- Where: Pailolo Channel, Hawaii
- When: April 26, 2008
- What: Kai Wa’a/Smith Builders, LLC Maui to Molokai Challenge
Mid April marks the beginning of the paddle sports racing season in Hawaii. As the winter surf season ebbs to a close, it’s time for the C4 crew to join all the canoe, surf ski and paddleboard enthusiasts in gearing up for a summer full of training, races, and plain ole holoholo larks.
After spending the past four paddle seasons shaping and designing open ocean stand-up race boards with Brian Keaulana, Todd Bradley, Archie Kalepa, and Karel Tresnak, I was keen to get the new C4 Vortice XP out in some ripping trade wind bumps and point that baby downhill.
So I was stoked when my Molokai Channel partner, Archie Kalepa, rang up to invite me to paddle with him in a race across the Pailolo Channel to Kaunakakai on Molokai. Arch is more or less the godfather of stand-up paddleboard racing, being the first guy, back in 2004, to take on the 32-nautical-mile Kaiwi Channel standing up.
Now that dozens of Vortice racers are springing from of Karel’s molds, this will be the first year Archie and I can train on identical boards; we are both keenly anticipating this year’s Molokai crossing, knowing that if the trades are smoking’ we have a design that gobbles up bumps like M&Ms.
On Maui, race day dawned in a voggy calm. The forecast insisted trades were on the way, but as we motored to the start point at D.T. Fleming Beach in the Kalepa Kai, Archie’s tricked-out Radon, it was soon apparent that the bulk of the stand-up contingent had been spooked away by the glassy, unruffled ocean. Well, maybe the 5-foot north swell had something to do with it, too…
But by the time the start horn blared the wind was visibly increasing, and already bursts of popcorn were sprouting out to sea. A nightmarish vision of a 6-hour death march over sticky calm water abated; we could begin to relish the thought of 4 hours of constant ’scoots’ and runs.
Heading due west from Fleming Beach, the first leg served up an hour’s battle with a more northerly wind component. Luckily the prevailing torque of the bumps continually squeezed us up to windward, thus allowing us to hold our westerly line toward the finish line at Kaunakakai Harbor, 23 nautical miles distant.
By mid channel the wind veered more easterly, seemingly funneled and refracted around the islands of Lanai and Molokai. I can’t tell you how much fun it is to settle into a pace miles out to sea, with the wind squarely abaft and no other contestants harrying your tail. By hour two Archie and I had settled into a regimen of trading 20-minute turns on the Vortice XP. Watching Archie from the Kalepa Kai, I was gratified to note that he was able to constantly keep the nose pointed downhill. That is what you want to see; in contrast, paddleboards that tend to go pitch-up usually wallow on the crest of a bump and often stall out before you can push it over and start scooting downhill.
By Kamalo Point the wind was churning up perfect surfing bumps—-tight, steep, and close together. The run of the chops settled into a ‘basket-weave’ pattern, the kind that overlap and let you hop right-to-left- and left-to-right from wavelet to wavelet in long railroading runs. At this point we were stoked to be routinely stitching together 5 waves per run.
Nearing the finish line at Kaunakakai Harbor, the wind died somewhat, but the chops still kept pushing us along. We hove alongside open class solo paddleboard hellman Keoni Watson, the lone paddleboard entrant, as he slurped his last bottle of protein sludge on the way to a splendid 4:10 race time.
Archie steamed past the finish buoy at the tip of the wharf to secure for us a time of 4:07, which we figured pointed to an average paddling speed of about 6 or 7 mph. An hour later the only other relay team, Tiare Friedman and Mele McPherson, scooted in on their new Vortice XP with a very respectable time of 5:06. Minutes later, solo stand-up paddlers Mike Madsoon (on an F-16) and Jack Gillen (on a Ku Nalu) came ashore with times of 5:11 and 5:18, respectively.
At 23 nautical miles, the Maui to Molokai race was an ideal warm-up for the Molokai Challenge on July 27th—–you could call it a Metric Molokai. It’s long enough to find out what you’re made of, yet short enough that it doesn’t lay you out for days afterward. ….And as any stand-up paddleboarder knows, having the wind on your back and the bumps puckering everywhere like grenade craters is manna from Heaven.
-Dave Parmenter, 29 April 2008
