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Donna Kahiwa Kahakui: Paddling For Life
By Katie YoungIt was the perfect morning for a paddle. Dawn was just breaking over the top of Diamond Head, and the water off the Waikiki shoreline was brilliant and flat.
As her one-man canoe sliced through the water, Donna “Kahiwa” Kahakui remembers looking over the side and being able to see clearly to the bottom. The water was so translucent, she had a perfect view of the patterned sand ripples on the sea floor, formed by the ocean currents.
Just as she neared the Ala Moana buoy, where she planned to turn the canoe around to head back towards Outrigger Canoe Club, a smooth dorsal fin broke the surface of water next to Kahakui’s boat.
“At the time, I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time on the ocean by myself,” says Kahakui. “And a dorsal fin is not always a good thing. I was trying to pretend like I didn’t see it.”
When she turned the canoe to head back, Kahakui realized that the ominous shapes in the water next to her weren’t sharks, they were dolphins — three bottle-nosed dolphins.
“They were huge,” recalls Kahakui. “They came up on me on both sides of the canoe — two big ones and one baby. They were right next to me so I was trying to figure out how to paddle. But every time I took a stroke it was like they knew and they’d go down and then come back up.”
The dolphins stayed with Kahakui for over 30 minutes, playing underneath the hull of the canoe and swimming along side her. The smallest dolphin stayed right by her the whole time.
When she was almost back to shore, Kahakui remembers taking a stroke and looking at the baby dolphin.
“He kind of rolled over and I looked straight into his eye,” she says. “That’s when I got it. It was like this dolphin was looking at me and saying, ‘Wake up.’”
Wake up to the problems that continue to threaten our ocean environment. Wake up and do something.
Kahakui, 40, grew up in Waikiki. She learned to surf when she was three and lived with the ocean as her playground. Her sport of choice in high school was swimming, but she began paddling when a friend of her mother’s saw her strong, square shoulders and pegged Kahakui’s paddling potential.
“I remember what Waikiki used to look like,” she recalls. “When I came home from college in 1992, I became aware of all the crap in the ocean. But I was thinking, ‘What can I do?’ Every day I would see rubbish. It’s like a garbage can out there.
“And here I was on this beautiful morning out on the ocean and there’s all these animals that have to live in this pollution.”
Kahakui’s encounter with the baby bottle-nosed dolphin gave her the kick-start she needed to have a personal hand in preserving these gifts from the sea.
She started the non-profit, Kai Makana (meaning gift from the sea) in 1998. The organization’s objective is to take an active role in educating and mobilizing the public to better understand and preserve marine life and the ocean environment.
Kai Makana envisions a world where people show respect for the ocean through their everyday actions. In the seven years since the non-profit was started, Kahakui has led countless paddling expeditions to raise money for ocean preservation, participated in hundreds of ocean environmental clean-ups and launched a Youth Mentorship Program offering keiki a holistic view of their world, the ocean and their culture.
“At first I didn’t know anything,” admits Kahakui. “I was never a marine biologist. I’m more of a numbers kind of girl. It was a whole new experience for me to learn what all those gross, ugly bumps on sick sea turtles were.”
It’s a lifelong commitment from Kahakui, who is also joined by a formidable group of board members, advisors and volunteers including Nainoa Thompson, Teresa Bright and Kanoe Cazimero.
Kahakui, a graduate of Punahou School and a political science major at Oregon State University, worked for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as a federal agent for 10 years.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) opened an office in Honolulu and Kahakui came on as a federal agent for the organization in 2002.
Her day job helps pay the bills, but Kahakui’s love of the ocean is what drives her to spend every waking moment working towards the mission of Kai Makana.
“You give up family, getting married — you make choices,” says Kahakui. “You have to decide if you want to make a difference. And with that, there’s all these great people I’ve met along the way and all these wonderful things I’ve learned.
“Initially, Kai Makana just started by doing community projects and paddles to raise money. We get corporations to give us money to paddle really far. Now it’s evolved to where we also work with the kids.”
The day of Makai’s interview with Kahakui, she had just come from taking a group of keiki to Heeia Pier to pick limu and to learn about water quality testing.
“We try to give them experiences that most people don’t get to have so they can feel special about being a part of nature,” she says.
Kai Makana has taken members of their youth program to places like Kahoolawe and as far away as Tahiti and New Zealand. They will also go to Rapa Nui at the beginning of 2005.
All Kahakui’s vacations for the past seven years have been dedicated to taking keiki on trips to help educate them about the ocean and making paddles to raise money for Kai Makana.
When she can, Kahakui tries to fit her paddles into a three-day time frame so she can be back at work on Monday morning.
The Kai Makana program began in 1998 with a 78-mile paddle from Maui to Oahu. Kahakui’s time of 19 hours and 45 minutes was recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records. In 1999 she paddled from the Big Island to Oahu, a distance of 140 miles.
She circumnavigated Oahu in 2000 in 68 hours and paddled down the Hudson River from West Point to the Statue of Liberty in 2001.
Most recently, she completed a 180-mile paddle in June from Haleiwa to Niihau. It was a joint effort and about 20 other paddlers joined Kahakui for parts of the journey.
In addition to her countless other paddling achievements and records set, Kahakui has garnered other honors as well. She was named Athlete of the Year by Tiffany and Company, Ecotraveler of the Year and Female Senior Athlete of the Year by the Quarterback Club to name a few.
She has paddled eight channels among the main islands of the state of and has journeyed from Oahu to Molokai over 30 Times.
Although Kahakui is one tough competitor when it comes to the sport of paddling, she views the win more as a fleeting moment in time, and prefers to concentrate instead on the psychological benefits of pushing her body to its limit.
“It’s all a game of the mind,” says Kahakui, explaining how she gets through some of her toughest paddles. “No matter how physically fit you are, it’s really about if your mind is going to allow you to do it. When everything on your body hurts, it’s your mind that tells you to stop or that you can do it.”
It’s tough to keep your mind focused when you’ve been traversing rough seas for hours in a solo canoe enduring the blinding glare off of the ocean’s surface by day and the freezing sea spray at night. Sometimes Kahakui has only three hours of sleep on an escort boat with no hot water or food until she’s back in the ocean paddling again.
Kahakui would like to pass on to the younger generations the idea that our mind is our strongest asset. “With kids now, it’s all about instant gratification to them,” she says.
“Yesterday is too late, they want it now. Nobody has any patience to work for anything.
“My biggest fear is that we’re going to lose what we have — that we won’t have the choice anymore to paddle or swim with the dolphins. I really see that happening if we don’t take care. It’s a responsibility we all have. If we don’t have organizations like Kai Makana, kids won’t be able to appreciate the ocean. They won’t learn about why oxygen is important in our water and why run-off kills oxygen. They won’t understand, so they won’t be able to take care of it.”
Kahakui sees her participation in paddling as an opportunity to become a better person and to bring knowledge to the community.
“I think sometimes what people don’t understand is that when you look out at the water from land, it’s beautiful, but when you’re on top of it, paddling in it, you’re looking at all this rubbish,” she explains. “The oil sheen on the water from boats, the department store plastic bags, aluminum cans, empty sun tan lotion bottles. How can we allow this to be acceptable?”
It’s not all bad, however. Kahakui, who gets in the water at least once a day for an hour or two, gets to see some incredible miracles of paradise.
“Like Makapu‘u Point,” says Kahakui. “When you paddle along the cliffs over there, there are these huge caves. And when you’re paddling in the morning, all of a sudden there will be a pod of dolphins that will hang out with you — sometimes even turtles or whales.
“Or,” she continues, “the Na Pali coastline. To be able to see the waterfalls coming down the cliff line. All the waterfalls are connected so you can see the start of a waterfall and all the way down to where it hits the ocean. It’s insane.”
She’s also sat in the waters off Kaena Point, looked one direction and seen the dry Waianae area, and looked the other direction toward the lush, green North Shore with calm waters on one side and 15 to 20 feet waves on the other.
Kahakui has seen the coast of all the Hawaiian islands. She’s seen untouched beauty and had the opportunity to glimpse nature that seemed to burst to life around her. Untouched, peaceful and pure.
“I will stop and take in the moment,” Kahakui answers when asked if she’s more focused on training than sight seeing. “You could concentrate only on the training and the win, or you can stop and look for that one moment and appreciate it. Because who knows what will happen to it in the future.”
During her paddling career, of course there have been situations that were potentially dangerous for Kahakui. But this Hawaiian, Caucasian, Chinese local girl, who admits she feels like she has gills sometimes, says she refuses to live in fear.
“I try to have as much respect for the water as I can,” says Kahakui, who as a child used to take her tricycle and ride it on the bottom of her friend’s pool. “I feel really fortunate. There’s been times when I’ve gotten slammed by waves or times when I’ve been tossed surfing down the face of a big wave in the middle of the ocean. But I enjoy the moment and the ocean always seems to take care of me.”
Kahakui doesn’t consider herself a risk-taker when it comes to the ocean, however. You’d be more likely to see her in a set two feet high than being towed into Jaws.
“People still always worry about me when I paddle,” Kahakui says. “I say, if something were to happen and I didn’t make it, what a way to go, doing the thing you love most. You can’t be afraid of life.”
Kanoe Cazimero, a long-time friend of Kahakui and Kai Makana’s vice president of the advisory board, says that that Kahakui has truly grown into her Hawaiian name which means “the favorite waters of heaven.”
“As a waterwoman, Kahiwa’s affinity with the ocean, oceanlife, respect, reverence and dedication to building awareness in order to protect, preserve and perpetuate the ocean environment is paramount as the driving force of all that we strive to accomplish,” says Cazimero.
“It has, without a doubt, made a difference here in Hawaii, nationally and internationally across the ocean in communities where we have participated in and spearheaded ocean projects.”
“Paddling is a vehicle to be in the ocean, to travel the world, to meet a lot of great people and to compete against the best,” says Kahakui. “But you also have the opportunity to flourish and make a positive change.
“I think the thing about paddling that I’m most proud of would be having the ability to give back and teach kids. At the end of the day, at least I can say I tried to save the ocean. I won’t ever have to say, ‘Gee, I wish I had done that.’”