Why You Can't Travel Between Hawaii's Islands by Boat

Out of all of America's 50 states, Hawaii is arguably its most unique. It's the only state to be geographically located outside of the North American continent. It's America's most recent state, having only been admitted to the Union in August of 1959. It is by far the most ethnically diverse state and the only state where Asian Americans make up the single largest ethnic group. It's the most expensive state to live in in the country and, most notably, it is the only state made up of an archipelago that consists entirely of islands. And because of that, as you'd expect, transportation throughout Hawaii works very differently than it does in other states because of the population being divided across all these different islands. The Hawaiian archipelago is made up of 137 different islands, but there's really only four of them that have significant numbers of people. Oahu, the most heavily populated island that's home to Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, has around a million people that live on it, which all on its own is about two-thirds of the state of Hawaii's entire population. The Big Island has about another 200,000 people, Maui another 164,000 more, and Kauai about another 73,000 more, representing the four primary majorly populated islands in the state, while the islands of Molokai and Lanai have significantly fewer numbers of people and the other islands have either negligible or non-existent populations. And the distances between all of these islands are larger than you'd expect. The distance between Oahu and Kauai is about 100 miles, and the distance from Oahu to the Big Island is closer to 150 miles, about the same distance as between New York City and Baltimore. And because of the distances involved here between all of these islands and population centers, the only way to travel between them is by either flying or taking a boat. But it might surprise you to learn that as of right now in 2024, there isn't a single ferry service or regularly scheduled passenger maritime transportation option between any of the four main Hawaiian islands. And people very rarely travel between the islands by boat. In fact, the only regularly scheduled ferry service at all in Hawaii today just operates between the relatively nearby islands of Maui and Lanai. And that's it. Instead, if you ever want to travel between any other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago, your only realistic option is to fly between them. And so virtually all travel between Hawaii's main islands is dominated by very short haul flights run through carriers like Hawaiian Airlines. And this situation appears rather puzzling at first glance, because ferries and maritime transit are a very common and popular form of transportation across several other archipelagic parts of the world, including in many areas that have significantly smaller population bases than Hawaii even has. Take the Aegean Sea, for example, where there are dozens and dozens of great ferries that service dozens of islands and locations across the whole region, including many ferries that service very small islands with negligible populations, but which have very large tourism interest. Across 2023, Hawaii received about a third as many tourists as Greece did, but their spending was roughly equivalent, with tourists to Hawaii spending nearly $21 billion in the state across 2023, and tourists in Greece spending nearly $23 billion through the same time period, implying that a ferry service across Hawaii's islands could or should be at least somewhat comparable to the very robust system of Greek ferries. Closer back to home in North America, there are three notable examples of ferry services that seem to make the lack of ferry services in Hawaii seem all the more puzzling. The island of Newfoundland in Canada has a small population of only about 478,000 people, less than half the population of Oahu in Hawaii. And it's also located about 100 miles away from the Canadian mainland in Nova Scotia, a similar distance as between the islands of Oahu and Maui or Oahu and Kauai. And yet there are two active ferry lines that run from the island to Nova Scotia, a shorter ferry from Port Au Basque that takes about seven hours to complete and a longer ferry from Argentia that takes about 16 hours to complete. Lengths of time though be comparable to ferries between the islands of Hawaii. Washington State also operates a system of ferries across their island communities throughout the Puget Sound. And perhaps most notably, Alaska operates a complex system of ferries across enormous distances that link several small communities together from Bellingham, Washington, all throughout the Alaskan Panhandle and the Aleutian Islands. A ferry system that is notable in the context of Hawaii because the distances involved are substantially longer and Alaska's population base is only about half that of Hawaii's. So why does Hawaii essentially not have any ferry service at all compared to all of these other examples? And why is it that in order to travel between the Hawaiian islands, you nearly always have to fly rather than take a boat? First of all, it's important to note that Hawaii has actually had large-scale ferry services between their major islands in the past. But they've all failed for a complex list of reasons that largely has to do with the nature of Hawaii's unique geography and population patterns. The most serious attempt at establishing a reliable ferry service connecting Hawaii's major islands together was called the Hawaii Superferry throughout the decade of the 2000s. And it was one hell of a fiasco. Planning for the Superferry began in 2001 by a private company that sought to offer up an alternative way for the airlines to travel between the Hawaiian islands that would be quick, cheap, and most importantly, would enable people to easily transport their own personal vehicles and belongings between the islands as well. At the time, it seemed like a virtually untapped market. Egged on by the Hawaii Superferry company's statistic that in 2001, Hawaii's own residents, excluding tourists, took around four million flights between the islands throughout the year, implying that the parallel demand for a ferry was there that wasn't currently being serviced. By 2004, the company signed a contract with a shipyard in Alabama to build out the first two of their Hawaiian ferries for a total sum of $178 million, or $89 million a piece, which inflated to $2024, was about $332 million for the two of them. A few years later, by 2007, the Hawaii Superferry was finally ready to begin launching its master plan that envisioned regularly scheduled ferry service between all four of Hawaii's majorly populated islands. But the company almost immediately began encountering significant difficulties. First up, there were numerous environmental concerns and risks brought up surrounding the ferry and port. Many of the ferry routes between the islands criss-crossed over well established and mapped out routes of humpback whale migration paths, which led to concerns that the huge sizes of the ferries could impact and kill whales and cause other environmental destruction for Hawaii's unique marine life ecosystem. And more pressingly, there was the concern that the ferries could spread invasive species throughout the rest of Hawaii as well. As a series of geographically isolated islands far removed from the rest of the world, Hawaii's ecosystem is uniquely delicate and fragile and the state is by far the most serious about invasive species in the country. The big island has already seen several notable invasive species like fire ants, kokui frogs, and eulex plants establish a strong enough of a foothold there that eradicating them has effectively become impossible, leaving the government with the unenviable goal of preventing their spread to the rest of the islands as much as possible and containing them to the big island as much as they can. The biggest fear was that ferries loading up people's personal vehicles could accidentally transport these kinds of invasive species between the islands far easier than people flying between them on airplanes could. It also didn't help that by the time the ferry finally began its operation between Oahu and Maui in 2007, they still hadn't completed an environmental impact statement that was required by Hawaii state law. The Hawaii Supreme Court eventually ruled that the superferry could continue its operation while the environmental impact statement was busy being prepared. But that did little to halt the torrent of environmental lawsuits being dumped on the company which steadily increased the company's litigation costs and made it increasingly difficult for them to remain financially afloat. And if all of that wasn't enough, the superferry idea was hitting many, many other roadblocks as well. As it turned out, another major problem for ferries in Hawaii was the fact that the waters around the islands are notoriously rough, especially compared to the waters where those other ferries I mentioned previously operate in Alaska and Washington state. These ferries all operate nearby to their respective continental coastal shelves, where the waters are relatively shallow and calmer. But Hawaii doesn't really have a continental shelf in the same kind of way because the Hawaiian islands are all volcanic in origin and are basically just the tips of underwater mountains that rise miles up from the seafloor to penetrate just above the ocean's surface. As a result, the depths of the waters between the Hawaiian islands are often very high, such as in the channel between Maui and the Big Island that's more than 6,000 feet deep, significantly deeper than the average depth seen in even the Mediterranean Sea. The name for this narrow and deep channel in the Hawaiian language is the Alunui-Haha Channel, which roughly translates into English as the Great Billow Smashing Channel, which should give you some kind of an idea as to how rough the waters here can get as the currents surge through the deep chasm between Maui and the Big Island. The depths seen between the channels of the other islands are similarly deep and the waters in between similarly rough as well, which means that ferry passages between the Hawaiian islands are effectively done over open ocean, which means that the ferries involved in the passages need to be ocean-rated, requiring them to be larger and more sturdy and more expensive vessels than you would otherwise see in Alaska or in Washington State. And because of the distances between the main islands covering 100 nautical miles or more, the journeys on the superferry between the islands would last for 6 to 8 hours or in some cases even longer through waters that were often very rough, meaning that seasickness was a common ailment among passengers traveling aboard. If you were a resident of Hawaii and you wanted to travel from one island to another island, you could opt to take the ferry, which might take you up to 8 hours to complete. It might result in you getting severely seasick along the way, and because it would take you another 8 hours or so to get back to your home island, you couldn't really make a day trip out of the ferry journey so once you get to the other island, you would need to compete with all of the tourists for a hotel for the night, which adds on to the cost and practicality of the ferry journey even more. When you factor all of that in and then you consider that a round-trip flight between the islands is often only a little more than $100 and takes less than an hour each way, the price of flying between the islands is often cheaper and faster and less likely to make you sick, which to most people still made flying between the islands the more obvious choice to choose instead of taking the ferry. There's also just not really a big pent-up demand for residents on the Hawaiian Islands to actually commute between the islands all that often. Oahu, as the economic and population center of the islands, is home to most of the state's major events like concerts and most of the state's good hospitals and medical care, which means that for the most part the residents out on the other main islands usually only go into Oahu at most a couple or so times a year for special events or for medical care and for those purposes they're going to be more likely to fly than to take the ferry. As a result, it was perceived by a lot of Hawaii's residents that the people most likely to utilize the inter-island ferry service were going to be tourists instead of locals. Tourists who would bring their rental cars with them from Oahu and clog up the more limited infrastructure and roads on the less developed major islands, which led to a lot of the residents on the islands of Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island fearing that the ferry service would contribute to further over tourism of their islands and led to a lot of opposition against the whole concept. In the end, the Hawaii Super Ferry originally planned to establish regular and reliable ferry service between all four of the main Hawaiian Islands, but only managed to establish service between Oahu and Maui because of all of these compounding difficulties. And due to all of those problems, along with potential lobbying from Hawaiian Airlines and rental car companies who were probably concerned about losing out on inter-island market share to the Super Ferry, the whole project wouldn't even survive for more than a couple years. In 2009, less than two years after they began their service in 2007, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that their previous granting of the Super Ferry to continue without the full environmental impact statement being completed yet had been unconstitutional, and the ferry service was immediately halted. Up to that point, the Super Ferry had only managed to transport about 250,000 passengers between the islands that it serviced through the 11 months when it was allowed by the courts to operate, which was well below the ferry's break-even costs and well below the volume of passengers flying between the islands on the airlines. For reference, air carriers between Honolulu and Kahului, the largest city on the island of Maui, fly about 4,890 seats between them each way per day, while a 2017 ferry feasibility study conducted by the Hawaii state government concluded that even in an optimistic scenario, a ferry would only be capable of transporting 11% of those same numbers of seats along the same route. Shortly after the courts ordered the Super Ferry to halt its operations over the environmental concerns in 2009, the writing for the Super Ferry was on the wall and the company immediately suspended all of its services and let go of all of its employees. Within months, the company would declare bankruptcy and it abandoned both of the ferries that it acquired. Eventually, both of the company's ferries would be acquired by the U.S. Navy in a fire sale for just $35 million, a tiny fraction of their original $180 million price tag that the company had paid for them. The entire debacle and catastrophic failure of the Hawaii Super Ferry that saw hundreds of millions of dollars basically lit on fire has essentially ensured that nobody else will ever try establishing another ferry service in Hawaii for at least another one or two generations. And besides for the geographic and economic constraints standing in the way of another Hawaiian ferry service trying, there's also significant legal obstacles standing in the way as well. One of the strangest set of laws that still exists on the books in the United States are the 1886 Passenger Vessel Services Act and the 1920 Jones Act, which basically both stipulate that vessels operating within U.S. waters that transport passengers or cargo, like ferries carrying people and vehicles, need to have been built within the United States and also crewed by an all-American crew. These laws have essentially established a sort of maritime protectionism scheme within the United States for more than a century now, which forces American ferry and logistics companies to only purchase their ships from American shipyards, which have been coddled and globally uncompetitive for more than a century as a result, since they have a captive customer base, which means that prices are always artificially higher. The Hawaii Super Ferry purchased their ferries in 2004 from an Alabama shipyard for $89 million a piece, or $166 million a piece in 2024 dollars. In 2019, the same company that built those Hawaii Super Ferries announced that it was building another even larger ferry with double the passenger and vehicle capacity at one of its non-U.S. shipyards for only $116 million in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars, tens of millions of dollars less for a ferry with double the capacity. This means that establishing ferry services anywhere in America, and especially in Hawaii, where the additional requirements for open ocean rated ferries are geographically costlier than they are elsewhere, are legally and artificially more expensive than in other countries as well. That 2017 ferry feasibility study commissioned by Hawaii state government that I mentioned previously, ultimately concluded that while establishing a ferry service in Hawaii is still technically possible today, it's not really economically feasible for a huge variety of reasons. Hawaii residents polled as a part of that study showed expectations of a ferry service that don't really match up with current technologies or economic realities. They generally expected that a ferry service between Honolulu on the island of Oahu and Hilo on the Big Island should take no longer than three hours to complete in order to be competitive with simply flying. But the study found that even a ferry operating at a speed of 40 knots an hour along that route, faster than recommended for the rough oceanic conditions in the area, would still take nearly seven hours to complete, more than twice as long as most residents expected. The study ultimately concluded that the costs required to upgrade Hawaii's harbors to accommodate passenger ferry terminals, the costs required to establish agricultural screenings between the islands in order to prevent the spread of invasive species, and the costs that would be required to acquire the ferries themselves and to maintain their operating costs for years, do not match the limited demand for the long travel times between the islands that the ferries would provide. The ferries would simply be uncompetitive against existing faster and cheaper air travel between the islands and, as a result, the study concluded that if a ferry service was going to be successful in Hawaii, it would have to be at least partially subsidized by the state government just in order to stay afloat. A subsidized ferry service throughout Hawaii would not be without precedent though. The Washington State Ferry Service has revenues that are about 25% subsidized by the While there's enough pent-up demand for the short ferry journeys across the Puget Sound to cover the remaining 75% of the ferries operating costs. This probably wouldn't be the case in Hawaii, however, where demand for a more expensive and time-consuming ferry service would be lower. So a better comparison would be with Alaska's Marine Highway Ferry Service, which covers very long distances, supports very small populations, and is heavily subsidized by the Alaska state government. The Alaska Ferry Service covers more than 3,500 miles of coastline, including dozens of individual route segments, with many of them taking 6 hours and 10 hours and even one line from Bellingham, Washington up to Ketchikan, Alaska that takes a whopping 38 hours to complete and costs hundreds of dollars to travel along. However, Alaska's ferry service is highly subsidized by the Alaska state government, to the tune of nearly 69% of its entire total revenue, while actual ticket sales only account for about 31% of the ferry's revenues. This is the system that would be much more comparable to Hawaii than Washington state's ferry system, but Alaska is able to heavily subsidize its ferry service because it has something that Hawaii does not, a metric boat ton of oil. Despite how it appears at first glance, Alaska is much more of a rich state and Hawaii is much more of a poor state. Alaska has been geologically blessed with huge oil resources and the state controls the fourth highest producing oil field in the entire country, at Prudhoe Bay in the far north of the state. As a result, Alaska has a massive oil industry that generates huge revenues for the state government to the point where an overwhelming 85% of the Alaska state government budget simply comes from all of the state's oil revenues. And all of that oil money in the state enables Alaska to do several things that would be impossible in other states, such as heavily subsidizing the state's otherwise unprofitable ferry transportation system to better help its residents. And other interesting things like establishing an oil fund that pays out every single one of Alaska's residents an average of around $2,000 a year just for existing there. The only form of basic income currently seen anywhere in America. On top of having no income taxes and having the lowest overall tax burden imposed on citizens out of any of America's 50 states. Hawaii, on the other hand, is not as fortunate as Alaska. Hawaii has effectively zero natural resources and its sheer distance away from any significant markets makes shipping costs to and from the islands anywhere else prohibitively expensive, which makes any potential manufacturing base in Hawaii naturally uncompetitive from the start. The only two industries that Hawaii's geography enables it to excel at are tourism and the military. Because of the incredible strategic value offered up by Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, near the dead center of the Pacific Ocean. But for the people who actually work in these two industries, the jobs available are generally low paid, which is why Hawaii's median income is lower than the median income seen in New Hampshire. And yet home prices in Hawaii are nearly twice as expensive as they are in New Hampshire anyway, despite the lower incomes. Hawaii is a fantastic state for people who move to it who are already wealthy and possess more purchasing power than the locals do. But for those who have grown up on Hawaii without money, finding opportunity on the islands is very difficult, which is why so many of them leave for the mainland and which is also why Hawaii's overall tax burden is already among the highest in the entire country. Without any natural resources or industries outside of tourism and the military, and with the military really only interested in the island of Oahu and none of the others, the result is that the Hawaiian state government has to fund itself primarily through taxes rather than natural resource revenue like Alaska. And so if the Hawaii state government wants to begin heavily subsidizing a prospective unprofitable ferry service the same way that Alaska does, the only way it would be able to do so would be by increasing taxes in the state even higher than they already are. Which would make the cost of living crisis in the state already the worst in the entire country, even worse than it already is. For all intents and purposes, that is all why a ferry service between the main Hawaiian islands doesn't currently exist, and why one isn't likely to exist in the future either. Until ferry vessel technology and legal reforms advance enough to carry passengers between two points much faster and for a much lower cost than they currently can, the low market demand for the use of a ferry in Hawaii and the likelihood of ferry service in Hawaii succeeding are each likely to continue remaining very low. And after the massive financial disaster the last time that someone tried getting one up and running with the Hawaii Super Ferry in the 2000s, nobody is likely to try getting another one up and running in Hawaii for the foreseeable future. And the only way you'll be able to travel between the islands for the most part, unless you want to charter or bring your own boat, will be to fly between them Now Hawaii is known for a lot of things besides for their lack of good maritime transportation options, and their food culture has absolutely got to be one of those top things. From poke bowls, to spam musubi, to tempura shrimp, and even more. And if you're anything like me, you might always be wondering why it still takes so much money and time to eat more healthily today. The global food supply runs more efficiently than ever, but there still seems to be this trade-off where you have to choose only two of the following three options with your meals. 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