The lone entrant from Brooklyn, New York, tells of competing in the Molokai World Surf-Ski Championship with some of the world’s greatest ocean paddlers.
By Hawaiian standards, it was just another day in the Kaiwi (“kah-EE-vee”) Channel: eight-to-12 foot swell, 20-knot wind, chop and swirling currents. It was also the 27th running of the race known as Molokai—the unofficial world surf-ski championship—and nine-time winner Oscar Chalupsky, the big redhead from South Africa, was in trouble. An hour into the race, the valve on his three-liter water bladder popped open, emptying his sports drink. Now, with the island of Oahu looming large 20 miles into the 32-mile race, the anxious skipper on Oscar’s escort boat shouted to him that he was as much as 600 yards behind Australians Dean Gardiner, the premier marathon paddler in that water-crazed country, and 1992 Olympic kayaking gold medalist Clint Robinson, the greatest ocean sprinter who’s ever lived.
In his 10 previous starts at Molokai, Oscar’s lone loss was to Gardiner in 1999. It still rankled him. He was sure he had been the faster paddler—“far faster,” he insisted—but he had made a tactical error by not covering Dean, who took a better line to the finish. But there was even more at stake for Oscar than avenging that loss. Gardiner also had nine Molokai wins to his name. Each wanted to be the first to 10.
For several minutes, Oscar chased, cutting the gap in half. When he backed off, the Australians regained their comfortable cushion. As Oscar would later say, “I had my doubts that I could come through.”
Oscar Chalupsky and “doubt” are not words often used in the same sentence. He won his first Molokai World Championship in 1983 at the age of 20 and by 1989 had earned seven consecutive titles. Then, when South African athletes were banned from international competition for the country’s apartheid policies, he sat out for five years, watching as Gardiner notched win after win. In 2003, the race for 10 was on.
A 38-year-old boat captain and firefighter from Sydney, Gardiner stands in sharp contrast to Oscar. Easygoing to the point of being terminally nonchalant (he crashed on the beach the night before one Molokai win), “Deano” has never seen a wave he wouldn’t chase or met a paddler he didn’t assign a goofy nickname to—he tagged Oscar “Easter-Island Head,” a reference to the man’s large cranium. Days before the race, Gardiner said that he’d take no particular joy in beating his longtime rival, no matter how much trash he talked. “Oscar is good value,” he said, chuckling. “He’s tough, smart and adds stature to any race he does. But with all the best guys in the world here this year, winning would be huge.”
So what was I doing in this race? If the 6-foot 4-inch, 240-pound Chalupsky was the most cocky racer in the field, I was arguably the least. The lone entrant from Brooklyn, NY, I trained in a saltwater bay called Jamaica Bay, where the “waves” can be measured with a school kid’s ruler. The channel swell, on the other hand, normally runs four to 10 feet, with small craft warnings prevailing. The Molokai race’s web site details the pleasures of the course: “Paddlers must deal with choppy, confused water from the start, where waves and currents from both sides of Molokai converge. The troughs between the waves are deep. Roaring, breaking swells, at times as high as 15 feet, run down from the northeast. A paddler can hear the hiss of a breaking wave before it’s even seen. Escort boats can be buried in tumbling water. Gusts of wind grab raised paddle blades and make staying on the surf ski a supreme effort.
Each May as the race neared, I’d read the pre-race articles in the Online Hawaiian newspapers and, afterward, study the results, always wondering how I would have stacked up. Given my pedestrian surfing skills, inability to train in the ocean in the months leading up to the race (the Atlantic in March is unfit for mammals without blubber) and the logistics of arriving in Hawaii with enough time to gain confidence, I’d always managed to skip it. But then Oscar took matters in hand.
I’d met Oscar Chalupsky four years earlier at a 36-mile race across the St. Lawrence Seaway in northern Quebec. Since then, we’d competed together in Thailand, Tahiti, South Africa and Florida. I’d never beaten him in a race, and our post-race consumption of beer was an even more lopsided competition. When the phone in my apartment rings at 2 A.M., it’s usually Oscar. This March, after exchanging the usual pleasantries—“Wake up, you bastard!”—Oscar informed me that he’d be in New York on business and that I would be lucky enough to have him stay at my house for a week. “I’ll bring two boats! Be prepared to have your ass kicked.” When I hung up, he was still laughing.
Two weeks later, the animated, rather out-of-shape South African arrived at my doorstep. Highly motivated to capture his 10th title, he’d begun training two weeks earlier. However, midway through our first session in Jamaica Bay, the 1992 Olympian was breathing hard enough to disturb the fishermen on the far shore. I knew that Gardiner had been racing regularly, and I thought to myself, “If Oscar wins Molokai this year, I’ll eat my spray skirt.”
While Oscar hardly sleeps, is rarely quiet and is capable of eating you out of house and home, training with him is tremendous—equal parts coaching clinic, boot camp and motivational seminar. When the bay was flat, he worked on my forward stroke. When the wind picked up during a spring snowstorm, he paddled alongside of me, shouting (cursing, actually) for me to surge here, turn there, relax now. By the end of the week, Mr. Positive had me believing that I had a legitimate shot to crack the top 15 in the world’s biggest open-ocean race.
The day before the race, we flew to Molokai, a former leper colony with no traffic lights and just 6,000 inhabitants. The wind increased in ferocity as the day heated up. The chattering palm trees along the shore outside our deserted motel (it was actually out of business) gave the place the ambiance of a ghost town. Listening to the wind howl as I watched an uncut version of Apocalypse Now on the tube, I felt as relaxed as a man about to have a tooth pulled.
Even Oscar seemed subdued, but for a different reason. While the Molokai World Championship is the premier race in ocean paddling, this year’s field was the best ever assembled. Since Molokai became international in 1979, only five paddlers have won, and four of them were back. Add two past second-place finishers—Gardiner’s fellow Aussie Robinson and Tahiti’s top gun, Lewis Laughlin—and you began to wonder whether Oscar or Gardiner would even finish in the top three. So strong was the field of 60 that Barton, America’s best flat-water paddler ever, said he’d be pleased to crack the top 10. The gun sounded at 8 A.M. The Aussie trio of Gardiner, Robinson and Grant Kenny set a torrid pace, followed closely by Oscar and his brother Herman, who crossed the line first in 1997. Thirty minutes into the race, the swell grew, and my worst fears about the day were confirmed. To get from Molokai to Oahu, you must head from left to right. However, the swell, which is too fast to catch on pure paddling prowess, rolls across the ocean from right to left. The key to finishing the race in less than four hours is to catch the “small” wind-generated waves, pick up speed and turn onto and down the face of the swells, which on this day were 20 feet or more. Traveling at speeds of up to 18 mph, the top dogs scan the sea and cut back toward another “hole” up ahead, linking as many runs as possible. An Olympian like Barton can connect as many as three runs before stalling out; downwind virtuosos like Oscar, Gardiner and Kenny tied together as many as five or six—all the while maintaining their general direction.
Though I fell off my ski half a dozen times in the first 16 miles, my escort boat shouted to me that I’d reached the halfway point in two hours—just where I’d hoped to be. Up front, Oscar surged ahead of his brother Herman and trailed only Robinson and Gardiner. For the “other” Chalupsky, who’d eclipsed Oscar as South Africa’s premier ocean paddler in the last few years, it was severely disappointing. Many observers, including me, figured Herman, the sculpted 38-year-old who does his talking on the water, to be the dark horse. But, as he said afterward, “I just couldn’t get going.” Relying on what he calls BMT (“Big Match Temperament”), Oscar put the hammer down. Three-quarters of the way across the channel, Oscar caught the man he feared the most from a competitive standpoint. Sidling up to Robinson on the face of a huge swell, he said:“How you going?”
“I’m cramping,” said Robinson.
“Where’s Dean, then?”
“That’s him up front,” said Robinson, pointing toward the escort boat ahead
.“Thanks. See you later. I’m going to chase him down.”
Nearly three hours into the race, Oscar pulled even with Gardiner along the cliffs known as “Chinaman’s Wall.”
Marty Kenny (Grant’s brother), a perennial top-five finisher here, had told me that Gardiner not only has an incredible feel for the ocean, he’s a fearsome competitor. “When he has an attachment to an event such as Molokai, he will arrive ready to go to battle.” For the next few miles, the two nine-time champs took turns passing each other in the foamy white water rebounding off the cliffs.
Afterward, Gardiner described what happened next: “As I approached Oahu, my forearms started cramping. When Oscar came past, I gave it all I had for five minutes. But I didn’t have enough left to respond.”
As Gardiner relinquished his precious lead, my time in the channel turned uglier still. While the first 16 miles were more of a one-sided whuppin’ than a graceful display of downwind paddling, I was sufficiently fit to make it halfway across in a respectable two hours. But as fatigue set in, my balance deteriorated and I swam more than I care to remember. Even more vexing were the constantly changing wave patterns and swirling currents that I encountered closer to Oahu. Roughly five miles from the cliffs on the southeast shore, the incoming swells collide with the refracted waves, turning the turbulent ocean into a turbo-charged washing machine. Head-high standing waves—the tops blown off by the cranking wind—made paddling a grim exercise in determination. My sole aim was to stay on the ski and finish. And I did, but it wasn’t pretty—my time of 5:05 put me 31st out of 60. I crossed the line just as Oscar finished his fifth beer.
Standing in front of the press at the finish, the 40-year-old South African was overcome with emotion as he spoke about his historic 10th victory. “Given my responsibilities at home, it was difficult to prepare for this race. I had to dig deep to pull it out.” Then, as he tried to explain how it felt to win 20 years after his first race here in 1983, the man who had talked non-stop before the race suddenly ran out of words. He could only say that he was amazed that he had won his 10th title. He continued to field more questions from the reporters, but as he did, tears streamed down his cheeks.
The cameras had stopped rolling by the time I pulled up to the dock. When I learned that Oscar had prevailed, I wobbled over to the big man, who was surprisingly subdued and said, “You did it, you fat bastard!”
Oscar beamed, then shouted: “Where the hell have you been, you useless bum! Didn’t I teach you how to surf? Next year, you must get here two weeks earlier. You’ll definitely finish in the top 20.” Many hours and a bunch of beers later, I was almost ready to believe him.