Celebrants from across Hawai‘i flock to first-ever Ko‘olau Limu Festival on Kaua‘i

Visitors from throughout Hawai‘i joined Kaua‘i locals Saturday to celebrate the first-ever Ko‘olau Limu Festival.

Limu refers to the many varieties of edible algae found on coral reefs surrounding the Hawaiian Islands. Varying in color, shape, taste and texture, it is an iconic component of Hawaiian cuisine: Anyone familiar with poke – a raw seafood salad that’s achieved international popularity – has almost certainly eaten limu.

The Aug. 17 festival was held at Anahola Beach Park on the Garden Isle’s northeastern shore.

“I come from a legacy of limu pickers,” said organizer Nālani Kāneakua of the Ko‘olau Limu Project. “My grandma, great-grandmother and great-great-great-[grandparents], they were all limu pickers in Anahola.

“The word ‘limu’ is synonymous to Anahola,” Kāneakua continued. “If you knew somebody from Anahola village, most likely they would come up to you and tell you, ‘You get limu!’”

Kāneakua, a semiretired chef, began harvesting limu with her father at the age of 3. The Ko‘olau Limu Project promotes the culture and conservation of limu through a nonprofit named in his honor: The Hosea Lovell Foundation.

More than 20 groups – in addition to food vendors and local Tahitian dance group Tumoana – hosted booths beneath a large tent on the Anahola Beach Park lawn. Many represented limu hui, or societies, from throughout the Hawaiian Islands. Conservation organizations and commercial limu operations, like Ocean Era of Kailua-Kona on the Big Island, were also present.

Ocean Era cofounder and CEO Neil Sims, together with wife Kate, enthusiastically dished up samples of sea grapes and lepe-o-Hina. The sea grapes – long strings of tiny, vibrant green spheres – popped in one’s mouth. Sprigs of the deep red lepe-o-Hina were fleshy. Both species, grown on land in vats filled with fresh seawater, burst with the salty tang of the ocean.

“We’ve been focused on research in new fish species, and then limu and looking at ways to be able to farm more of the seafood that we crave, that everybody loves eating,” said Sims.

Ocean Era currently provides several varieties of limu to KTA Super Stores on the Big Island, as well as distributors and restaurants around the state. Sims and his team, now operating on land, hope to position a “limu array” eight miles offshore of Kona sometime within the next year.

The submersible growing platform would descend 200 meters every night and approach the surface every day.

“We’d have the limu out offshore, but there’s a challenge: Where are the nutrients for the limu? Where’s the fertilizer for it?” Sims said. “Because the beautiful blue waters of Hawai‘i, they’re really nutrient-poor.

“In deep water, there’s a lot more nutrients,” he continued. “We would have the limu array … go down into the deeper water where it can absorb the nutrients, and then have it come up closer to the surface again during the day, so it can photosynthesize.”

At an adjacent booth, Symbrosia – another Kailua-Kona-based company – promoted its use of limu kohu, or Asparagopsis taxiformis, to create SeaGraze, a feed it claims reduces livestock methane emissions by over 80%.

Elsewhere at the Ko‘olau Limu Festival, members of the statewide community organization Kuaʻāina Ulu ‘Auamo interacted with the public. The KUA Limu Hui hosts annual meetings for its 50-member network of limu practitioners, most recently on O‘ahu this past April.

“One of the challenges that a lot of our limu practitioners are facing is that limu knowledge is not being passed down to our younger generations,” said limu hui coordinator Malia Heimuli. “We don’t have a lot of limu eaters anymore … We have limu in our poke and our poke bowls, but there’s not the ono [taste] for a lot of our native limu, especially with our younger generations.”

Wild limu is also on the decline, according to Heimuli, who said urbanization has degraded the quality of runoff needed for limu growth on nearshore reefs.

“We’re not seeing a lot of wai [fresh water] flowing down into our kai [sea or seawater] areas, our oceans. Wai is a necessary resource that our marine ecosystem also needs,” she said. “A lot of people think it’s just salt water, but it’s not. We need wai flowing into those areas because it brings nutrients from the land that our limu, our fishes, all our marine life, need to sustain themselves.”

An emcee at the Ko‘olau Limu Festival hailed Saturday as the first of many more limu festivals to be held on Kaua‘i in the years to come.

“I’ve always had a great, great love for the ocean and I continue to gather limu till today,” said Kāneakua. “I always say, the limu takes a hold of me.”