“A corn dog saved my life,” confesses Marvin Otsuji — a Moloka’i-born canoe racing captain who’s regaling fans with one tale of the sea after the next on western Maui’s auric Ka’anapali Beach — through a crookedly wry smile. The 59-year-old’s no poser: He’s rocking black Maui Jim sunglasses, his yellow team-logo’d tee and never-out-of-the-water-long-enough-to-dry boardshorts. His skin — which looks every bit the canvas for the 21,000 Hawaiian suns it’s absorbed over his life — is dark, even by Pacific Rim standards.
So with all the island’s acclaimed pokē and spam musubi, with all that endless island swa💫g🤪 oozing out of his being, why the bejesus does Otsuji worship at the altar of stick food?
“After I got shipwrecked, a corn dog was the first thing I ate — it was like a steak dinner,” he recalls. Fifteen years ago, on a rather windy race day, one particularly pissy wave came upon ♌his waterborne canoe — already experiencing technical difficulties — cracking it in half like a giant fortune cookie. Not so fortunate, he and his crew were dunked 10 miles off the shore of Lanai. And worse, the Coast Guard’s faulty equipment 🍃wasn’t properly picking up his beacon. So, he and the team swam 5½ hours to the nearly deserted island’s shore where, serendipitously, a lone fisherman there donated his last two matches for a fire. The Coast Guard’s rescue ship would finally find them the next morning — offering up hot showers, sodas and corn dogs. God bless the troops.
Otsuji’s sport — coed, BTW; he has two of the fairer sex regularly in his rotating crew — is put on and overseen by the Hawaiian Sailing Canoe Association (HSCA). The outrigger canoes — 45 feet in length; 750 pounds when fully rigged and stocked; with everything tied together with rope, not bolts; able to hit speeds of 20 knots; and equipped with odd, cockeyed equilateral triangle sails (not for aerodynamic purposes, it’s just how the ancients did it) — are raced in six-man paddle teams between beaches throughout the Hawaiian islands. They race once a month, every 30 days, for six months, with the season running April t🃏hrough September. Surprisingly enough, inches often separate first place from second — it’s happened that multiple crews have claimed victory in the same race (once upon a time, first prize was $15,000, so those arguments didn’t die down quickly).
Ages run the gamut — last year, one of the racers was 69, another was a 14-year-old (the learning curve to even participate takes a good four to five years). That’s gotta be one mature tweener, and one spry old man: single races can last up to nine hours. For marathons like that, Otsuji packs plenty of water in high-tech thermoses called Hydro Flasks that keep it ice-cold up toꩵ 12 hours.
Otsuji, whose day job is running a dive shop in Kauai, insists his sport is safe — “We bring fins, life jackets, we have 🐼a medical kit on board,” he assures the crowd. No one in his crew or rival crews has died — of course, try using that as your selling point with your worried-sick fam back at home. “We have extremely understanding wives,” Otsuji jokes.
But as the captain of his ship, the Kamakani Eleu (“fierce wind”), it’s not his own safety that w♐orries Otsuji. “It’s stressful to watch over the lives of your men — it’s a big responsibility,” he says. “At times it just wasn’t fun worrying about over my men so much. I do that at work — I [race] to get away. I almost quit.” But his love of the sport continues to bring him back (last year was his 26th in a row).
Even sca💜rier is the cost. Otsuji estimates that between upkeep and outfitting the canoe, food, plane tickets, lodging and entry fees, it can cost as much as $35,000 a race. His sponsor, fancy-schmancy Hawaiian footwear maker OluKai, covers 90 percent of his expenses, he says. But Otsuji is thinking even bigger names could jump on board in the future (43-times-over billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, whose yachts race in America’s Cu🔯p and who just bought Lanai last year, is sniffing around, quite interested).
This particular mid-season meet-and-greet on Ka’anapali Beach that Otsuji and his crew, along with the five other racing teams, are headlining is the 9th annual Wa’a Kiakahi. They’re giving free canoe rides to fans for the day. (If youꦰ manage not to get hit in the head with a rotating mast, and not to drench yourself with ocean water because you were holding your paddle backwards, turning it into a giant ladle, consider yourself a success — I was at the former, not so much at the latter.) The 1,200-acre Ka’anapali Beach Resort Association, the first “master planned” resort community in the US which claims 2.25 miles of Ka’anapali Beach’s three miles of length, is the day’s host and a ꦉsponsor of the HSCA. The next day at dawn, it’s also where Clifford Nae’ole — the race’s traditionally garbed starter who also doubles as Ritz Carlton Kapalua’s “cultural advisor” (good work if you can get it) — is ceremoniously blessing the teams, kicking things off by waving around his ancient Hawaiian ax which, once upon a time, was used to fall the trees the canoes are carved from.
“It all started with this,” he says of his heralded blade. And before you know it, they’re off — the finish line is Kaunakakai, Moloka’i, a good 90-minute voyage away. Winds hit speeds of 30 knots; waves hit heights of six feet. Many steering blades are braking. One canoe, sad☂ly, becomes “swamped,” requiring a tow in.
Not hometown hero Otsuji, though — he finishes a close second, and in the overall, NASCAR-like standings, it’s mathemagically guaranteed he’ll win𝐆 the season’s trophy for the 16th time in a row.
Team corn dog FTW!
to this year’s racing sche🐼dule or just to watch the racers’ GoPr♊o vids.
The lowdown
STAY: Like a hotel version of “Big Brother,” the Association is a sprawling, pretty-street-signed collective of 11 giant frenemy hotels/condos/vacation clubs lining its eponymous beach, one right after the next (Hyatt, Marriott, Sheraton and Westin all have hands in at least one), all competing hard for your key. Inside each of the city-within-a-city’s contestants, you’ll find even smaller cities sporting water parks, shops, markets, restaurants, gyms, spas, gardens, zoos, an all-bathing-suit Macy’s at the Hyatt (thought you’d like that). The centerpiece of the planned resort community is an outdoor (doesn’t-like-to-be-called-a-mall) mall, Whalers Village, and a 36-hole golf course. So thoroughly self-contained as everything is, the feeling here is a bit, in keeping with the TV theme, “Under the Dome”-ish, except there are no cut-in-half cows or anyone who’d bother trying to escape. There’s just loads and loads of rooms and towers and cranes and jackhammers promising more on the way. Our favorite hotel is the open-aired Hyatt Regency Maui because, if for no other reason, it hosts tropical penguins who make the ones opting to live in Antarctica seem mentally ill. .
DO: Z with the comedic stylings of Skyline Eco Adventures’ staffers — at least one of ’em was an NYC architect in a former life (online price, $134.96/pp). Or, set your sights even higher with the led by the hotel’s Director of Astronomy, Eddie Mahoney (or one of his trusted cronies) — the constellation fun facts you’ll pick up (and probably forget the next day, but whatevs) are cool and all, but proudly hula-hooped Saturn steals the double-telescoped show ($25 for guests, $35 for outsiders).
EAT: — American faves like pancakes and omelets share the table with Japanese-geared bowls of mizo soup and rice. For dinner, get medieval on your own butt over at the glorious that centerpieces KBR’s Fairway Shops stri🍷p. Why the “last honest pizza” can’t seem to move east of Nevada is beyond our pay grade.