The first swimmers from each team plus the 12 individual
swimmers line up at the start at the now deserted Lanai Island Resort.
It and the whole island are owned by "Murdoch" - not Rupert, as we'd
surmised, but David - an American and no relation.
As per the photographic evidence, some-time oceanswim.com correspondents Roger Muspratt and Fiona Kettle did do the Maui Channel Swim. Roger writes:
Unlike the irrumbidg ... irriki ... jelly fish girls, our attempt at a Gold Coast team fell apart at the seams months ago. We had already booked our Hawaiian holiday so we were going with or without a team.
Getting over to Maui from Oahu (Honolulu) is very easy and cheap. Plus you are out of tourist central. We stayed at the Kaanapali Beach Hotel which hosts the channel relay and offers a swimmers' discount. It is a walk to the shops and cheap eateries at Whalers Village and a short local bus ride to the former whaling village of Lahaina with its huge banyan tree and quaint old touristy shops.
If you want to do the swim but haven't got a team, the race organiser, Ian Emberson (www.mauichannelswim.com) can usually link you up with a team missing a person or two.
In the case of our Gold Coast/Californian team, we finished eighth out of twelve teams missing out on fifth place and a highly-sought-after towel by two minutes (after four and a half hours of swimming).
After four and a half hours, it was still a final slog sprint to
the beach between our final swimmer, Klaus Graf (right) and some other
guy. Despite little or no body surfing experience, Klaus took the plunge
in the quite nasty shore dump to give himself a 10-metre gap at the
finish.
Conditions this year were described as near perfect. Last year, it was rough and mid-field finishing times stretched to seven and a half hours. Yuck-oh.
Even in our calm conditions, the diesel fumes and wallowing along at three of four kilometres an hour is a recipe for seasickness. In fact, Fiona was already suffering as the impressive 72-boat armada bobbed up and down off Lanai waiting for the start. And unless she has a spot on board Shangri-La, the 60-foot catamaran hired by the Tattersalls for their top team, she's an unlikely starter next year.
The irrumbidg ... irriki ... jelly fish girls did a great wrap up of the relay (see below) and a huge job in getting a team over there, with a chase boat and ready to race.
The only other thing I wanted to add was how quickly 72 boats can scatter all over the ocean while still all heading for the same finishing point.
The answer is in the ocean currents that the armada has to lead the peleton through.
Fiona's choice for her chase boat next year. Unfortunately it's
$2000 a day and booked up well in advance by the hotshot (Sydney) Tattersall's
team. (As per usual: os.c)
After the Saturday (September 1), relay some of the the irrumbidg ... irriki ... jelly fish girls turned up for the third annual 3.8km Aumakua ocean swim on the Monday (which is the Labor Day holiday in the US). It was about a one-hour drive along the coast from Kaanapali to the start on the beach in front of the Maui Prince Hotel with the highlight being a coral arch about 4m down at the 3km mark.
The deal was if you went down through the arch, you had a minute taken off your time (it used to be two minutes). However, organisers estimate you could spend 50 seconds preparing, diving and recovering.
So do you dive or not?
After umm-ing and ahh-ing, I dogged it. I left it up to the two guys I was swimming with. If they dived, I would. If they went past, I would too.
They went straight past and I was happy with their decision. It wasn't wimping out; just taking a conservative approach.
With everyone in the same caps it was hard to be sure but I might have been first to the beach in the 50-54s but some guy still beat me. A diver I suspect because my two non-diving buddies turned out to be in a younger age group.
Fiona elected herself oceanswim.com for the day as chief photographer so that's why she's standing at the back of the pack for the start (see pic above).
With the channel relay on Saturday, Aumakua organiser Malcolm Cooper has just about given up trying avoid a clash with the big Waikiki Roughwater Swim back on Oahu.
Waikiki used to be on the holiday Monday but was switched to Sunday so Malcolm slotted his much smaller event into Monday.
Now, Waikiki has gone back to Monday. Aumakua has a field of about 300 compared to 1500 at Waikiki. They're both 3.8km and while Waikiki has the prestige, the little guys look after you better.
Details for Aumakua swim are at www.aumakuaswim.org
The International team from the Maui Channel relay (from left)
former college swimmer Emily, Sylvia who is 71 but a real trooper,
Aussie connection Fiona and Roger, Lynelle and Klaus who are both
triathletes but still quite good athletes. The mixed category was
strictly three men and three women so with four women and two men, we
were forced into the open/men's 300+ category
Geraldine Hunt was an Irukandji, from Balmoral Beach Club, doing Maui Channel
Our support boat, a 40 foot ex-Navy launch, “Manele Nellie” stood off Kaanapali Beach at dawn. We gazed westwards towards the island of Lanai, our destination and also the beginning of another journey.
We were on the Hawaiian island of Maui and about to swim the Maui Channel. None of our team of six had ever made this swim before, and this was the first ever boat-assisted relay swim for two of us. Together, our ages added up to 302 years, which made us female Senior Makules (Makule being a gentler term than its rough English translation of “aged”).
Lanai is approximately 15 kilometres from Maui across a chasm created by flooding of an extinct volcanic crater. The channel is hundreds of feet deep and as we observed later in the day, beams of sunlight spear into the blue depths and never reach the bottom. It was like swimming in a huge cocktail glass laced with blue curacao.
A detail of the peloton lining up. Irukandjis in baby blue at right. Just from the left, the big, balding bloke is our cobber, Roger Muspratt, a water poloist and excellent swimmer, even though he is a journo. We think that's Roger's bride, Fiona, standing back behind him. Not wearing the wettie today, Fiona? And they live on the Gold Coast!
We swam out to join the Manele Nellie and the sand dropped away precipitously. Within a few strokes we were in fifty feet of water, but it looked like ten because the water is so clear. The day before, we swam around Black Rock point and saw a school of rays gliding below. They seemed no larger than the stingrays encountered all the time at Balmoral Beach or Manly, but when we dived for a closer look we realised they were spotted eagle rays and their wingspan was close to two metres.
The water was still in the hour after dawn, but as we motored towards Lanai the wind came up and by the time we neared the starting point, a rough chop had developed. This stayed with us for most of the race and the swell built later in the day. The Easterly wind is a consistent visitor at this time of year and is known as the “Trade Wind”. Historically, the arrival of the Trade Wind would be followed closely by square riggers from the mainland.
The first swimmers of each team, and a number of hardy soloists, swam from their support boats to the beach at Lanai. From where the rest of us bobbed, the water looked as pristine here as it is on Maui, but the swimmers reported entering a murky soup of vegetation and peat that had drained from the mountain slopes during recent rain. One of our group described the sensation as akin to swimming through small chunks of vomit, although how they knew just what that felt like exercises the imagination!
The Irukandjis at the finish at Kaanapali beach, joined by two members of the Victorian Police team.
There was a pause of nearly twenty minutes while a swimmer whose boat had forgotten to pick him up made his way to the beach (to be greeted by an announcement by the others that all drinks were on him once they reached Maui). The hooter went and the race was on.
Each swimmer started with a 30-minute leg, after which the rotations dropped to 10 minutes. The fastest teams were lucky to get through their entire rotation of swimmers before they reach Maui. We expected to be a fair bit slower; we were not there to win, but to participate and, hopefully, to finish. Each swimmer was quietly contending with her own fears this morning. For some it was the eerie experience of swimming in bottomless blue water; if you sank into those depths you would rest there for eternity. For others it was the prospect of battling a breaking swell of 2 metres whipped up by the Trades. There was also the very real risk of seasickness and the knowledge that no remedy is fool proof. For me, it was a lurking disquiet about tiger sharks. A large specimen created havoc in this race some years before. Ocean swimmers blow off the notion that we might be afraid of sharks, but they are never far from our minds and form a regular topic of conversation. In fact, a shark horn sounded on the beach at Kaanapali only half an hour before we finished.
Tattersalls team members nearly broke the presentation stage with sheer weight of numbers! (os.c says: We're not sure how many of these "Tattersalls" swimmers actually get to breast the bar as members at Big Tatts. Certainly not the little ones, or the ones with longer hair.)
Our fellow teams came from far and wide; Australia had a large (and noisy) contingent, with a number of teams from Tattersalls and one from the Victorian Police. Our team, from Balmoral, is called the Irukandjis. I’m still not sure why we named ourselves after a particularly toxic species of jellyfish but the t-shirts looked great! Tattersalls hoped that their men’s team, led by Peter Thiel, might take out the race, as they had two years previously, but there was much consternation the day before when they discovered that their main competition, the Tiburon Milers, had recruited two Russians and a Tunisian. On paper, the Milers should have been able to do the distance 5 minutes faster than the Aussies. On the day, the margin was only 3 minutes, and the winning time was 3 hours and 3 minutes.
The female Senior Makules had no competition in their division and hence won in 5 hours and 50 minutes. No trophy is awarded for the different female divisions; there was one overall women’s trophy and this went to the Stanford swim team, replete with All-American and Olympic swimmers. The crossing went smoothly, with no major dramas for the Irukandjis and a short period of elation when the rough weather came and our ocean swimmers started overtaking the other, faster, teams who had grown up in swimming pools. Tattersalls’ womens’ team was cursed by a faulty boat engine and were picked up by another team and ferried back and forth by jetski. Exciting, but also frustrating, especially for Charm Frend who was lost during one of her legs and had to keep swimming, alone in that bottomless ocean, until relocated.
As the morning wore on the hotel strip at Kaanapali come into focus; an extinct volcano rising behind with pleated skirts of green velvet. We were joined by an honour guard of spinner dolphins about half an hour from the end. The swimmer at the time, Jackie Bourn, did not see them frolicking behind her, which was probably for the best.
The run up the beach at Kaanpali is one of the most enjoyable memories of my life, especially when I was joined moments later by the rest of the Irukandjis who had dived into the water to swim the final leg together. A group of women who had gathered for the express purpose of challenging themselves with something that none had ever done before; taking on one of the world’s iconic ocean swims. We came, we saw, and we conquered the Maui Channel. And didn’t that champagne afterwards taste great!
Amazing, too, how the Tatts team always seems to include World Champions. They must have an amazing training regime at Tatts. Never mind: the winners of this year's Maui Team, the Tiburon Milers, from San Francisco, have probably never stayed more than a night in Frisco, including as they did swimmers from Russia and Tunisia. Regular swimmers in San Francisco Bay, to be sure.
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Key links ...
The beaut little enamelled key-ring trophies for the amauka
swim. First place got a beer glass so one bloke who won his age group
went back up to request a swap to one of these which were for second
(me - Roger Muspratt) and third.
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