Out Alone

Once you start there’s no turning back. The April northwesterlies are tearing the tops off the seas now. The canoes are single-seaters, but just unloading them from the truck racks is a two-man job lest the boats blow away like thistledown.

Fwunk! Fwunk! the i’ako, outriggers, are snapped into the hull—now at least if a gust catches the 19-pound craft it won’t blow spinning over the marine terrace and into the sea. Click! Click! The ama, float, is locked to the i’ako and the one-man Hawaiian outrigger is a whole vessel now, a live thing, honed by 10,000 years of Polynesian seafaring into something more akin to a sea-skimming fighter plane than a surface-bound dugout canoe.

But this OC1, as it’s called, is a cheaper alternative to flight, at $4,000 new. Though immensely popular in Hawaii and Tahiti, where they developed over the past few decades as off-season six-man