Moikeha Canal

The canal takes its name from Mōʻīkeha, a legendary chief whose voyage is one of the great Polynesian epics of the Hawaiian Islands. Born at Waipiʻo on Hawaiʻi Island and raised in Kahiki (the ancestral homeland, often associated with Tahiti), Mōʻīkeha sailed back across the Pacific with his sisters, brothers, priests, and navigators after a heartbreak. He stopped at every island in the chain, leaving companions wherever each found a place to call home. By the time his canoe reached Kauaʻi, only a few remained. He landed at Wailua, married two daughters of the chief Puna, and made Kapaʻa his final home. To this day, an old Hawaiian saying remains: "Ka lulu o Mōʻīkeha i ka laulā o Kapaʻa", the calm of Mōʻīkeha in the breadth of Kapaʻa.

Centuries later, this same shoreline became one of the most difficult boat landings in all of the islands. The Kapaʻa Boat Landing once stood where the canal now meets the sea. Ships faced an exposed coast and a reef channel so narrow that even a small steamer could thread through only in the calmest weather. Open boats called lighters ferried cargo back and forth from ships anchored beyond the reef. The Makee Sugar Company improved the landing in the late 1800s to ship sugar off-island.

The two bridges crossing the canal today are the last surviving pieces of the Ahukini Terminal Railroad, which carried sugar and later pineapple along the east coast from the 1920s through the 1950s. The last train rolled across them in 1959.