“Just stoked. Technology, man, it’s pretty amazing,” a now-talking Makali‘i Andrade, a firefighter on Kauai, told Hawaii News Now after traveling to Tennessee to undergo vocal reconstructive surgery three years after a foil-surfing accident left him with a slit throat, severed trachea, and long-term vocal paralysis. In December of 2022, Andrade, a Fire Rescue Capt., was tow-in foil surfing off Hanalei with a group of friends—which, fortunately for him, included none other than one of Hawai‘i’s most accomplished and celebrated living watermen, Archie Kalepa who, far from the first time in his life, played no small part in saving that of another. “I saw Maka catch this beautiful bomb from the outside,” Kalepa told Hawaii News Now shortly after the harrowing accident. “And then I seen all the skis take off… We realized, OK … something serious happened.” The tip of his foil wing had caught his neck.…