The Reef House Puako

WAIKIKI it’s not. Fairway villas and mondo condo–not so much either. Puako is true Old Hawaii, a town with one street 1.5 miles long, with some 60 houses on the water, beach shacks mixed with mansions, still largely undiscovered except for a discerning few. The best kept secret in the islands.
Puako, or “cane flower,” sits at the center of the Big Island’s South Kohala coast flanked by the famous Mauna Kea Beach and Mauna Lani Bay Hotels, on a rich coral reef fishery at the edge of a kiawe forest on ancient lava flows. It is the sunniest place in the state, averaging nine or fewer inches of rain a year. Ninety percent of the days are sunny and free of cloudcover.
The fringing coral reef of Puako is regarded by many as the premier snorkeling reef in Hawaii. Hawaiian green sea turtles feed and bask daily in the cove in front of Reef House as many as fifteen at a time. Endangered humpback whales calve in Puako Bay and are regularly seen from the house from late December to early April. Watch for spouts, flukes, and breaches as close as 150 yards. From time to time pods of up to 60 spinner dolphins spiral and cartwheel just off the point. In the last few years the two local white sand beaches, Hapuna and Kauna’oa, have each won the annual geographers’ ranking as Best Beach in America.
The Big Island of Hawaii is geologically the youngest place in the world. Looming over Reef House to the east is the often snow-capped summit of Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the Pacific (13,796 feet). The shield dome of Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, drifts in the sky in back of Mauna Kea. Mauna Loa is not only the largest mountain by mass in the world but second largest in the solar system. Just twelve miles from Reef House as the crow flies, the Kohala cloudforest gets up to 300 inches of rain a year. Spectacular hikes through virgin Kohala wilderness lead to canyon rims with two thousand foot waterfalls.
The thousand-year Hawaiian village of Puako was thriving when missionaries came here in 1823. Hokuloa Church was dedicated in 1860. In 1952 the state offered homesteaders lots in Puako at public auction. The first Reef House was homesteaded in 1958 and extensively remodeled in 1988. The second house was completed in 1995.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! And my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Bourne, like thy bubbles, onward . . .
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane–
As I do here.
—Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage