THE OAR CORPS : Offshore Outrigger Club’s Women Paddlers Set Pace That Leaves All Others in Their Wake

Some Orange County women who travel regularly to Catalina have found a quicker and more reliable way to get there than sailing.

Sailing, after all, can take all day. Paddling an outrigger canoe, they have found, can take less than five hours.

Of course, to cover the 28 miles that fast, you can’t go in just any outrigger. You have to put to sea in the No. 1 boat of the Offshore Outrigger Canoe Club of Newport Beach, which contains nine of the fastest women paddlers in the world.

The women in No. 1 have paddled from Newport Beach to Santa Catalina Island in the annual outrigger canoe race each year since the races began in 1980.

They have never lost.

And for the past two years they have placed first in the annual canoe race generally considered to be the world championship--between the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Molokai, beating teams from Australia, Tahiti, Hawaii, New Zealand, Samoa, Japan, Canada and the continental United States. This year they will try for a third win at Molokai, something no women’s team has ever done.

They have succeeded in an arcane sport--one not native to the United States--that requires precise, almost hypnotic repetition, pinpoint timing, seamanship and startling strength and endurance.

“I really feel that a lot of our success has to do with the people we attract,” said John Rader, the founder and president of the Offshore club. “We seem to have found sort of a niche, in that we get people who come to us from other teams who are very good athletes in their own right and who want to be better. They know we’ll be going to the top competitions. Over the years, these people have mixed with the people we’ve already had, and we’ve gotten better and better.”

Also, said Rader, “these people are water people. They love the water. They’ll be involved in swimming or surfing or kayaking. And they love the teamwork. This is one sport in which each person depends very closely on the others. Psychologically, everyone has to be into each other, without one person pulling one way and another person pulling another.”

Outrigger canoe racing, like the sport of crew, involves a boat full of people working as one. Each paddle blade must enter the water at precisely the same instant, or the boat’s efficiency is cut in the same way a car’s engine would be if one cylinder stopped firing. The steersman, in the stern, must work with her paddle to steer a true course, sometimes through high ocean waves, and the lead paddler (called the stroke) must set an unwavering cadence and provide a visual reference for the paddlers behind her.

And, the coaches must decide when a paddler is beginning to tire, and order a replacement for her from the ever-present motorized escort boat.

It is long, hard work. And, throughout the season that lasts from April through September, the women practice three days a week, for two hours or more at a time.

Watching No. 1 lunge over the calm surface of Newport Harbor during a practice session is a bit like watching a clock mechanism. Even in practice, the women paddle with a precision and an unwavering cadence that makes it appear that they can go on like that forever.

Some of them, like Bonnie Sherar, nearly can. Sherar, 31, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, is one of the workhorses of the team. During the past two Molokai races, she said she paddled for unbroken stretches that lasted almost 1 1/2 hours.

“I get abused quite a bit,” said Sherar, laughing. “It takes me a while to warm up. . . . I go through about 15 minutes of pain and hating it, but after that I get to the point where it starts to feel good.”

JoJo Toeppner, 33, a nine-year veteran of the Offshore club, said that in a long ocean race, such as the 28-mile Catalina race, “you do changes, so what it is, for us, is really a series of sprints. You’re going as fast as you can the whole time.”

Changes, in outrigger racing context, mean bringing in replacements, a tricky bit of agility and timing that the women say sometimes can make the difference between winning and losing. It involves the escort boat pulling ahead of the racing outrigger and dropping off the replacements in the water, lined up in the order in which they will sit in the boat. The steersman then maneuvers the outrigger toward the women in the water, and, as the boat pulls abreast of them, the paddlers to be replaced roll out of one side of the boat on a command from the steersman, and the replacements pull themselves in on the other.

A practiced team will not miss more than a couple of strokes during the maneuver, and the boat will barely slow down.

“God, it’s great,” said Melinda Arrand, a three-year club member who regularly paddles in one of Offshore’s three other boats. It’s like doing a pullup into the boat. You just try to gracefully twist your seat and your body into the middle. You only have one shot at it, and it’s a lot of technique and timing, but when you’re in the race your adrenaline is up, and, miraculously, I can get myself into the boat. It’s a lot of fun.”

Arrand is something of an inspiration to the members of the club, said Mindy Clark, one of Offshore’s coaches. Arrand, a 47-year-old mother of two, began paddling with the club three years ago.

Arrand said she had been “active” throughout her school years, “but not this intensely. I started really getting into athletics in my 30s.”

Clark said that “Melinda has the best attitude on the team. She knows she’s not one of the strongest, but she’s out there to have fun. She’s usually in the third or fourth boat, but she’s there for the camaraderie of it and to have a good time.”

While the Offshore club’s elite paddlers carry the most fame in the world of outrigger canoeing, there are about 27 other women in the club, like Arrand, who paddle in the club’s other three boats and compete at lower levels. Many of them, like Arrand, were attracted to the sport by the sense of teamwork and, of course, the water.

“It’s a very physical sport, and I love the environment,” Arrand said. “I get a lot of motivation out of the group. The girls work very hard, but they have a lot of fun working out, too. It’s always challenging for me because I keep trying to get better with my timing and not splash anyone behind me.”

The No. 1 one boat, she said, sometimes appears to be a faraway goal.

“They’re so good,” she said. “They amaze me. They get everything right on the button. I don’t set up hopes for (attaining) that, but I keep on trying. I’m a late bloomer, so I’m really pleased that at this time of my life I don’t have any sign of burnout. The bottom line is that I feel really good.”

The Offshore club--one of five outrigger clubs in Orange County--offers constant encouragement to paddlers at every level of experience, Arrand said, and never turns away a woman who is interested in trying her hand at the sport. However, said Clark, “of the amount of girls who actually come out (for the first time), only two or three out of every 10 will stay. It’s harder than a lot of people expect it to be.”

It is Clark’s job, both in practice and in races, to keep the paddlers’ minds focused on their work and off their fatigue. To that end, Sherar said, she is a kind of cheerleader, keeping both inspiration and perspiration high.

“She’s probably one of the best steerspeople in the sport, man or woman,” Sherar said. “She says encouraging things to you, lets you know where you stand. (A steersman’s) intonation can ruin your whole attitude, but she makes it real fun. On long paddles during practice, like from Newport to Dana Point, she’ll play word games with us, like asking us to name five words that begin with the letter ‘A.’

“When you get tired, you kind of lose concentration. But timing is everything, and if the timing is off by even one person, the boat doesn’t ride right. The only thing you should be watching is the blade in front of you on your side of the boat. You get into a sort of hypnotized realm. But Mindy says things that bring back your concentration.”

The act of paddling an outrigger is not necessarily difficult, Clark said, although some women learn faster than others. Most of the approximately 36 women in the Offshore club, however, are good enough to make it into the first boat, she said. The top nine, she added, tend to be both dedicated and very strong.

Many of the women, whether in the first boat or not, train each day in some sort of aerobic exercise such as running, cycling or swimming. Several also are on weight-training programs. And, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, they paddle. During the season, Saturday usually is race day. And, because paddling an outrigger is primarily an upper-body activity, the common silhouette among the elites is a pronounced and heavily muscled “V.”

“You get in tiptop shape,” Toeppner said.

The racing season begins with races of between 8 and 14 miles, with 1/2-mile to 2-mile sprints in June. Toward the end of the season the longer Catalina and Molokai races are held. The idea, Sherar said, is to work up to the longer distances. But, she said, her first race--a relatively short one in San Diego--was a revelation.

“It was about a 10- or 12-mile race, and by the time we got to the mouth of the harbor, I figured we’d be turning around any minute. That’s about when the pain started, and I started asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ”

The harbor mouth, she said, was only about a mile or two into the race.

“There’s no way to try to explain to one of our novice girls what it’s like to race,” Sherar said. “You just have to do it. And you’re going to get halfway through it and start to question your sanity. You really are.”

And, Toeppner said, in high ocean waves, “sometimes the bow will be completely out of the water and if you’re sitting one or two (first or second position in the bow) you can’t reach the water with your blade. But you have to keep your cadence anyway, to keep the others in time.”

Also, she said, the boat can “become very tippy” depending on the roughness of the seas and the direction of the wind.

Still, said Toeppner, who works as a fitness trainer and whose husband is an outrigger paddler on the Offshore men’s team, “it’s much more exciting out in the open ocean.”

Such rigors tend to make the paddlers’ social lives somewhat self-contained, Clark said. Of the six women who are planning marriages this year, she said, three are marrying men who also are outrigger team paddlers.

Part of this has to do with the nature of the training schedule, Sherar said.

“The schedule isn’t really hard, because it gets to be a habit after a while,” she said. “From May to October your life revolves around paddling. We all have our paddling friends and for six months that’s primarily who you see. It’s hard to explain to other people.

“People I work with or whom I’ve met . . . will say, ‘Why do you go out and hurt yourself three times a week? What reward do you get out of it?’ Well, in Molokai, we got little wooden salad bowls.”

The answer, she said, “is that you become so goal-oriented. There’s the people and the competition. For the last two years we’ve been the best in the world. No one’s won Molokai for three years in a row. So this year, we have to do it.”

It’s both a shared misery and happiness, Toeppner said.

“It really is a little bit of both of those,” she said. “When we’re doing five- or six-hour workouts for Molokai, we get tired and punchy and we just start laughing and making fun of each other. That’s really special with the crew we have. Basically, with all the fatigue, we just flat out enjoy it.”