Captain Ailani Souza

I was 22 years old when I got my captain's license. My father thought I was making a mistake — a woman running a private charter operation out of Lahaina Harbor in 2003 wasn't the obvious career path. He came around when the business started to work, and he really came around when I started contributing whale behavioral data to the Pacific Whale Foundation and they published it. 'My daughter is in a scientific journal' was a story he told until he passed.

The Lahaina channel is where the humpbacks come to give birth. Every winter, they make the 3,000-mile migration from Alaska to these warm, shallow waters because this is where their calves can survive the first weeks of life. I've been watching this happen for 20 years. I know the bubble-net feeding sites. I know the areas where mothers rest with newborns — where you can cut the engine and drift and watch a calf nursing without causing any disturbance to the behavior. I know the exact positions on the channel where breach activity is most likely in late afternoon.

I rebuilt my charter business after the 2023 fire in Lahaina. Deliberately smaller, deliberately private. One group at a time, no strangers sharing the deck, no timed departure schedules. The fire changed the way I think about this work — when you watch a town burn, you start to ask what's worth keeping and what isn't. The private experience, where people can actually have a conversation about what they're seeing, is worth keeping.

I contribute behavioral data to the Pacific Whale Foundation because I believe the science matters. The population is recovering — slowly — and part of that is because research guides protection policy. When guests ask me why a certain male is behaving erratically near a cow and calf, I can give them the answer from 20 years of watching the same animals and reading the published research. The whale isn't a backdrop. It's the subject.

What I want guests to feel is the channel as a living system — the wind, the current, the migration that's been happening for millions of years with or without us watching. On a good day in December, we cut the engine and sit in the middle of it and everyone on the boat goes quiet. That silence is the best thing I can offer anyone.