On a Saturday morning this past February, close to 2,000 people lined up along the shore in He'eia and started passing buckets of coral rock hand to hand. Some had done this before. Many hadn't. By the end of the day, the last open stretch of an 800-year-old fishpond wall, a gap that had stood broken since a flood tore through it in 1965, was finally closed. The 1.3-mile loop around He'eia Fishpond was whole again.
If you've lived in Kāneʻohe for any stretch of time, you've probably driven past this pond a hundred times without giving it much thought. It sits at the base of the Koʻolau along Kamehameha Highway, a wide ring of water that looks, from the road, like it's always just been there. What most people driving by don't clock is that for twenty-five years, a small nonprofit has been quietly putting that ring back together one stone at a time, and this year they finished.
That finish line matters for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia. It means the fishpond's job is about to change, and so is the way you can be part of it.
From Mangrove Tunnel to Working Pond
Before the restoration started, He‘eia Fishpond wasn't really visible as a fishpond at all. Invasive mangrove had grown so thick around the wall that people could only walk it single file, ducking under branches, unable to see the water on either side. That was the state of things when a group of University of Hawaiʻi students began clearing sections by hand in the late 1990s, the start of what would become Paepae o Heʻeia, a nonprofit formally established in 2001 by a group of young Hawaiians including Hiʻilei Kawelo and Keliʻi Kotubetey.
For years the work was almost entirely mangrove removal. Kawelo has described those early days as a wall of green that swallowed the horizon, the fishpond wall, and the water's edge all at once. Getting the mangrove out came first. Rebuilding the kuapā, the seawall itself, came after, stone by stone, using a technique called dry stacking that lets the wall flex with tide and storm rather than crack under it.
The final push closed the last open stretch of that wall, the section standing between a quarter century of effort and a complete loop. Nearly 2,000 volunteers showed up for that one event alone, on top of the close to 150,000 people who have passed through the fishpond as volunteers, students, and learners over the life of the project. Kawelo has been leading the effort for about that entire twenty-five years and has said, more than once, that finishing the wall was never really the point. The teaching was.
Why the Wall Being Done Is the Real News
Here's the part that generic write-ups about "an ancient Hawaiian fishpond in Kāneʻohe" tend to miss: before this restoration, there used to be around 30 fishponds ringing Kāneʻohe Bay. Most got filled in during the twentieth century to make way for residential development. He'eia is one of the few that survived, and it survived specifically because a small group of people decided a broken wall was worth two and a half decades of weekends.
With the kuapā now complete, Paepae o Heʻeia's attention is shifting away from wall repair and toward what the pond can actually produce. The nonprofit is working with the He'eia National Estuarine Research Reserve, NOAA, and the University of Hawaiʻi's Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology on the water quality side of things, since a closed wall doesn't automatically mean a productive pond. Fishponds need the right mix of fresh water flowing in from the stream and salt water from the bay to create the brackish conditions that feed the system naturally, without anyone hand-feeding the fish. That's the next phase: getting the water right so the pond can start doing, at scale, what it was built to do 800 years ago.
This is also where He'eia connects to something bigger. It's part of a statewide network called Hui Mālama Loko I'a, which now covers more than 60 traditional fishponds being restored across the islands, from family-owned ponds to sites managed by resorts. Paepae o Heʻeia is widely regarded as one of the pioneers in that network, the organization other fishpond caretakers look to when they're figuring out their own restoration.
None of this means the pond opens up as a walk-in attraction. It's still a working, culturally significant site, not a park. But it does mean the relationship between the fishpond and the people who live around it is entering a different chapter, and that chapter has specific ways to participate.
How Windward Residents Actually Get In the Water
If you want to be more than a driver-by, here's what's real and current, not aspirational:
Lā Holoholo, the family fishing days. Paepae o Heʻeia opens the pond to the public roughly one Saturday a month between April and September specifically for predator fish removal. Volunteers help catch carnivorous species like papio, barracuda, and toau that prey on the herbivorous fish the pond is meant to grow, including ʻamaʻama and awa. It's productive work dressed up as a great family outing. Sign-ups run on a lottery system announced through the nonprofit's Instagram, @paepaeoheeia, so if you want a spot, that's the account to watch.
Guided walking tours. For a slower, less hands-on introduction, Paepae o Heʻeia runs one-hour guided walking tours of the fishpond, priced at $60 for up to four people at the kamaʻaina and military rate, with additional guests at $15 a head. It's a way to actually walk the wall that took a quarter century to close, with someone who can tell you what you're looking at.
Ongoing volunteer days. Wall completion doesn't mean the maintenance work stops. Mangrove regrowth, invasive limu, and general upkeep of the kuapā are year-round jobs, and Paepae o Heʻeia still runs volunteer workdays for anyone willing to get muddy for a few hours.
If you've got kids, the fishing days in particular are worth building a summer weekend around next year. Registration tends to fill fast once it opens, so following the account ahead of April is the practical move rather than waiting for the announcement to surface in your feed.
What This Says About Living Here
There's a version of this story that stays purely sentimental, an old wall gets fixed, isn't that nice. That version misses the point. What actually happened this year is that a piece of working infrastructure, built by hand centuries before anyone thought to call it infrastructure, came back online. For a quarter century, showing up at He'eia meant showing up to fix something. Starting now, showing up increasingly means showing up to use it the way it was designed to be used, to fish, to learn, to walk a wall that finally holds its shape against the tide.
That shift, from repair to production, is the kind of thing that happens quietly in a place like Kāneʻohe. No ribbon cutting, no press conference, just a Saturday in February when the last stones went in and nobody had to duck under mangrove branches to see the water anymore.
I'm Mavis Nellas, and I spend most of my working life in the neighborhoods along this coast, which means I spend a lot of my off hours here too. If you're curious about the windward side, whether that's the fishpond, the trails, or eventually a home nearby, reach out through Mavis Nellas Hawaii and let's talk story about the parts of this coast that don't show up in the usual guides.
