OCC Member Profile
“I aspire to be like Duke Kahanamoku and all these great watermen that have come before me…” —Toa Pere
And part of his ability is in knowing when he just needs to power through. In his first paddleboard Moloka‘i channel crossing, he managed to push through the pain and override the part of his brain that “kept telling me ‘it’s OK to stop.’’ Then, in his first Catalina race, 32 miles from Catalina to Manhattan Beach, he suffered cold waters and faced headwinds and sidewinds for much of the course. It was “prob- ably the worst possible conditions I could have asked for and it was brutal,” he remembers. Some called it the toughest Catalina race in its 46-year history. Toa had designated his race as
a fundraiser for the Lahaina Canoe Club, collect- ing more than $10,000 to help replace equipment that the club lost in the fires. “I was really thinking about them [the children of Lahaina] as well, just like ‘you can’t stop, you gotta finish.’ And sure enough, the conditions got better, and they got a little flatter, and there were some little downwind bumps, and I saw them, and I surfed to the finish.” If individual ocean sports are about reading the water, in the team sports, it’s about reading teammates. Toa has paddled for Ka Lahui Kai and began paddling with OCC in the past year. Canoe paddling, he says, “shows me the value of
18 AMA | SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2024
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