Word travels in a small community the way sound travels over water, and it did not take long for Hinemoa's people to notice what was happening. Night after night she would sit at the edge of the lake listening to a kōauau (small flute) drifting over from Mokoia, and night after night her face gave away exactly whose flute she thought it was and exactly how she felt about it. Her family had already refused the match. What they had not accounted for was that refusing it once, formally, in daylight, would not be the end of the matter while the sound of him kept arriving after dark.
So they took the practical step available to people who live by a lake and want to control who crosses it. Every canoe belonging to Hinemoa's people was hauled up out of the water and drawn well beyond the shoreline, up onto dry ground where no one could simply slip one loose in the dark and paddle off toward the island. This was not a subtle message. It was a direct, physical answer to a problem they believed they had solved by removing the one tool that made the lake crossable. No canoe, no crossing, no more nights spent listening to a flute meant for her and thinking about answering it.
It is worth noticing how deliberate this was, because it tells you how seriously her family took the situation. This was not an oversight or ordinary caution about canoes left unattended overnight. It was a targeted response to a grown woman's evident intentions, and it assumed that without a boat, the water itself would do the rest of the refusing on their behalf. Lake Rotorua is not a narrow channel you might reasonably swim on a whim. It is a real body of water, cold enough and wide enough that no one hauling those canoes up the bank thought they were leaving her any real option at all.
That is usually how these barriers work, in families and elsewhere. You do not always forbid a thing outright a second time. You simply remove the means, quietly, and let distance and difficulty do the work that an argument might not. It looks, from the outside, like caution rather than cruelty — nobody shouted at Hinemoa, nobody locked a door. They simply moved every canoe out of reach and trusted that a lake at night, with no vessel to cross it, would be barrier enough for anyone.
What they had not fully weighed was what Hinemoa would decide the barrier was actually worth overcoming for. A canoe removed from the shore assumes the person being stopped will accept that the crossing now belongs to the category of impossible. It does not account for someone who has already spent enough nights listening to know exactly what she is choosing between — a safe, sanctioned stillness on her own side of the water, or a crossing nobody in her family believed she would seriously attempt.
Sitting on the bank at Ōwhata with every boat gone and the flute still arriving faithfully across the water each evening, Hinemoa was left with a very plain choice, stripped of any easy option in between. She could not paddle. She could still hear him. And the lake, cold and wide as it was, had not actually been made impossible — only harder, and only for someone unwilling to go into the water itself. What she did next is the part of this pūrākau most people already know, and it began with two empty gourds and a decision that the missing canoes were not, in the end, the last word.