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The World's Largest Long Distance Outrigger Race |
by Paula Daniels
Paula is the former President of Heal the Bay and is currently a Commissioner on the City of Los Angeles Board of Public Works. Originally from Hawaii, she is a relatively new paddler with Marina del Rey Outrigger Canoe Club, and recounts her journey to preparing for the 18 mile long Queen Liliuokalani Race in Kona, Big Island Hawaii
It will be a long paddle. Some say it will take about three hours. Our club president, a veteran of many difficult races, said the race is “beautiful…but brutal.” Start hydrating now, was the advice I got on the Wednesday before the Saturday race.
It is known as the world’s largest long distance outrigger race and draws significant international participation. I am going to do this race for the first time. I am not able to do my usual reading on this transpacific flight, as I worry about whether my body will hold up in a longer race than I have ever done, in a sport that is relatively new to me. I am older than Hawaiian statehood; my birth certificate shows that I was born in Honolulu, “Territory of Hawaii.” I won’t be the oldest one paddling, but I am well above the average age of the top competitors in the field.
There are many who travel to Hawaii and other places for the love of sport. I can’t help but reflect on the irony of flying over two thousand miles at 800 miles per hour in a comfortable Boeing 757, to paddle an outrigger canoe. Outriggers were the way my ancestors crossed over two thousand miles from the other side of the Pacific to find Hawaii in the first place. I am certain their motivations were not recreational. Little is known about the precise reasons for the first ones to undertake the arduous, daunting, and extraordinarily bold exploratory journey from other parts of Polynesia to…well, who knew, at that time, that they would land in what would come to be known as Hawaii? All the available information is that the original settlers of the Hawaiian Islands just set out, believing that there were other islands out there.
And they were right. They found it, by outrigger canoe and a phenomenal adroitness at celestial navigation.
One of the things my Maui grandfather wanted to impress upon us as we were growing up was the excellence of the original Hawaiians. They had no written language and did not create a society that conferred degrees or created corporations; but they knew how to work effectively with the tools of nature, using them to their best advantage exactly as they existed. Who needed to invent a compass, for example, when you could navigate by stars?
I feel impaired or stunted in the limited range of skills cultivated today. I know how to operate a computer and an iPhone and on a good day, can manage the information from hundreds of emails. I can make my way around courthouses and capitol buildings and city halls; I know how to work a statute from inception through to the myriad evolutions of its debated and interpreted life in the books. But I don’t know how to build my own house or grow my own food. I don’t know how to read the stars for direction; how to raise fish; how to make fiber for cloth.
But now, I do know how to paddle an outrigger canoe.
The ancient Hawaiian craft became the basis of a modern Hawaiian sport, which was brought to California along with surfing, around the time of Hawaii’s admission to statehood and the release of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii.” It is as popular in Hawaii as NASCAR racing in Indiana, but in Southern California, it lags behind the popularity of surfing. Surfing became more widely adopted and assimilated into California culture, maybe because it is an individual activity. Outrigger racing is a team sport that requires a different kind of commitment. Although I have been living in California since I came here for college in 1973, I had no idea it existed here until I stumbled across it in 2007.
It was burnout that drove me to it. After days, months, years of word wrangling in artificially lit offices, I needed to get out on the water. It was always my place of restoration.
Lucky for me, I Googled my way to a nearby club whose last day to take new members for the season, was the first day I could get there. They gathered at the beach in Marina Del Rey as they always did three times a week, only it was my first time meeting anyone there. I had kayaked before, many times and in many places from Hawaii to Alaska, but outrigger paddling was new to me. I knew about it but hadn’t done it myself. A quick lesson on the sand about what the paddling stroke is like, and before I knew it, I was paddling with the team.
We raced each other to prepare for upcoming races with other teams. We went out past the breakwater and ploughed through the crashing waves, six to a canoe, focusing on the timing of our strokes. It was a great workout for every muscle above the knee (including the one between my ears). The sun was bright on the water, the dolphins played along, the salt spray in the air tasted sweet. I was immediately hooked.
Hooked enough to meet up for practice three times a week. Hooked enough, and competitive enough to get up at 3:30 in the morning to drive two or more hours to participate in one of the thrice monthly races held by the Southern California Outrigger Racing Association at various beaches along the vast southern California coast. I had never before in my adult life made so much time for a non-obligatory commitment. I was once known as a workaholic. Being on a paddling team has definitely reformed that part of my life. It provides counterweight, balance. And maybe as important: to be on a sports team, for the first time in one’s life in the middle years of one’s life, is a new lesson in humility.
Like any sport, the better you get at it, the more you know it and the less you need to actually think about it. It is important to get to the point where you can free up your mental energy so you can feel the boat; feel the blend with others; feel whether the water moves efficiently by the hull. Think it less and feel it more, so you can be fully
committed to just paddling.
All of us on the team have jobs and other lives that we shed when we push away from the sand; our personalities, on the other hand, seem to be a part of our stroke. Learning how to work them smoothly into the boat is almost as important as our physical conditioning. Like any situation where more than one person is involved, there are those interpersonal
dynamics that play out as politics, large and small. Paddling is no different. We even have our own name for it: “paddle-tics.” Working through it and rising above it – particularly on a really nice wave – is part of what it is all about. As those wiser than me have said: it’s about the journey, not the destination.
It still helps to have a goal.
In outrigger paddling, the talk is often about one’s “reach.” Paddling could be said to be like synchronized golfing: to move efficiently through the water, each stroke from each paddler in the boat must be precisely matched and timed, and there are infinite adjustments to each stroke that can be made in order to get more power and pull through the water. A really important aspect of the stroke is a long reach, so that one can get a big load of power into the front part of the stroke, then unload while the boat glides through the stroke return.
So we’ll reach in every stroke of that nearly three hour race on Saturday. We’ll reach for a good place and a good finish. Reaching is what it is all about. Whatever it is anyone is committing themselves to, reaching to be the best you can be at it, is the journey.
It will be a long paddle. I am not sure what will actually occupy my mind during the race on Saturday. I hope it will not be the heat or the thirst or anything at all related to how middle aged my body is. I hope it will be about being strong, about reaching long, and about doing well by others. And maybe, if things go really well, I will not think at all. I will just paddle.
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