I spent less than a month of my life in Lahaina, but the town had a profound and lasting impact on me. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the two visits I made to Lahaina shaped the direction of my life.

I first went to Lahaina just a couple of weeks before my 23^rd birthday. It was spring vacation in Japan, and my Portuguese-Australian friend, Liliane, and I booked a two-week holiday in the Maui tourist town. At the time, going on vacation to Hawaii from Japan was equivalent to northern Europeans vacationing in the Canary Islands. We booked the holiday through a travel agent (remember them?) who travelled from school to school, booking holidays for busy teachers, and in March we flew east from Japan, across the Pacific Ocean, to Hawaii. It was my first grown-up holiday, and the first time I ever flew somewhere to take a break from work.

Lahaina was beautiful, full of low wooden buildings, palm trees, and artists. The mountains behind the town were deep green and, from the perspective of a boat at sea, dotted with rainbows. The streets were lined with artists’ galleries selling art inspired by the sea – humpback whales, turtles, fish as paintings, sculptures, silk prints, photographs. The sunsets each evening were mesmerizing and, as many nights as I could, I found a wall to sit on, where I could look west over the ocean, and bathe in those sunsets.

It was in Lahaina that I first ate mango, first ate Mexican food, first ate macadamia nuts and macadamia nut ice cream. Ah, the ice cream. I wasn’t much of a fan of ice cream, having mostly only ever eaten tasteless blocks of HB vanilla that we had in the freezer back in Ireland. The ice cream in Lahaina was like nothing I’d ever tasted and I soon discovered the best ice cream shop, on a corner just by the banyan tree. That banyan tree, claimed to be the largest in the western hemisphere, covering over an acre of land. It was the first thing I thought about when I first heard about the fire – that vast tree and all of the activities that took place under its shade – family gatherings, markets, people raising awareness for their important causes, buskers making music.

Lahaina was also my first time in the US and I was unprepared for how friendly all the service staff were. Shop assistants, waiters, bar staff were all so NICE. It took a little getting used to walking into a shop and the shop assistant telling me how much she loved my dress or my sunglasses or my accent. I’d never before encountered such fresh and unabashed complements and I quickly grew to love that attitude.

My lasting impression of the local people I encountered was that they were fiercely unique and independent. On that trip, and when I returned a couple of years later, I met aging hippies and flower children now in their sixties, and Vietnam vets from the US mainland; I met native Hawaiians and people of Japanese descent and I spent a memorable night sitting in a diner with a 76-year-old jazz musician, getting endless top-ups of coffee, as he told me of the amazing life he’d led. I’d never met people so keen to tell their life stories. As a recently graduated anthropology student, I was hypnotized.

But the biggest impact that Lahaina had on me was in the ocean that surrounded it. As part of that vacation, I had decided that I wanted to learn to scuba dive. In the first couple of days, I found a dive shop and signed up to do the PADI open water course. The three-day course involved classroom work, four open water dives to practice and test skills, and a classroom exam. The instructor was a huge red-headed Midwesterner called Gary Bluhm, who had only recently moved to Lahaina after 25 years as a dive instructor on Lake Michigan. I felt in safe hands.

Scuba diving was a transformative experience for me and something I continued to do regularly for many years afterwards. I put a tank on my back again a few months ago after a break of almost a decade, when I took 12-year-old Katie for her first dive in the Mediterranean. I was delighted that she loved the experience as much as me.

Lilian and I took a boat trip one day to a humpback whale research station along the coast. On the way, we saw humpback whales breaching, diving, breathing. That first experience of seeing whales in their natural habitat had a profound impact on me. The waters off Lahaina are a humpback whale nursery, where pregnant females, who have spent the summer in Alaska, migrate to Lahaina to give birth and raise their calves, preparing them for the arduous migration north in spring.

From that first moment, I decided I wanted to learn more about humpback whales and whales in general. I returned home to Japan and dug into the natural history of humpback whales, into the history of whaling, into the science of studying whales. Two years later, in 1995, I returned to Lahaina as a volunteer humpback whale researcher, joining Dr Adam Pack and Professor Louis Herman and their team of post-grads and PhD students, for two weeks of research. I was almost as much in awe of the dedicated scientists and the work they did as I was of the humpback whales that I had the privilege of seeing while assisting in their work.

For those two weeks, I lived in a rented house in the suburbs of Lahaina with the scientists and two other volunteers. Each morning, we’d quickly make our lunch for the day (peanut butter and jelly for me…another first and another revelation), hop in the van and head off for a long day’s work. Some days, I was up on a hill overlooking the ocean, from where we had a panoramic view of where the whales were and the direction they were travelling. We recorded their movements – coordinates of where we saw them and what behaviours they were exhibiting (spouting, breaching, slapping, deep diving), whether they were mother-calf pairs, or were in larger groups. We radioed their location to the boat team, who we could also see from our lookout point.

Other days I was on the boat, and those were the best days of all. Based on our own observations and on those radioed down from the hill, the skipper (one of the post-docs) would manoeuvre the 15-foot Boston Whaler into the vicinity of some whales. And then he’d cut the motor and we’d wait. I remember whales breaching so close that we got wet from the splash, and the fishy smell when they came up to breathe right beside us. I remember a calf with its mother, lying sideways in the water, as it looked up at us with one huge eye, full of youthful curiosity. One day, a young male whale swam under the boat. I could see his pectoral fins, like wings, either side of the boat. He remained perfectly still underneath us and sang. I felt his song more than heard it, as it reverberated up through the hull, up through my feet and legs, and up to my heart and head. I can still feel that vibrating sound in my body to this day, 25 years on.

My job, as a volunteer, was to keep my eyes peeled for whales, to help the scientists as they prepared to do their work, and then to take precise written notes of what was going on. Meanwhile, the real scientists did their work. Some took photographs of flukes (fluke matching is the primary way to identify individual humpbacks, as each fluke is unique). Others dived in with underwater cameras to film whale behavior. Microphones were dropped overboard to record songs and calls.

The days were long and, without a loo onboard, a moment would come each day when we’d have a mass evacuation into the sea. Anyone who needed to relieve themselves would jump into the 5,000 metre deep Pacific Ocean, knowing there were humpback whales and tiger sharks and who knew what else, in there too. I’d jump in but, the thought of the depth of the water beneath me and what might brush against my leg…or worse…left me with stage fright and no matter how much I needed a wee before jumping in, it always took longer than I hoped. I’d haul myself back onto the boat as quickly as possible and we’d be on our way again.

Each evening after supper (everyone took their turn to do the cooking), we’d pour over piles of photo albums, filled with page after page of black and white photographs of humpback whale flukes, trying to match up a fluke from one year with one from a different year. Did a fluke from 1982, with no other identifying notes, match one from 1994, this time with a calf and, therefore, clearly identified as female?

From those couple of weeks learning about humpback whales and about marine biology, my love of whales and of the sea deepened. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I pursued a PhD into the anthropology of the sea and how humans relate to the sea and acquire their sea-related knowledge and skill because of those two weeks, or that my postdoctoral research was about the relationship between humans and beluga whales, or that I became a sailor and took to the sea. That I got a tattoo of a humpback whale doesn’t require too deep a psychological investigation. For years, I had a recurring dream about humpback whales. At times of stress in my life, they came to my rescue and brought me safely to shore.

And so, when I woke one morning last week to the news that Lahaina was on fire, I was deeply saddened. My first thought was of the banyan tree but, as the days wore on and news of the fire grew grimmer and more desperate, with more deaths and more destruction, I thought of all the incredible people I met these in 1993 and 1995 – the marine biologists, the hippies, the Vietnam vets, the artists, the scuba divers, the sales assistants and waiters, the dancers and performers. They are in my thoughts, wherever they are now.