The boys saw first-hand the island’s native reforestation process and spent ample time underwater, scoping out the vibrancy of what is now a pristine reef. Leaving their boards on the boat they met up with the island’s resident researchers from The Nature Conservancy. Īfter a week at sea, the crew anchored in Palmyra. Johnson joined forces with childhood friends John John Florence, Nathan Florence, and Erik Knutson and together they hoisted the sails of JJF’s boat Vela, embarking on a month-long, off-the-grid blue water adventure. It had, after all, been the search for a model of environmental health that initially sparked the idea for the sail from Oʻahu to the remote Pacific atolls of Palmyra and Fanning. It breaks when some of those connections between the different layers are severed,” Johnson says, explaining the metaphor. “He kind of made a joke that like the ecosystem in general ‘Is kind of like the engine that you guys just broke,’” remembers environmentalist Kona Johnson, a sailor on the crew, “ a complex interaction of different layers of species, different trophic layers: it’s running well, like an engine, when there’re the proper connections between all of those different layers. Peering with puzzled faces into the malfunctioning engine, the scientist among them was the first to speak. The symbolism was not lost on the group of sailors.

Johnson atoll