Tag: Cursed Canoe | Frankie Bow

August 24, 2018

The real-life version of the “Labor Day Race”

In The Cursed Canoe, Professor Molly Barda’s best friend Emma Nakamura practices with her crew for the “Labor Day Race.”

Emma’s big race was Saturday morning. I wasn’t actually planning to attend in person. If I wanted to catch Emma and her crew before they left, I’d have to be down at the water before dawn. The dark beach would be packed with team supporters and tourists, and, of course, plenty of little kids careening through the crowd. There would be a live Jawaiian band, or a noisy DJ setup. After their registration and last-minute checks, the paddlers would pile into their various canoes and stroke out to sea. Emma’s canoe and dozens of others like it would disappear over the horizon before the sun was even up.
The women’s crews would leave the bay, paddle the tough eighteen miles down the coast, and disembark. The women would get out and the men’s teams would climb into the same canoes and paddle back up the coast, where they would arrive at the starting point many grueling hours later. A spectator on the beach wouldn’t see anything after the canoes sped off. I’d be staring out at the empty blue water.

The Labor Day Race is a big deal—so much so, that all seven women on Emma’s crew want to participate. (Unfortunately, the canoe has only six seats…)

Man in Outrigger, Hawaii by Charles Bartlett 1923-27 Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Labor Day Race is inspired by a real event: The Queen Lili’uokalani Canoe Race, which takes place every Labor Day weekend in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. Started in 1972 by the Kai Opua Canoe Club, and named in honor of the last queen of Hawaii, the Lili’uokalani Canoe Race now welcomes over 2,500 paddlers from all over the world. The big day is Saturday, when the teams paddle 18 miles between Kailua and Honaunau. The women’s teams start first, racing the canoes from Kailua south to Honaunau.

Saturday's canoe race on the west coast of the Big Island. Source: qlcanoerace.com — Saturday’s canoe race on the west coast of the Big Island. Source: qlcanoerace.com

The men’s teams meet the women in Honaunau and race the canoes back up to Kailua. Tiny Kailua’s hotels (the town’s population is less than 12,000) are packed with paddlers the entire weekend.
Even if you’re not a canoe paddler, or much of an outdoorsy person at all, the Queen Lili’uokalani Canoe Race is worth a trip. Canoe paddlers are easygoing, hard-partying, and fun to be around. And the Big Island is a world away from the more touristy parts of Hawaii. Check out the schedule for the upcoming Labor Day weekend here!
Featured image oil painting by Arman Manookian, c. 1929.
Originally published on Brooke Blogs

August 17, 2018

Paddletics

In The Cursed Canoe, Professor Molly Barda’s best friend Emma Nakamura is the captain of a paddling crew. With seven women on the crew and only six seats in the canoe, things get a little competitive.

In fact, there’s a word for this kind of infighting:

Paddletics.

“We call it paddletics,” Yoshi said. “When paddlers get too competitive within their crew, and turn on each other.”

Yoshi has mellowed a lot since he first moved here with Emma as a freshly minted MBA. At first, he didn’t like living in Mahina. He claimed there were no decent jobs to be had, and would say things like, “I can’t live in a place where no one can tell I’m wearing a two thousand dollar suit.”

Tired of his grumping around the house, Emma got him into canoe paddling, which he embraced with the zeal of a convert. Most of his time is now spent paddling and hanging out at the beach. Today he wore board shorts, a souvenir t-shirt from the previous year’s Labor Day canoe race, and a cap with the logo of a local paddling shop.

One thing that hasn’t changed about Yoshi is his need to be the Expert. His favorite pastime is explaining things to people.

“Paddletics!” Pat exclaimed before Yoshi could expound further. “Molly, isn’t that one of those words you hate? What do the Word Police have to say?”

Pat knows I hate sloppy neologisms: Homophobe. Anything-gate. The worst of the bunch is the suffix –holic, which got snapped off the end of ‘alcoholic’ and now is attached to any word you can think of to indicate addiction or even mere affinity. Normally I enjoy arguing etymology with Pat, but right now, I wasn’t in the mood.

“I’ve heard worse. Paddletics could mean affairs of the paddle, in the same way that politics means affairs of the city.”

–The Cursed Canoe

It’s not just at the office or in the PTA that people vie for position and undermine their colleagues. Paddletics (derived, as you might guess, from “Paddle” and “Politics”) describes all of the infighting and backbiting that comes with a competitive endeavor. Paddlers have been known to talk down teammates, undermining the coach, or even threaten to leave for a competitor club.

So does this mean you should avoid canoe paddling?

No. The blog LiveScience tells us that spending time around the ocean can improve your health and well-being. Some paddlers describe their experience as almost spiritual:

“I’ve learned that sometimes I can’t change things, but I can go with the flow. I’ve learned to harness nature’s energy and use it to my advantage. I’ve learned not to get in Mother Nature’s way. I’ve learned to listen when she speaks. I’ve learned to respect, love and celebrate nature and her ocean.” (source)

And if you’ve been yearning for shapely, muscular arms, you can’t beat the hours of repetitive upper-body work required to push a four-hundred-pound canoe through the waves.

What if you live far from the water? You can get a taste of Hawaiian outrigger paddling from The Cursed Canoe, a Professor Molly mystery.

Originally published on Lynda Dickson’s Books Direct