Some of the forgotten real story of how the Hokulea was conceived and built originally-
Ben Finney, Anthropologist Who Debunked Theory on Island Settlement, Dies at 83
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/us/ben-finney-dead-hawaii-tahiti.html?_r=0
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With Herbert Kawainui Kane, an artist, and Tommy Holmes, a local waterman, Professor Finney founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society in 1973 to study traditional Polynesian techniques of sailing and navigation. In 1974, he and several colleagues, including David Lewis, a New Zealand anthropologist who was an expert on ancient Micronesian navigation methods, set about recreating a facsimile of the double-hulled canoes used in ancient Polynesia, assembling a mostly Hawaiian crew and taking the vessel on test runs around Hawaii.
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If the navigation went according to plan, the voyage did not. The canoe confronted fierce storms and becalmed seas. Even worse, cultural tensions arose. The Hawaiian crew threatened to burn the boat.