For about four hours, members of Outrigger Santa Cruz used the silhouette of the stars on the water and the light of a support boat to navigate the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean early Sunday morning.
Seven hours later, they were nearly blinded by the smiles of the children from Jacob’s Heart Children’s Cancer Support Services who greeted the weary paddlers when they came ashore on Monterey Municipal Beach.
In all, it took 13 paddlers, working six at a time in one-hour shifts, roughly 13 hours to complete their trek from Half Moon Bay to Monterey, a distance of about 90 miles. The journey was a fundraiser for Jacob’s Heart that generated more than $19,000.
“We were making very good time until we came face to face with large fog bank and southerly wind, which brought strong, wind-whipped waves against us that were white-capping,” Outrigger Santa Cruz coach Dave Waynar, 46, wrote in an email. “(It was) six hours of very tough paddling in these conditions. It made (it) very difficult to change out paddlers as the ground swell and wind waves were combining to form a washing-machine effect on the water.”
Waynar said conditions did not clean up until the canoe was a couple miles from Monterey.
The team used a new Puakea canoe to make the crossing, which was unusually long and is believed to have been completed for the first time. To celebrate the achievement, the paddlers gave the canoe a name. They christened it Kai Malama Keiki, which Waynar said translates to “On the ocean we honor and serve the children.”
