The Great Canoe Race
Across six months, five islands and four ocean channels, Hawai‘i’s canoe sailors set a course for adventure.
Catharine Lo
Photography by Jason Moore
Tom Boomer’s first harrowing experience at sea happened when he was barely a kindergartener. From four inner tubes and some two-by-fours, he fashioned his first boat, perfect for exploring the watery playground in his Tiburon backyard. He was four, and his neighbor, he remembers, was five. The two young boatmen had to be rescued before they floated out of San Francisco Bay into the wide, wild Pacific.
Over the years, Boomer has sailed “just about everything that floats.” The late 1960s found him navigating motorboats for the Navy in Vietnam. Fast-forward another two decades, and he was at the helm of a Hawaiian sailing canoe, racing across the Pailolo Channel from Maui to Moloka‘i.
As teams race neck and neck, ocean knowledge, wind finesse and brute strength determine success.
Side by side with Captain Mike Kincaid’s canoe, Boomer recounts how each tried to scoop the other’s wind line. As Boomer passed on the inside, he also passed over the tail of a full-grown bull whale. “It waved and slapped its tail a few yards away and our ama [outrigger] went flying,” he says, his eyes opening wide with the memory. “If he’d hit the boat, we’d have turned into splinters. That tail had to be as long as the ama—which is twenty-seven feet!”
Boomer’s story echoes those of his fellow canoe sailors, the unsung roughriders of the Pacific who love to pit their navigational skills against each other and the unruly sea. They relish the thrill of harnessing nature’s might, the narrow escape from a hairy predicament, the camaraderie created in pursuit of a daunting, singular task, and the nostalgia of looking back at those moments and realizing that they are among the most priceless of your life.
“It was 1987, the Year of the Hawaiian,” Boomer says, recalling the beginnings of the Hawaiian Sailing Canoe Association. Sailing canoes are modified six-man outrigger canoes with an additional ama and a sail hoisted on a mast between the canoe’s first and second seats. They’re modeled after traditional Hawaiian sailing canoes (the ancestors of modern-day catamarans) that were used in old Hawai‘i for fishing, racing, interisland transportation, and long-distance voyaging. The vessel is steered with an oversized paddle from the back seat, and its sail trimmed from a trampoline that connects the outrigger to the canoe.
