Most evenings this month, if you walk down to Lanikai Park at the corner of Aalapapa Drive and Kaiolena Drive, you'll see canoes coming off the racks before the light goes flat. Paddlers stretch on the grass, coaches call out lineups, and somebody is always coiling a bow line that doesn't need coiling yet. It looks the same as it does every August. What's different this year is what those paddlers are training for, and it isn't the trophy everyone's already talking about.
Lanikai Canoe Club had a summer worth talking about. The club just won its eighth straight Oahu Hawaiian Canoe Racing Association title and its seventh straight state championship. Those two numbers get flattened into one streak in casual conversation around the neighborhood, but they're not the same accomplishment, and knowing the difference explains a lot about what the club is actually chasing this fall.
Two Trophies, One Number
The confusion is understandable. Both wins happened within two weeks of each other, at the same venue, with the same green-and-white jerseys on the podium.
- OHCRA Championship (July 19, Keehi Lagoon): an Oahu-only regatta series. Lanikai took the large-club division with 226 points, its regatta-best 15 first-place finishes and 18 runner-up finishes putting it well ahead of Outrigger Canoe Club (141), Keahiakahoe (111), Hui Nalu (104), Kailua (87), and Healani (81). This was the club's eighth consecutive Oahu title and its 48th straight OHCRA regatta win dating back to 2017.
- HCRA State Championship (August 1, Keehi Lagoon): the statewide meet, open to clubs from every island. Nearly 3,000 paddlers from 57 clubs and six organizations competed. Lanikai's AAAA Division crew scored 479 points to beat Hawaiian, the 40-time defending Maui County champion, at 397, with Kai 'Ehitu, the Big Island's top club, at 311. That result made it seven straight state titles for Lanikai.
One is a regional streak. The other is a statewide one, run against clubs the Oahu series never sees. Lanikai has now won both in the same summer for seven years running, which is the part worth knowing if you've only heard "eight-peat" mentioned in passing at the beach.
The Margins Behind Both Streaks
The state title wasn't a runaway. Head coach Scott Freitas described a season where Lanikai has often trailed after the youth races before pulling ahead.
"We've been down by 50 to 150 points in past state championship wins after the kids' races, but today, we solidified things early then went mano a mano with Hawaiian in every race because they were our biggest threat."
Hawaiian and Lanikai have effectively owned Hawaii's paddling scene for a generation. Combined, the two clubs have won 26 straight HCRA state championships. That's a rivalry playing out at the top of the sport for longer than most of Lanikai's current keiki paddlers have been alive.
The Record Still Ahead
The OHCRA eight-peat ties Outrigger Canoe Club's run of eight straight Oahu titles from 1985 to 1992, the longest in the organization's history. Outrigger also holds the state record: nine consecutive HCRA championships from 1984 to 1992. Lanikai is at seven. Two more years would put the club level with a benchmark that's stood for more than three decades.
Freitas isn't treating it as inevitable. Asked about the chase, he pointed to the pipeline rather than the scoreboard.
"I'm fully confident that with the way the youth program is going, we'll be competitive like this for at least the next three to seven years. I never really thought about winning two more, we just take it one race at a time."
The Race the Trophies Don't Cover
Here's where the season actually turns. The state championship was, as Freitas put it, the final event of the summer sprint-racing calendar. What comes next isn't more of the same. It's the long-distance campaign that ends with the Kaiwi Channel crossings, and it's a competition Lanikai hasn't dominated the way it dominates sprints.
One Lanikai paddler, Bagood, put the goal plainly after the state win: "Our goal is to win the Molokai Hoe junior division. Last year, our top crew came in second, so this year we need to get that win!"
Second place. That's the honest state of things heading into distance season, and it's a useful reminder that sprint dominance and channel-racing dominance are separate skills built on separate training.
A Different Kind of Roster
Sprint regattas run on six-person crews and races that last a few minutes. The Kaiwi Channel crossing is a different sport wearing the same uniform. Under official Molokai Hoe rules, open and masters crews can register up to nine paddlers, six in the canoe at any moment while three ride an escort boat and rotate in through the crossing. That's not a minor roster tweak. It changes conditioning, water exchanges, and who a coach trusts to hold a line in open ocean swell for five hours or more.
The women's crossing, Na Wahine O Ke Kai, is scheduled for September 27, 2026. The men's Molokai Hoe follows on October 11, 2026. Both cover the same 41-mile course from Hale O Lono Harbor on Molokai's south shore to Duke Kahanamoku Beach in Waikiki, and both fields draw crews from well beyond Hawaii, including Tahiti, Australia, and Brazil. If you want to watch a Lanikai crew land after a channel crossing, the finish at Fort DeRussy is open public sand, no ticket required, though the morning after tends to be quieter on the windward side than at the Waikiki finish line itself.
The Paddler Whose Name Still Comes Up
Distance racing in Hawaii carries its own history, separate from regatta trophies, and one name from Lanikai's own roster belongs to that history. Kai Bartlett started paddling six-man crews with Lanikai in 1998 at age 23, a Kailua native and Kalaheo High School product. He moved to Maui in 2003, commuted back to race with Lanikai through 2005, then joined Hawaiian Canoe Club in Kahului and later Wailea Canoe Club, building a long-distance career that included five Molokai Solo championships and multiple team and relay titles. He founded the canoe and kayak-building company Kai Wa'a and was inducted into the Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation Hawaii Waterman Hall of Fame in 2023. Bartlett died on March 28 of this year, at 50, after a long fight with cancer. His wife Kealani paddles for Hawaiian during the summer sprint season, alongside the couple's children, Kaiākea and Keliana.
It's worth sitting with that connection for a moment. The club celebrating an eight-peat in sprints traces part of its own paddling lineage through a man whose real legacy was built on the channel, the discipline Lanikai is still trying to master.
What Changes at Lanikai Park This Fall
For residents who pass the park on a run or a dog walk, the practical shift is worth knowing. Current club scheduling has youth paddlers ages 9 to 12 on the water Tuesday and Thursday from 4:00 to 5:00pm, with Saturday sessions from 9:30 to 11:00am. Women's crews across Novice, Open, and Masters divisions train Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30pm and Saturday at 8:00am. Open Keiki, for paddlers 10 and under, practices Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 to 5:30pm. As the club shifts its focus toward channel conditioning, expect longer paddles and more time spent on open-ocean technique rather than the short, sharp intervals sprint season demands.
The club, a volunteer-run 501(c)(3) with 400 to 500 members ages 9 and up, asks the same of the neighborhood every season: carpool or bike to practice when you can, don't block driveways or intersections, and don't drive into the park itself. If you're walking the beach access path while a crew is carrying a canoe down to the water, a coach will usually give you a heads up, and the courtesy runs both ways.
None of this requires anyone on the loop to lift a paddle. But it's the kind of detail that separates knowing a place from just living near it, and it's part of why the launch beach, the longhouse, and the practice schedule matter as much to Lanikai's identity as the pillbox trail or the sand itself. If you're curious about how the rest of daily life here fits together, we've written more about it in our guide to what it's like to live in Lanikai.
Whether you're watching from the park bench or just noticing more canoes on the water this fall, it's one more thread in what makes this loop feel the way it does. If you ever want to talk about what that means for property here, or anywhere else on Oahu's windward or south shores, Beth Chang is always glad to connect.
