Follow the pet thing CLOSELY. It's about a 6 month process, at a minimum and you only have a certain amount of time once the final test is done. Three months maybe? I can't remember anymore. If you miss a step you go back to having done nothing as far as the sate is concerned, and the only quarantine facility is on Oahu. Which really sucks if you are not on Oahu.
A couple other things for you. I originally moved to Maui from the Bahamas, and no matter what people tell you, Hawaii has COLD water
Okay, so its 72-78, but that is nothing like the 85 you are used to.Matson is the only company that ships cars. You can go thought Horizon, but it'll still be on a Matson boat. And from our experience, Horizon didn't know when the boats left. We shipped one car to Maui and two back from Maui. We were planning on shipping one car back first, then send the next one a couple weeks later when we were actually moving off island. That way we would only be with no car for a week or two once we got to Texas. Turns out that her car sat in the lot in Maui for two weeks (because we were a day late, thank you Horizon) and was on the same boat mine was. Then they got to LA right before Thanksgiving, and sat in southern California for another week. The 5 weeks of car rental we had to do pretty much killed any savings we would have had if we would have just sold them and re-bought.
The vog affected my wife and I pretty badly. We would get it on Maui during a kona wind (regular during the summer), and it would make the air look like we were in LA. The new vent that opened up made it even worse. It would make us lethargic, tired and generally depressed. And I don't mean depressed like "Oh bummer, its crappy outside" but like "I need some medication" depression. It took us a while to figure out the connection between the depression and the vog. I also spoke with a several people that told us about increased cancer rates of people living in the vog path, on the Big Island in particular, but they might have just been paranoid hippie types. We didn't look into it too much.
Regarding spearfishing... if your partner wants to go to Molokai (and probably Lanai to a lesser extent) to spearfish, go with some locals (the native kind, not the haole kind). Or wait until you have been there for a while and are no longer considered a tourist.... say 20 or 30 years.
I know that all sounds negative, but you know all the good stuff already. The diving is great (but completely different for the Caribbean), weather is perfect, yada-yada-&t. I loved living there enough that it is the only place I have ever moved back to.
