ABOVE: Maifano Amaru (left) greets Christian Marston Sr. at this year's Aloha Aito paddling race on Oahu. Both Tahitian transplants living on Kauai, they are key figures in V1 (vaa 1) racing. "I just love paddling," says Marston. "Hawaii used to be the champions, and I'd like to bring that back."
Last March, more than 170 canoe paddlers ages 7 to 70-plus gathered at Mauliola, a strip of beach in urban Honolulu across Keehi harbor from the airport's reef runway. They came from throughout Hawaii and as far away as Tahiti, Canada, New Zealand and Florida. Some were competing in their first race; others were among the world's best. All were here for Aloha Aito, a day of races that included a 1.5-mile course for kids under 14; a 6-mile course along the sheltered contours of Keehi Lagoon, for teens, novices and competitors ages 40 and up; and a 12-mile, open-ocean run for elite paddlers and any others who dared. That so many racers from so many places, with such varied skill levels, gathered on the same day was noteworthy. Even more so because they were all there to race in V1s, the notoriously challenging single-person canoes that have long been popular in the South Pacific and are lately seeing a wave of interest in northern waters.
"No matter how good you are, even if you're an elite paddler, when you jump from the OC1 to the V1, it's a completely different thing," says Christian Hauata Marston Sr., who founded the Aloha Aito race on Kauai in 2017. "Being on these canoes teaches you not just to appreciate the water, but appreciate the technique needed to make the canoe go straight without having to stop." Marston was born in Tahiti but has lived on the Garden Island since he was 10. Outside of the canoe world, he's best known as the owner of Hanalei's iconic Tahiti Nui Restaurant, but he's also one of the people behind the V1's growing popularity in Hawaii.
There are two basic boat designs in solo outrigger racing: OC1 and V1. The numeral indicates the number of seats. There are also two-, three-, four- and six-seat outriggers. The letters point to the canoe's origin: OC is short for "outrigger canoe," which has been the craft of choice in Hawaii for the last three decades. V is for vaa, the generic Tahitian word for canoe—same as waa in Hawaiian and vaka or waka in other parts of Polynesia.
Oahu paddler Tavita Maea surfs downwind on his way to second place in the Masters 40 division at the Aloha Aito.
The late Joe Quigg, a legendary surfboard shaper, canoe builder and maker of all manner of watercraft, is often credited with developing the OC1. As the story goes, Quigg came up with a prototype in the early 1980s as an off-season training tool for members of Oahu's Outrigger Canoe Club. At roughly the same time but 2,600 miles to the south, Tahitian paddlers were adapting single-seat canoes—vaa hoe, traditionally meant for calm lagoon waters—for racing in the open ocean. In 1991 another Oahu canoe builder, John Martin, began commercially manufacturing his version of the OC1.
Today, OC1s are dominant in Hawaii and throughout much of the world, except in the South Pacific, where the V1 reigns. The most glaring difference is the rudder: OC1s have them, allowing paddlers to steer with foot pedals; V1s do not, requiring racers to manage everything with their paddles and a variety of strokes. Paddling in the open ocean is challenging no matter the craft, but the V1 requires an exceptional mix of technique and environmental awareness—without a rudder, small variations in stroke power or paddle angle alter speed and direction. The canoes also weigh about twenty pounds, light enough for even the slightest breeze to change their course. Add currents and waves, and keeping a V1 headed in the right direction becomes exponentially harder.
Case in point was the start of the short course at this year's Aloha Aito, which was part race, part demolition derby: Keeping a rudderless canoe going straight while bringing it quickly up to speed takes a lot of skill. With barely a paddle's width separating dozens of twenty-foot-plus canoes from each other, it was inevitable that one would clip another, setting off a chain reaction that either spun out or blocked every boat within a forty-foot arc. By the time that logjam was sorted out, anyone who'd avoided the wreckage was pulling away from the crowd of also-rans. It's all part of the learning process.
The Kalama family is known for hewing to waa (canoe) traditions, including the art of lashing outrigger canoes.
Cousins David (left) and Cy Kalama—head coaches at Kai Oni and New Hope canoe clubs—talk story with paddler Kathleen Raitzsch at Kailua Beach Park.
"If you want to really get better as a paddler, V1 is like an automatic coach," says Marston, who sees the canoes as one means of helping Hawaiian paddlers to gain ground on their Tahitian counterparts, who have been the dominant force in outrigger canoe racing for decades. "Right now it's Tahitians," he says. "That's my blood, that's my heritage, but I grew up here and learned to paddle here, so it's important to me that I transmit whatever I know, what little I know, about paddling to the kids."
Marston knows more than a little. He started paddling in the early 1970s with Hanalei Canoe Club on Kauai. Back then and up until the early 2000s, Hawaii largely dominated the Molokai Hoe, the annual forty-one-mile race from Molokai to Oahu, which was founded in 1952 and remains one of the world's premier races for male paddlers. A separate race for women, Na Wahine o ke Kai, began in 1975 and runs the same course each year, two weeks prior to the Molokai Hoe.
"At one point we were dominating the world," Marston recalls. "And then all of a sudden ... I was on an escort boat in 2006 with Shell Vaa. Those Tahitian guys were so far in front, and they were just having fun-Shell Vaa finished thirty minutes before the first Hawaiian club came in. They finished fifteen minutes in front of the second boat, which was another boat from Tahiti, and then another boat from Tahiti. And I'm like, 'Something's wrong, we have to get more involved with this.' Hawaii used to be the champions, and I'd like to bring that back."
Surfer, board shaper and paddler Gordon "Slash" Gaspar with his V1 at Kailua Bay.
So Marston founded the Aloha Aito race to help promote V1 paddling as a means of returning Hawaii to prominence in the OC6 race world. The single-day race is modeled—with the originators' blessing—on two races in Tahiti, Te Aito and Super Aito. Te Aito began in 1988 with much the same purpose: to elevate Tahitian paddlers on the world stage. Or, as the race's French-language website recalls it (roughly translated), "To go win the beautiful lady that is the Molokai Hoe and to simply become the champions of the high seas world!" Super Aito was founded in 1992 as a race for the best of the best: The twelve-mile Te Aito is open to all; the top one hundred finishers qualify for the thirty-mile Super Aito.
The strategy to win the "beautiful lady" paid off: Prior to 1992 only one Tahitian crew, Te Oropaa, had won the men's channel crossing. That was in 1976. Following the founding of Super Aito, Tahitian teams won back-to-back races in 1993 and 1994, before Hawaii reestablished itself, winning nine of the next eleven races. But between 2006 and 2019—when the race was last held before the pandemic—only one Hawaii crew took the top spot. Or at least, the top spot in the men's race: Throughout the 2000s, Hawaii teams have won all but two Na Wahine o ke Kai.
During this same period, solo canoe racing has gone global: In Hawaii, California and elsewhere, there are races that build up to late spring OC1 crossings of the Kaiwi Channel between Molokai and Oahu. The International Vaa Federation (IVF) World Distance and World Sprints Championships, which are held on alternate years at venues worldwide, include solo divisions racing in V1. In all these races, the Tahitians are the ones to beat.
Keone Mekealoha Loo shares some pre-race V1 advice with his 12-year-old daughter Laakea. "The coolest thing is seeing kids do something that people in their thirties and forties think is too hard," says paddler Micah Kalama. "Kids are fearless—it just takes showing them what's possible."
Down at Kailua Beach, in the parking lot across the street from Buzz's Original Steak House, a semipermanent, sawhorse-mounted memorial often blocks out one of the lot's prized spaces, fronting the hale waa (canoe house) shared by Kailua and Kai Oni canoe clubs. Until May of last year, this spot was occupied most days by the white minivan of Joseph "Stuboy" Kanai Kalama Jr., a.k.a. Uncle Stu, a.k.a. the Governor of Kailua—Vietnam vet, outrigger canoe paddler, former coach at Kai Oni and fixture at the beach park. This year's Aloha Aito race, the first since his passing, was dedicated to his memory.
Two or three times a week since last September, a growing flotilla of V1s has been heading into Kailua Bay and out toward where Uncle Stu's ashes are scattered, near Popoia (a.k.a. Flat Island). This is Team RDRLS Hawaii Waa—that's RDRLS as in "rudderless"—a program founded by Marston and David Kalama. Kalama and his family own and care for most of these canoes, housed either at the Kai Oni site or at the family homestead in Waimanalo. When the V1s are out, Kalama and wife Kim, both lifelong paddlers with decades of coaching experience, watch from the beach, taking note of each paddler's technique and giving post-workout feedback. Out on the water, in a black carbon-fiber V1, their son Micah puts the paddlers through their paces. Their grandson, Joevid, helps coach the kids' section of the program, while others of the family are always around to help things run smoothly.
"So Stuboy is my dad's older brother, and then their dad is Joseph 'Stew' Kalama Sr.," says Micah, when asked about his family's canoe genealogy. "Joseph Sr. was a founder of Kai Oni [in 1952] and also of Hui Waa"—one of Oahu's two outrigger racing associations—"and he was also a canoe builder, more on the whole concerned with keeping tradition and the cultural side alive. That's the line—all my dad's cousins used to live over at Buzz's Lane, and my dad's family was farther up the street in the Gramberg house, my great-grandfather's place. Kai Oni is the 'birth club' for a number of other clubs on Oahu and the other islands."
David Kalama and Christian Marston refer to each other as hanai (adoptive) brothers. Their relationship stems from the Hanalei Canoe Club, which was founded by Kalama's parents, Joseph Sr. and Shirleyanne, who also loaned the club its first racing canoe. "We used to come over and stay at David's parents' house, the whole club," Marston chuckles. "Hanalei and Kai Oni and David's family—it was one big family. David's dad lived and breathed canoes—that was his life. In my view the Kalama family and the Van Giesons on the Leeward side have done more than almost anyone else for paddling on Oahu. ... Those two families are so close, they're like bread and butter."
Joevid Pacheco-Kalama, seen here in Kailua, coaches the RDRLS ("rudderless") Hawaii Waa keiki (kids) program.
How the Kalamas came to be involved in V1 flows directly from Kalama's relationship with Marston. "So Uncle Christian just shows up one day at my dad's place with a trailer of V1s, literally just dropped it off in the yard and said to my dad, 'Hey, I want you to teach people how to paddle these boats,'" recalls Micah. "My dad's a carpenter. He was working as a foreman boss on the Leeward side and was already trying to juggle that and refurbishing Kai Oni's boats, and now we had something like twelve boats, old and new."
RDRLS was formed not long after, in 2018, at the same time Marston proposed moving Aloha Aito to Oahu. "Yeah, I'm sure Micah was thinking, 'What is this guy doing?'" laughs Marston when asked to confirm the origin story. "At the time David wasn't paddling. When I showed up with the trailer, I knew he wasn't going to be too happy at first. But I also knew that he loves paddling and he loves canoes. He's one of the few guys out there who can build you a canoe from a log-not just a canoe but a beautiful canoe—that's a talent that he got from his dad."
"My dad will spend his whole paycheck to buy a new boat and say, 'We'll just get it because we can get a kid on it,'" says Micah. He estimates that RDRLS now has around seventy-five members. "My grandfather was the same way—he was giving koa canoes to clubs in the 1950s and '60s, just build them and give them away. That's also part of Aloha Aito: In Tahitian, 'te aito' means 'the warrior.' But with Aloha Aito the message is, 'Everyone can do it; let's see everyone in a boat.' Te Aito and Super Aito are two of the most prestigious one-man races in the world. Not many people will ever experience that, but here you can—this is a race for all."
David and Kim Kalama paddled and coached multiple championship crews before returning to Kai Oni Canoe Club, which David's father helped found in 1952. "I grew up around paddling my whole life," says their son Micah, pictured above center. "It is definitely not recreation—it's passing on a legacy."
Each year, the IVF holds its world championships in a different part of the world, with paddlers from as many as thirty-five countries alternating between sprint races one year and long-distance races the next. In addition to hosting Aloha Aito and preparing team members for July's Race Around the Hat—the other major V1 race on this year's Oahu calendar, hosted by Keola o ke Kai canoe club in Kaneohe Bay—a near-term RDRLS goal was to qualify paddlers for this year's World Sprints Championships, which run August 13–24 in Hilo.
But there are longer-term goals, Micah says. "Some people want to do V1 as a tool to be competitive, and that direction is awesome for those who are driven to maybe one day be the best in the world. For us it's not always about competition. It's about tradition and history and culture and heritage. It's about teaching things as simple as how to treat your canoe—don't drag it on the sand, always face it to the ocean. ...That's something we really focus on: Showing more care and doing it in a more traditional way."
