OUTRIGGERS : A Fierce, Spiritual Determination Is Force That Drives These Racers, Their Historic Craft

“I feel good doing this. This is my heritage. This is what Hawaii is all about,” shouted Matthews Sosa, 22, a Portuguese-Hawaiian, as he and his six-man crew paddled their 42-foot outrigger into the sea from this tiny town on the Big Island’s northwest coast.

Sosa and five other paddlers, a team of all-Hawaiian ancestry, were embarking on a rigorous two-hour workout, a ritual that occurs every day from February through October except when they are involved in competitive racing.

Outrigger canoe racing is an ancient Polynesian tradition steeped in religious significance. It is still very much alive today in the Hawaiian Islands.

The Islands boast 96 outrigger racing clubs, each club with an average of 100 active members. There are 60 clubs on Oahu, 13 on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11 on Maui, 8 on Kauai, 3 on Molokai, and 1 on Lanai. At nearly every coastal town of any size in the island chain, crews paddle through breakers out to sea every morning and every evening without missing a stroke, getting tuned up for the next race.

“From start to finish there is no way for a paddler to take a rest,” said Manny Veincent, 52, founder-coach of the Kawaihae (Ka-y-hi) Canoe Club. “A team is only as good as its weakest member. One paddler eases off and the race is lost.

“Paddling an outrigger canoe is comparable to a well-tuned engine. A malfunction of a spark plug, no matter how slight, the engine is not at peak performance.”

Veincent is a strict disciplinarian. “You’ve got to be to come out ahead in this business,” he said. No member of his club is allowed to have an alcoholic drink during the nine-month training and racing season. If someone has as much as one beer and Veincent finds out, that’s it. He or she is off the crew.

It takes top physical conditioning to be an outrigger paddler.

Probably one of the most grueling sporting events on earth is the 46-mile, non-stop outrigger race from Molokai to Oahu, held each summer.

Knuckles bleed from bouncing off the sides of the canoes, and legs get banged up when paddlers change from one side to the other.

“Hut ho!” yells the stroker at the bow of the canoe after 14 strokes on one side, ordering the paddlers to change over and do 14 strokes on the other side. “Changeovers keep us from getting too tired,” Sosa said.

Short races run from a quarter of a mile to 2 1/2 miles. A good crew will do the quarter-mile in two minutes or less. Average time for the 2 1/2-mile run is 20 minutes.

Island kids, girls and boys, as young as 6 are paddlers. There are competitive divisions for paddlers 6 to 12, 13 and 14, 15 and 16, 17 and 18, followed by novice, freshman, sophomore, junior and senior adult crews, depending upon skill, and finally a masters’ division for those over 40.

There are boys’ crews, girls’ crews, men’s crews, women’s crews and mixed crews.

There are races throughout the summer among the 96 competing clubs, and state championships in each division.

“It takes a dedicated person to be a paddler,” Veincent said. “It’s two hours in the water of continuous paddling each day, six days a week. Night workers crew canoes in the mornings. Day workers do their workouts in the evenings.”

Veincent, a fire captain and rancher by profession, still works out regularly in races despite his 52 years. He is a highly respected practitioner of the sport not only for his paddling and coaching abilities but also because he happens to be a kahuna waa, a canoe priest, a tradition that dates back centuries, an honor handed down from one generation to the next.

There are only a dozen kahuna waas in the Islands.

A kahuna waa is a master koa canoe builder. Koa is a rare Hawaiian mahogany tree growing in the higher reaches of the Islands at elevations above 4,000 feet.

As a kahuna waa, when it comes time to build a new outrigger, Veincent goes up into the mountains and selects a tall, wide tree from which he will hand-carve his next canoe.

“The old Hawaiian gods tell him when the time is right to select the koa tree, point him in the direction of the right one,” said Noholani Silva, 26, the Kawaihae Canoe Club’s assistant coach.

The tree weighing tons is selected, felled, then brought down the mountain to be carved. The kahuna waa designs the koa canoe and carves it without help.

In the old days, the kahuna waa stayed up in the mountains until his canoe was carved, which meant two or three years. Other canoe paddlers would bring his food and other needs to him.

“A kahuna waa carved the tree into a canoe only at the proper time, that may be in the middle of the night or the middle of the day,” Silva said. “Sometimes a kahuna waa will go several days or several weeks without carving because the time is not right.”

Racing canoes is part of the old Hawaiian religion. In many ways it is a mystical sport. It took Veincent three years to carve the 400-pound, 42-foot Kai Hawanawana (Ripples On The Water), the Kawaihae Club’s current number one koa racing canoe.

Normally during practice sessions, fiberglass outriggers are used. But on racing day the clubs haul out their treasured koa canoes, which are polished like mirrors and handled with great care. A koa canoe often lasts two or three lifetimes. The Kai Hawanawana is valued at more than $50,000. Fiberglass outriggers cost anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.

In the old days, warriors crewed racing outriggers. Sometimes not only racing contests but battles were fought in the canoes. Crews would carry canoe breakers, huge rocks with holes drilled through the middle, hurled with ropes toward an opponent’s canoe to sink it.

The Kawaihae Canoe Club, as do all the clubs in the Islands, has crews of all-Hawaiian ancestry, mixed crews of those with and without Hawaiian bloodlines, and crews of those without.

Silva, half-Hawaiian, manages a restaurant. Besides serving as assistant coach, she and Joe Whitford, another aficionado of the sport, promote outrigger canoe racing in Hawaiian high schools.

“We did it to perpetuate this ancient sport,” Silva said. “We wanted to be sure it will always be here in the Islands.”

Today, thanks to Silva and Whitford, 32 high schools on Oahu alone have competitive outrigger canoe racing clubs.

Lorrin (Whitey) Harrison, 72, known as the grand old man of outrigger canoe racing on the mainland, introduced the sport to California in 1936.

Harrison, a diver and commercial fisherman living in San Juan Capistrano, got his first taste of paddling on a trip to Hawaii in 1932. He built his first outrigger canoe four years later.

According to Harrison, two outrigger racers from Oahu, Noah Kalama and A. E. (Toots) Minville, came from the Islands to Southern California in 1959 to promote outrigger canoe club racing on the mainland.

Harrison was a member of the six-man crew that year that raced with a Hawaiian team from Avalon to Newport Dunes.

“The Hawaiians made the 30-mile crossing in five hours. We did it in 5 hours 11 minutes. That was the beginning of outrigger canoe racing on the mainland,” Harrison said.

Harrison, despite his 72 years, still races regularly in the masters’ division and his crew placed second recently in a competitive event. He is founder-coach of the Dana Outrigger Club.

Today there are 14 outrigger canoe racing clubs from Santa Barbara south to San Diego, and 14 more clubs in the San Francisco Bay-Monterey areas. There are races every weekend during the summer. The clubs are members of the KOA, which stands for Kalifornia Outrigger Assn., as well as for the rare wood from which the best outriggers are made.

There are 1,400 active paddlers along the California coast, but mainlanders race strictly in fiberglass boats.

“Other than the koa boats we do just like they do in the Islands,” said Al Ching, 46, half-Hawaiian, half-Chinese, who lived the first 19 years of his life in Hawaii. “Same rules. Same tough daily workouts in the water.”

Ching, owner of an office cleaning business, is coach and founder of King Harbor’s Kai Nalu (Gentle Seas) Club at Redondo Beach. Redondo Beach also has another outrigger canoe racing club, the Lanakila (meaning determination and victorious).