A Fine Ride

I was kind of dreading the Maui Canoe and Kayak club race this Saturday. Last year the same race was from the Canoe Hale in Kihei to the Maui Price Hotel, just past Makena Landing. It was a nasty bit of torture–light winds, greasy swells that I couldn’t catch and every so often the wind decided to turn head on. The last mile of the race was into a headwind. I remember barely being able to get my board out of the water at the end.

This weekend the race ended at the Kea Lani, about three miles shorter. The MCKC map said eight miles. When I got to Haycraft Park at noon to sign up (the long canoe course started there) the windline was well offshore, but the winds were strong. I made my way back to the Canoe Hale and found Noah Yap hanging out, waiting for the race to start and guarding his borrowed board–Jeremy Rigg’s impossibly narrow (24″) Foote Maliko 14. I had decided to run my F18 so I started rigging it out. I’ve been doing the last few races and a lot of southside runs with my jukebox on the nose: An iHome portable iPod player using my iPhone as the pod. I stuff the whole thing in a big transparent drybag and lash it onto the nose with the volume cranked up. Good music and no headphones. Noah always jokes that he’s going to stick with me to hear the music. I say “you’ve got to catch me first”. I’m not going to be saying that anymore.

I’ve had lots of comments and a few disparaging looks at my sound system. Like I’m not serious if I’m adding weight to my board. If anyone picked up my poor beaten up and waterlogged F18 they’d understand–I bet it weighs fifty pounds. The whole sound system might weigh two pounds. It just won’t matter. Besides, I could skip breakfast and save more weight than that.

People started showing up. Tracy, Travis, Byron, Ron, Bruce, Lee, Jeremy, Konosuke, Sharon, Connor. Damn, Connor’s getting tall. He’s not that little skinny squirt he used to be. Some new guys showed up too, one with a new Production F16 V2. I considered offering to swap for my “much faster” F18 for the race, but decided that would be way too cruel.

There was more than a bit of confusion about where we should start. At first they were talking about a beach start. I went out to warm up as did pretty much everyone else, and I suspect the guy on the jetski thought “OK, let’s do a waterstart”. At first he was motioning us towards the canoe lane wands, but the wind was much stronger outside, so I decided to paddle out to the orange buoy and see if I could start in a better position. Everyone else came to the same conclusion and pretty quickly there was a herd moving towards the orange buoy. I wiggled my way past Jeremy and Connor, turned the board sideways to hold in the wind just as the starter gave up on getting us in any kind of order in the strong wind and blew his whistle. Damn, pointed the wrong way. I got turned a little, but decided to take advantage of my angle and started pumping for the outside. I started getting little bumps right away and used them to run further out where I could see a more intense windline.

Jeremy and Conner were off like a pair of greyhounds. I caught a couple of nice rides and stuck with them for a few minutes, but they kept getting smaller and smaller. I could see they were having a real duel. On the inside I could see Ron St. John slightly ahead, and Noah running parallel to me. With my cigar store Indian flexibility I don’t try to look behind, but I couldn’t see anyone else. I figured Noah would fade. Turns out that Lee was ahead of me too, but he was well inside I guess. I never saw him.

My F18 was working wonderfully. I was making good use of the small swells to hook into the big ones, and once I was in the big guys I was getting very long and fast rides. Super exciting. I expected to pull past Noah and start catching Ron with all the great rides I was getting, but it didn’t happen. Noah was surfing the board every time I looked at him and Ron was pulling slightly away. I was shocked, but I put my head down and worked harder at getting every ride I could. The Tahitian stroke was working incredibly well, popping me into swells that I usually wouldn’t catch. Nickleback was blasting out a nice cadence on the nose. Something uplifting about a guy’s Mom shooting his abusive Dad. Whatever, sounded great and went with the pace just perfectly.

As we neared the Cove I saw one of those big flat rippled sheets to my right that anyone who paddles here knows and loves. They aim downwards to a deep trough, and right behind them is always a big swell. I rode a little money wave over into it and started accelerating across the sheet. When I got to the other side I turned to come back and discovered a trough so deep and sharp it looked like a fold in the ocean. Nothing to do but drop into it, so I did, and immediately turned my board as much to the left as I could to keep the nose out of the wall in front of me. The acceleration was terrific, I nearly staggered backwards on the board, but dropped my front knee instead and stayed with it. The board zoomed along the face, staying in the wave a long, long way, and when I popped out of the far side a little gap in the wall let me swing over and continue the ride. Best swell ride I’ve ever done, anywhere. “So THAT’S how you do it!!” I crowed, and then got knocked off by a little side chop.

Ah well, I got back underway with little fuss, but while I was getting up I saw some SUP racer with a white rashguard closing on me. And Noah, that little weasel, had pulled out a serious lead.

As we passed Sorrentos I decided to draw a bead on the Kea Lani and do a gradual angle that would take me to the finish line, which I knew would be a buoy positioned just off the point we usually turn after to reach public end of the beach. I was catching good rides and moving fast, but the wind was slacking and the swells were getting more confused. I was coming in too early. I started to turn outwards again when a OC-1 went past my knee. Scared the heck out of both of us. The OC-1 was passing on the right and I didn’t see him as I started to turn. He almost had a very heavy and clumsy passenger. On the plus side it was the first canoe that had passed me. Quite a few more went by before the finish, but not as many as a typical race. The SUP folks were all maintaining a pretty rapid pace.

I was still pretty far out and thinking of going further when I was able to see the buoy. It drew me like a magnet. I should have resisted. A hundred yards further out the wind was still howling, but as I moved in towards the buoy the wind slacked, the swells got very confused with all the reflected waves from the rocky shore, and I slowed. I didn’t know where my white-shirted nemesis was, so I started putting the heat back into my paddling, concentrating on doing as solid a Tahitian Stroke as I could manage. I got a few little rides, then a bigger one, then a few more hard strokes and I was over the line.

After the finish line we had to make out way to shore, and up to the public parking, which wasn’t easy with dozens of tourists bobbing clueless-ly. How someone can stand in front of a bunch of sharply pointed 21 foot canoes nearly out of control in shorebreak and not at least be a little on guard is beyond me. I nearly speared a guy who walked in front of my board as a wave swept me towards shore. I had to dive on the nose and get the board stopped before it whacked him right in his goofy smile. He didn’t even put his hands up.

A guy and his girlfriend sat at the edge of the stairs while dozens of people carried long boards and canoes past him in the buffeting wind. I heard him say “we’re okay here” when she expressed some concern. I said to her “you have a 90 percent chance of getting whacked by one of these” so she got up and moved. He eventually followed after my fin wobbled over his head a few times. I was doing my best not to let it hit him, but geez.

I figured I was fifth until I saw Lee walking down the stairs toward me when I was carrying my board up. “Hmmm, where did he come from?”

Fish tacos and cold beer at the finish. What could be better. Byron Yap gave Jeremy and I a ride back to our rigs, and we both returned for the medal ceremony. Tracey Dudley told me that Jeremy and Conner were disqualified for missing the finish buoy. They didn’t know where the finish was, and were far outside, headed for the Maui Prince on the other side of Makenna Landing. Mary–the MCKC starter went out in the boat and asked them “are you in the race? The finish is back there.” I assume she was being serious, though Mary’s sarcasm is well known and appreciated. She was starting us a few races ago when my board drifted ahead of the lineup. She pulled in front of me and said “are you special? Do you get an extra head start?”

So despite carrying a blistering lead and finishing eight miles in well under an hour, they were both DQ’d. Ah, well, said I to Jeremy, look at the bright side, that moves me up two places. Somehow he didn’t see the benefit of that.

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