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Thirty four or so surfski paddlers were privileged to take part in the Molokai Challenge last week... Sitting here in cold rain-drenched Cape Town I could only imagine what it must have been like. A couple of Molokai participants sent me some reminiscences of the race...
 2006 Molokai Start (Photo: John Fitch)
DeAnne Hemmens paddled into 2nd place behind Maggie Twigg-Smith. DeAnne is an extremely experienced paddler having spent ten years competing with the US Sprint Kayak team. This was her fourth Molokai crossing, her second in a single ski.
She said, “What a killer! Patrick was on the ICON, me on the XT..the ocean kicked my ass out there… I wiped out on the reef at Portlock, lost the ski on the rocks, cut my legs and feet to pieces and said a few choice swear words...big 10' wave broke behind me and nowhere to go except into the reef. At least the XT was unscathed and I scrambled on between sets to finish...same time as last time I did it...arg... I was already second as I hit the physical wall at 3 hours of good surfing.”
Pat had a personal best under 4 hours so he is very happy with that.”
DeAnne said that big downwind conditions are always a challenge because she so seldom gets to experience them – the water in California is usually flat so it’s difficult to train for an event like the Molokai Challenge.
Another flat-water paddler is Joe Glickman from New York. Joe is highly experienced both on rivers and the sea and also has several Molokai Challenges under his belt.
DeAnne met him in mid-channel: “I passed him swimming in the middle of the channel… he recovered well and beat me on the last hour or so... we laughed as he wiped out on the reef too, the two flat water people go through the reefs where none of the locals would go....duh!. Oh well, makes for a good story!!!”
Joe commented, “This channel is incredibly challenging -- mentally and physically. The water is so big and so confused and the race is so long that once you get weary in the 2nd half it's tough to keep it together. Oscar and Clint had a magnificent battle out there, working together virtually the entire race. While I went OK, I was on sub-4:15 pace but those swims and reef mishaps hurt my time big time.”
Joe was happy with his result in spite of the mishaps, improving his time by fifty minutes over his last Molokai. He was paddling one of the new V10 Sport skis.
A couple of paddlers had close encounters with sharks. Joe Glickman reported an incident: “one dude had a tiger shark charge his boat and prepared for the strike when he saw a cloud of blood around his canoe...the shark had chowed a fish and not him so he s**t himself and paddled on...heady stuff.”
Pat Hemmens also saw a shark moments after spotting a “massive” dorado. Happily it and the shark were going the other way…
Apparently there was a run of dorado in the channel that may have attracted the predators – something like the sardine run on the South African coast?
Mark Sandvold (6th overall) was accompanied briefly by a large intruder who may have been a visitor from Cape Town...
“Two Hours into the race a very large great white pulled up maybe a meter under me and matched my speed and then pulled off and breached with a 2 foot dorsal fin in the air. I thought I was a goner and the heart rate monitor reflected that as well.”
Mark went on, "they say that when you see [a shark] at close range that it is a life changing experience. Well let me tell you that this was that and then some. Suddenly the race became very insignificant. This Shark was every bit as long as my ski and the most significant thing that caught my attention was the width of it, at least 2 meters or more across and it was very fast. Being an ex-airforce F-15 pilot I was reminded of a rejoin with a fighter as it matched my speed and came up on me and then qucikly broke left. We had several thousand Mahimahi (Dorado) migrating throught the channel and that may explain his presence. "
“It will go down in Hawaiian standards as one of the best races ever.”
Race Course
Where exactly is the Molokai Challenge held? The course takes the paddlers from Moloka’i Island in a westerly direction across the Molokai Channel to O’ahu.
 Race Course - from Moloka'i to O'ahu
Mark Sandvold sent me the data from his Garmin 305 HR monitor/GPS. I uploaded the data onto MotionBased.com. Click here to view the data.
 Mark Sandvold's GPS Track
Portlock Point, where DeAnne and Joe came to grief is close to the end of the race – and is shown in the image below.
 Detail showing Portlock Point
We hope to have a few more photos and some video clips on the site shortly.
See Also:
Joe Glickman's write-up of his experiences on the Epic website.
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