Toughing it out earned respect of new peers
Terry Galpin, Contributing Editor, Kaneohe, Hawaii
Bam! That’s a sound a sailing canoe captain never wants to hear. I look up and our entire standing rig comes crashing down. Everything – mast, boom, spar, sail, stay lines – all down in the water. Making sure my crew is unhurt I see the rescue boat in the distance racing to assist us. Thoughts of our failure two years ago flood my mind. Words, that small kids should never hear, come out of my mouth. We are not going home in the rescue boat this time. In 2004, bad weather and extreme seas swamped our canoe and literally split open our safety ama midway across the Alenuihaha Channel. We were racing from the Big Island to Maui. After 17 years of Hawaiian Sailing Canoe Association races, we were the first all-woman crew to compete. Grudgingly, but fearing for our safety – we had seen a shark eating a pilot whale right before we went down – we called in the rescue boat. Feeling like our wahine (female) crew had let down all of womankind, we vowed to train even harder and smarter. Over the next few years, we had good days, and really bad days – days with 30-knot winds and 20-foot seas in a 48-foot canoe with a sail capable of generating speeds up to 22 knots, all being steered with a wooden paddle. It made us wonder how the Polynesian ancestors traveled so far in similar craft to find Hawaii.  It is 2008 – 10 Hawaiian sailing canoes have left a beach in Kahului, Maui heading for Ka’anapali beach in Maui. Again we are the only all-wahine crew. The conditions are challenging: 20-knot winds and 7-10-foot wave faces.
We go high of the fleet, the better to turn down and catch the following seas and surf to the finish. Our canoe is flying. And then it happens. We are surfing down a wave when a sudden loud and violent crack comes from the rigging. One of the worst things that can happen to a sailing canoe has happened to us. Was it time to bail out of the race and get assistance to make it to shore? "Let us hook you up," the rescue boat captain screams to us. "No, just stand by!" I yell back. "We can do this." Through determination and clever leverage – while ducking 30-pound pieces of wood flying overhead and pieces of cotton line swing around like whips – we raise and reattach the entire standing rigging and raise the sail in those same winds and high seas that had taken us down before. We cross the finish line 30 minutes after the last sailing canoe finished, and are greeted as if we have won. It dawns on me that what we have actually won that day is far more important than first place. We have won the respect from our fellow watermen. We are no longer "the wahines in the pink sailing canoe,” we are the wahines of Moa “E” Ku. |
