I should have thought of it before, but it occurred to me that Hokule'a (the canoe) has been all over Polynesia, so they had to handle sailing east for part of those trips.

This led me to this article about their first trip to Easter Island, sailing from Mangareva:

http://www.samlow.com/sail-nav/giftofthewind.html

They expected the voyage to be difficult because it would be almost directly into the prevailing winds, but it turned out that they were able to sail pretty close to due-east the entire trip and they arrived at Easter Island 10 days early.

This was in 1999 which was not an El Niño year, but rather a La Niña year following the really large 1998 El Niño event.