cory hill

With eight km to go, Sean Rice decided to accelerate.  “There were three of us at that point and I felt I could do a burn to get rid of one of them,” he said.  To his surprise, both Cory Hill and Gordan Harbrecht dropped back.  But the race wasn’t over yet…

…and most of the world’s best surfski paddlers, both men and women, are in Ireland to take part.  Here’s what you need to know about the world’s richest surfski race.

"Molokai"  You just have to utter that name, and everyone in the surfski community knows what you're talking about: the 53km open ocean crossing from Molokai to Oahu across the Kaiwi Channel.  One of the oldest surfski races in the world, it was long regarded as the surfski world championships; and in the 2017 race only three of the past 43 year's winners weren't back to tackle the challenge once more.

The Kaiwi Channel has a reputation for massive downwind conditions; with a fetch of several thousand km, the NE trades can produce ferocious swell.  In 2017, however, the winds didn't arrive on the day and the paddlers faced a challenge of a different kind: heat, a head-on current, a slow heaving, seasickness inducing swell...!  (Those were the conditions I faced in 2008 - and it was one of the toughest days of my life.)

This video was released 6 months ago - but is well worth taking the time to review.  And with the Maui Jim Molokai Challenge coming up on Sunday, May 27, 2018, it's a great reminder to make your bookings and to keep on training hard...  And train for flat water, just in case.

Click here for the 2017 results

A feature of this year's ICF Ocean Racing World Championships in Hong Kong was the radically improved live coverage - the streaming video feed combined with TracTrac live tracking kept a worldwide audience enthralled.  Canoe Planet posted a bunch of great post-race interviews on their Facebook page, which give fascinating insights from the athletes' point of view...  

Cory Hill - Overall Men's Champion

He's not known as Cory "Chill" Hill for nothing!  This cool customer lead the race from start to finish, never looking anything but commanding.

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A grinding upwind into steep chop; a side-on, 2m diagonally-side-on swell that needed huge power to catch, and some smooth, clean runs to the finish… 

After the disappointing weather for the women’s championship on Saturday, the NE monsoon delivered – in spades – on Sunday, 19 Nov for the men’s event of the third ICF Ocean Racing World Championships. 

As we watched the Tractrac app, we could see Sean Rice edging ahead on an inshore line, exactly as he did in 2013 when he won the ICF World Champs…  Would it work for him again?  The conditions this year were very different to those in 2013.

There are at least ten paddlers who could podium tomorrow at the 8^th NELO Summer Challenge, which starts at 4pm in Porto, Portugal.

Le Morne Pass, Mauritius - “I saw how wide his eyes were, and thought to myself, ‘this is serious’,” said Jasper Mocke.  His brother Dawid had been hit by a “bommie”, a massive breaking wave just outside La Prairie pass at Le Morne; his leash had broken and his surfski had blown away.

The West Coast Downwinder was run and won over the weekend and despite lackluster downwind conditions it turned out to be a great afternoon for all involved. The event lived up to the pre-race hype and paddlers were greeted with calm, hot, flat, grind conditions for the 17-kilometer event. Over 100 paddlers took to the start line and a blistering pace was set early on. 

Thirty minutes into the Maui Jim Molokai Challenge, first-time participant Jasper Mocke led a five-man conga line of Clint Robinson, Hank McGregor, Cory Hill and Jeremy Cotter. When Mocke sprinted for a wave that shot him across Robinson's path, the five-time Olympian admonished him like a state trooper confronting an unlicensed driver. Mocke thought nothing of his move. "That's how we race in South Africa," he said. "It was just aggressive."