Duke's Festival: Hawaii Paddleboard Champs 2010

A tough Hawaii Kai to Waikiki Course yesterday!

Standups & traditional paddleboards battled small, short-interval bumps across Maunalua Bay and through Queen's surf break to finish at the Duke statue.

Always a great end to the summer, this year's race was also a lot of fun, even if conditions weren't optimal.

I set up a mini-race with Riggs Napoleon, joking that I would get to keep his new hat if I beat him... guess I should have kept my mouth shut and not talked so much stink when I passed him 1/2 way, cuz he came back to take me and cruised through an inside line around Diamond Head that put him a whopping 2 minutes ahead of me.... it was a defeat but also fun to race him. I am so in awe of the entire Napolean family and happy to see Nappy, Aaron, Sepa, Riggs, Joey all racing. 3 generations kicking butt and having fun!

Here are the full results:

Da Molokai Data

GARMIN GPS 

Check out our crazy North trek off the start! We were headed for the Big Island. The correction comes after my boat found me and said - where the heck are you going?!! After they gave me a direction I was able to pick a point on Oahu/clouds above Oahu and stayed pretty straight.

This was my first year to use a GPS on my board across the channel. I have the GARMIN Forerunner, 310XT. It is wonderful for training - you can see your speed, distance, time and split simultaneously. You can also set intervals for speed work, and it has a great default setting that tracks every mile.

Mile by mile, elapsed time, avg. pace, avg. speed, max speed. Note that I started the watch early & stopped after finishing so the overall time is over 9 minutes slow.

Although the larger, console style GARMINs have a map, mine is a small watch style that does not have a map (that's what your escort board is for!). But, my GPS does give great post-race analysis data.

Visual representation of speed by mile - you can see where I fell off my board knee paddling (early dip) and my water drops (shorter dips) as well as the slow, head-wind finish at the end. See my speed drop at mile 31 abruptly and then come up only after I got way inside Maunalua Bay - racing Kai Hall to the finish. I passed him and then he passed me back right at the end (he took 3rd place overall stock).