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Climate Change Is Sabotaging the World’s Most Dangerous Canoe Race
Hurricanes, erosion, and hot, windless doldrums threaten to upend one of Hawaii’s most revered athletic events
Only three canoes dared to put in for the first Molokaʻi Hoe in 1952. The race was not yet the spectacle it would become more than 50 years later. It’s the Super Bowl of canoe paddling and a staple of the Hawaiian sports scene in which over 1,000 participants from across the planet compete in the more than 40-mile race from Molokai to Oahu. But the Molokaʻi Hoe — pronounced ho-eh, so that it almost rhymes with “boy” — has always been extremely dangerous. The treacherous Kaʻiwi Channel has been locally infamous for a lot longer than the Hoe has been internationally famous. Kaʻiwi translates to “the bone,” a reference to the collection of human remains strewn across its depths. Just a few miles down the coast from the Molokaʻi Hoe’s finish line, corpses of fishermen and sailors regularly washed ashore from Kaʻiwi’s torrents.
The channel’s most well-known casualty was big wave surf pioneer Eddie Aikau, who in 1978 disappeared there when his double-hulled canoe capsized. But Hawaiians have always been well aware of Kaʻiwi’s dangers. A traditional legend, translated in 1902 as “The Wind Gourd of Laʻamaomao,” described the channel…
