On the windward side of Oahu, in the blue waters of Kaneohe Bay, lies a little islet famous for its appearance on the classic TV show “Gilligan’s Island,” and you can take a two-hour tour of it. 

The 28-acre islet is covered in trees, including 400 coconut palms, and is owned by the University of Hawaii. It’s used for marine research and offers walking tours to visitors who want to walk around it and learn about Moku o Loe’s history and the marine studies being done there.

The beauty of the place is part of the allure. On my arrival to the pier, I see the islet from afar and recognize its low and long outline from “Gilligan’s Island.” Moku o Loe was the island appearing in the opening credits, though the show was never filmed there, but at other locations in Hawaii and in Los Angeles. 

I step into a small shuttle boat that takes me quickly across the glassy bay to Moku o Loe’s landing. The views are spectacular, featuring Oahu’s lush coastline and the broad Koolau Mountain Range. Every day, 100 to 150 university staff and researchers make this trip every day to work on the island, and some even stay overnight.

There’s more to the island beyond “Gilligan’s Island”; it’s steeped in Hawaiian folklore — and science. Before we begin, my tour guide, Leah Barkai, starts with a traditional moolelo (story) of the islet. It involves betrayal — and teaches a lesson about being pono (good and moral).

Moku o Loe means “Island of Loe” in the Hawaiian language, and Loe was the name of a girl who resided there. The story goes that Loe and her three brothers used to live on the westside of Oahu, but were kicked out because they were naughty kids. So they moved to the windward side and each found a home in the area of Heeia. Two of the brothers lived in the mountains, one lived by the sea and Loe lived on the offshore islet.

They shared the bounty of the land and sea with each other as was custom in Hawaii. But one day, Loe learned that one of her brothers was keeping the best fish for himself. It caused a rift between her brothers. A few months later, when a famine occurred, many people stopped the practice of sharing resources.

Aside from Loe, Hawaiian royalty once lived here, too. Former island owner Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop is why there are so many coconut trees. She asked for 100 coconut trees to be brought to the islet by canoe to be planted for a party in honor of her aunt Queen Emma. 

“So they brought them there and now we have over 400. So that’s why we have ‘Coconut Island,’ the Western name,” says Barkai.

In the 1930s, the island was purchased by Christian Holmes II, an heir to Fleischmann yeast fortune, and used the island for his company Hawaiian Tuna Packers (now Coral Tuna). He also apparently threw lavish parties that are still talked about today.

We walk by an old bar, and what was once Holmes’ saltwater pool. Onshore, there’s a large ship’s spotlight that shone down onto the pool at nighttime. He also dry-docked a schooner, where he held movie nights, and created his own zoo. It was his amusement park.

Later, five wealthy oil men bought the island, and one of them, Edwin Pauley, eventually became its sole owner. He helped establish the first marine lab on the island in 1951. The University of Hawaii Foundation purchased the island in 1995 with the help of the Pauley family.

As we continue the tour, Barkai tells me it is roughly 1 mile along the pathways that circle the islet. The research facilities on the islet are spread out into various sections, connected by small roads as wide as a golf cart. 

Barkai shows us the Marine Mammal Research Program building to talk about new monk seal research its staff has been working on for about a year. She says while there is a lot of information on monk seals out of the water, there haven’t been many studies of them in the water.

“They started doing acoustic sound recording and video recording of these guys underwater and just trying to understand [what it could mean],” says Barkai. “There’s a bunch of footage that they took and they’re going through it all and listening to the noises and their behavior.”

The next stop is an outdoor lab, where there are about a dozen bins filled with water and inside are various live coral at different stages of growth. The researchers recently completed a stress test on them using different temperatures to predict how they’ll react in the future. 

“They notice that corals, they’re slowly changing to withstand the temperatures, but not fast enough,” she says, “so that’s why we have to do all this research to kind of support the corals.”

Next, she shows us how one team has 3-D-printed different coral designs. The hope is that when researchers collect eggs and sperm, the coral will spawn on the 3-D coral and grow to a point that they can then be placed in the ocean off Oahu, where they can help slow coastline erosion in specific places.

One of the more interactive parts of the tour is a touch pool. She picks up a spiky urchin and a slimy black sea cucumber for me to touch. I watch as another sea cucumber, which looks like an arm off an octopus or a giant worm, squishes underneath coral to hide.

Nearby is a large, enclosed pond that held hammerhead sharks the last time I was here, but this time, it’s empty. The area is constantly changing, depending on the research. Two weeks ago, Barkai says, there were tiger sharks in here and researchers were testing various repellents. They were recently released. She says visitors should call in advance if they want to know what research is currently being conducted.

As we end our tour, she takes me to one more lagoon and we wait a bit. I see fish, including a cute and smiley puffer fish, and then circling around is a blacktip reef shark with its fin visible out of water. It’s a perfect way to end the two-hour tour — and best of all, I wasn’t stranded on a desert island.

Editor’s note: SFGATE recognizes the importance of diacritical marks in the Hawaiian language. We are unable to use them due to the limitations of our publishing platform.