By GeorgeF. Lee, Star-Bulletin
The Lanikai Canoe Club will go for its third straight victory
in Sunday's Bankoh Molokai Hoe canoe race.
Lanikai’s
quest for no. 3
The defending champions
By Greg Ambrose
will go for third straight victory
in Molokai Hoe
Star-BulletinJUST as most people are sitting down to their Sunday breakfast, more than 1,000 men will be paddling an international flotilla of outrigger canoes at break-back speed from Molokai to Oahu. The paddlers' strokes will be powered by an urgent desire to win the Bankoh Molokai Hoe, the world championship of outrigger canoe racing that is a brutal 41-mile sprint across the treacherous Kaiwi Channel.
The Lanikai Canoe Club is paddling for an incredible third straight victory and a chance to break its course record of 4:53:03 set in 1995 in its canoe built by Oahu's master outrigger craftsman, Sonny Bradley.
"We just surfed our brains off in 1995," says Lanikai paddler John Foti. "It's hard to think that you could go much faster than we did in 1995, unless you rode the same swell the whole way.
"There is a good rising tide this weekend to give us a boost, and with a good swell at our back and a good strong tail wind, we could do it."
Lanikai will be pushed hard by the Faa'a Outrigger Canoe Club of Tahiti, which won in 1993 and '94. The Tahitians are fiercely determined to prevail after finishing third last year, and watching Lanikai in 1995 surpass their 1993 record, when they became the first team to break the five-hour barrier at 4:55.27.
"We can't overcome the Tahitians, we can only focus on ourselves and do the best we can do," says Foti. "If you worry about other people, you're just wasting energy."
One thing the crews can worry about is their starting place, where more than 100 canoes contend for the prime spot.
By GeorgeF. Lee, Star-Bulletin
A dejected and exhausted Chris Masters from the
Mooloolaba Outriggers of Australia canoe club rests after
finishing last year's Molokai to Oahu canoe race.
"We've been log-jammed at the start, and the race is over for you," says Foti. "You can take out a top crew in 10 seconds at the start. You have so much ground to make up, and it taxes you mentally."The best tactic is to line up next to a familiar crew who won't be inclined to jam you up, he added.
This year's 46th annual Molokai to Oahu race will be familiar to Joseph Kekua Napoleon, known to all as Nappy. The founder of the Anuenue Canoe Club will be making his 40th channel crossing for this contest, an incredible feat of stamina, conditioning and perpetual youth that has earned Napoleon a spot on numerous winning teams.
Both the women and men paddlers are dead serious about this inter-island race.
But the women know how to have fun, at least before the race begins.
On the eve of their race two weeks ago, the women paddlers performed skits using props and soundtracks to poke fun at their coaches in an incredible evening of camaraderie.
The men will spend Saturday gritting their teeth, flexing their muscles and preparing their battle plans for Sunday's competition. The most important part of the plan is plotting the course, which involves calculating the effects of tide, swell, wind and current to achieve the most efficient crossing.
Foti is comforted to have his brother, Jimmy, Lanikai's steersman, picking their path across the ocean once again.
Such attention to detail and innovations like rotating the nine team members during open-ocean changes to keep the canoe's six paddlers fresh have nearly halved the original 8-hour finish time.
This is not a strictly Hawaii affair, even though outrigger canoe paddling is the official state team sport. Teams are coming from Guam, Johnston Island, Yugoslavia, Hungary, The Marquesas and Connecticut. And clubs from as far away as Tahiti, Illinois, California and Australia have won the contest.
Curiously, among the Hawaii crews, only teams from Oahu have won this race, aside from the inaugural event in 1952 when Molokai's Kukui O Lanikaula triumphed.
Crews have grumbled over the years about some competitors forming dream teams of exceptional athletes who don't paddle for the same club. Such a practice doesn't bother Foti.
"We have prided ourselves on being a neighborhood club. What we have over dream teams is a chemistry that goes years deep, and bonding from small-kid days," Foti said.
"There are dial-a-team crews that might put the chemistry together to pull it off on race day. But it definitely makes it sweeter to be able to win it with your deep friends. It makes the party better."
Paddlers will start stroking at 7:30 a.m. from Hale O Lono Harbor on Molokai. The canoes are expected to begin coming ashore at Fort DeRussy Beach in Waikiki before 1 p.m. Parking is available at the Hilton Hawaiian Village garage, but race officials suggest that people park on the fringes of Waikiki and either walk or take The Bus to the finish line.
"Just to win the thing at all, once, is enough," says Foti. "The rest of this is gravy. If we could pull it off another year, that would be next to a miracle to me."
The facts
What Bankoh Molokai Hoe
