(ABOVE) Jillian Clary leads her husband Ryan to a competition at the Newport Aquatic Center (NAC).
At 11 a.m. on September 2, 2006, 128 outrigger canoes lined up outside the bay at Honaunau on the Kona coast of Hawaii Island, the starting line of the Queen Liliuokalani Canoe Race. Among them was a novice team from Southern California, living out their dream of competing in the world's biggest long-distance paddling event. Their steersman was renowned coach Billy Whitford, the founder of the Newport Aquatic Center (NAC), located in the coastal wetlands known as the Back Bay, where they trained.
The race ran eighteen miles along the coast in sweltering conditions, testing the endurance of the six-man crews. The NAC crew struggled, and before long they had dropped to last place; the only vessel behind them was the safety jet ski tasked with bringing up the rear.
RJ De Rama, executive director of Makapo, an organization that helps the visually impaired get on the water.
"Here comes this big braddah on the jet ski. We're way back," Whitford recalls. "He'd come over, he'd shake his head."
"Timing!" the ski driver yelled impatiently, puttering alongside the canoe.
"Eh, thank you, braddah," Whitford called out to appease him. "These are my blind guys."
The driver was stunned. "Makapo?"
"Yeah," the steersman replied. "They can't see."
Instantly, the jet-ski driver became their biggest cheerleader, calling out every landmark as the crew—the Blindsiders, they called themselves—pushed for the finish line. They crossed at three hours, ten minutes and forty-two seconds, becoming the first-ever blind crew to complete the race.
"'Makapo,'" someone repeated. Hawaiian for "blind" ("maka" means eye; "po" is darkness). When they returned to California, the Blindsiders evolved into the Makapo Aquatics Project, a nonprofit for blind and visually impaired paddlers.
The Makapo Aquatics Project is a perfect fit for NAC, which Whitford established as a nonprofit in 1980 to protect public access to the water among the exclusive marinas of Newport Beach. The center is like Top Gun for operators of human-powered watercraft—flatwater kayaks, surf skis, outrigger canoes, even dragon boats. The center's teams have won numerous national titles, and among its alumni are twelve Olympic gold medalists. Its membership spans young to old, and it consistently produces top collegiate rowers. The center also hosts We Are Ocean, a program that gets those fighting cancer out of the wards and onto the water.
When Makapo came along, Whitford says, it made sense for NAC. "Paddling is one of the few sports where blind people don't need anything adaptive. They can race against able-bodied men and women same-same," he says. "The vibe they gave off was pure. Everybody just loved helping." As one of Makapo's first coaches, Whitford quickly learned that when directing blind paddlers, simple verbal commands were key. "You don't have to go into a big explanation. Not, 'I need you to ...' All it takes is two words: 'Turn right.'" He chuckles as he recalls a water change—when paddlers jump out of the canoe and relief paddlers climb in—during a long race. "'Marco!'" he called. "I hear 'Polo!' and they start swimming towards me on the escort boat. That's a true story!"
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(LEFT) In 2022, Michael Yu became the first blind solo paddler to race in Hawaii using a newly developed remote steering system. (RIGHT) Makapo paddler Chuck Dill capitalizes on a fast start.
On any given day, Whitford is running around cracking dad jokes, but he's serious when he acknowledges the patience and respect demonstrated by the Makapo paddlers, a reality check for the rest of the NAC community. "If you ever think you're having a bad day, just talk to one of them," he says. "It humbles you so quickly."
"Billy reminds us we're kind of the glue here," says Makapo's executive director, RJ De Rama. "You've got people complaining about the most mundane things or top athletes worried about shaving a couple seconds off their time. But when one of our blind athletes comes through here on his own with a cane—when we first started, it was like, 'Oh my God, is that guy going to die? Is he going to sprain an ankle?'—for a split second they're reminded they have things to be thankful for."
"We like to say, as blind people, we run into the nicest people," jokes the 48-year-old De Rama, who went blind at 29. At the Braille Institute he met a former water polo player and swimmer named John Chavez, who had gone in for ankle surgery, suffered a heart attack during the procedure and woke up blind. Not one to back away from a challenge, Chavez cooked up the idea for the blind Kona crew and invited De Rama to join them.
Calm conditions greet the day at NAC's tenth annual Off Da Couch race.
"The draw for me was that I was going to participate in something with people who knew what I was going through, specifically the four other blind guys," De Rama says. (For obvious reasons, the steersman must be sighted.) He wanted to offer that sense of belonging to other visually impaired people. Whitford, Kirsten Hermstad and Toni Bushong stepped up to coach, and generous sponsors including LA84, the Andrei Foundation, Kings Hawaiian, Foreseeable Futures, the Los Angeles Lakers Youth Foundation and the Allergan Foundation have since helped buy equipment and fund the program. They also collaborated with New York Outrigger, which launched a sister program in 2014.
That same year, De Rama and his wife, Rita, adopted a newborn whom they would come to discover had cerebral palsy. "The big thing with disability is that your world changes. We saw it again when our son wasn't able to do the activities that typically developed kids could do," De Rama says. "As parents your life is your kids' activities—you're hanging out at soccer or baseball. Because our kid isn't in it, our social circle is different. For a lot of parents, the social circle doesn't exist. You don't have the flexibility to go to those places." He and Rita immersed themselves in a community of parents with kids with special needs, taking their son, Timmy, to therapy several times a week. Perpetuating what De Rama praises as NAC's "culture of yes," he opened up paddling to anyone with a physical, cognitive or developmental disability. Hope, he says, is the currency and a hallmark of Makapo.
"If there's one thing I want to teach my son, it's how to be a person with a disability in an able-bodied world. I don't think anyone sees people with a disability as not human, but there's a certain sense of humanity that gets lost. People don't know how to interact. Uber drivers will ask me, 'Hey, you're blind. Have you tried glasses?'" De Rama says. "The opportunity we have at Makapo is to be ambassadors, to walk with your head high, to ask and to correct people with respect and grace. In the cerebral palsy community, there's a program called Just Say Hi. If you see someone with a disability, just say aloha."
Makapo hosts a few hundred blind and adaptive paddlers a year, including amputees, autistic youth, individuals with traumatic brain injury and many others. Some race competitively. Others gather for Ohana Days, where families can spend the day at the beach and jump into a canoe for the first time. They are working on ways to quantify the therapeutic benefit of being in and around the water, with the goal of securing sustainable funding that could allow for on-site physical and occupational therapists and a full-time leadership staff. A big dream is to convince the International Va'a Federation to create a separate division for blind paddlers-and they've developed a device to make that a reality.
"Right off the bat, we went three feet and flipped in knee-deep water," says Ryan Clary, describing his first paddle almost nine years ago with his dad in an OC2, a two-person outrigger canoe. "That was my first taste of, oh, that's how this is going to be."
The new CoOP system allows Ryan Clary to paddle while head coach Rob Octavio steers Clary's canoe remotely from the escort boat.
Clary was 37, and it wasn't long after his field of vision began to significantly degrade, the onset of retinitis pigmentosa. Makapo came along when his options for doing outdoor activities on his own—like simply going for a jog—disappeared with his eyesight. Paddling gives him precious independence. "I get to go out there and blow out a bunch of energy—no need to worry about what I'm going to run into," he explains. "No tripping on stuff except getting to the canoe."
Now Clary's 46, and on a cloudless October morning in Newport Beach, he's about to race a one-man canoe (OC1) in the annual Off Da Couch race in memory of Sam Couch, a beloved NAC coach and outstanding athlete who had cystic fibrosis. Clary still worries about his balance, but the fact that he's racing an OC1 against more than a hundred sighted athletes is nothing short of incredible. It's possible thanks to Cooperative Outrigger Paddling, or CoOP (rhymes with "scoop"), a remote control rudder system designed by Mark Baldwin, a Makapo board member and researcher at the University of California, Irvine.
Baldwin began developing the CoOP system in 2018, when De Rama expressed a desire for blind paddlers to be able to train on OC1s. The challenge aligned with Baldwin's research in assistive technology, and with his knowledge of software engineering and industrial design—and input from the Makapo community—he manufactured a working prototype.
CoOP consists of a receiver with a motor and a battery inside a waterproof housing that attaches to the OC1's rudder cap using a suction cup mount. A remote steersman—in this race, Makapo head coach and board member Rob Octavio—turns a dial on a hand-held transmitter to control the rudder. Octavio follows Clary on a motorboat from about ten yards away (its range is one hundred meters, but the paddler must always be in the line of sight).
Engineered by Mark Baldwin at the University of California, Irvine, CoOP’s motor attaches to a canoe’s rudder, which is typically controlled by the paddler using foot pedals. A sighted steersman navigates with a remote control dial.
There's also a speaker on the OC1 so Octavio can relay information to Clary: "You've got 150 meters to the turn. ... I'm going to be turning you left. ... You're going to have a wake on your ama [outrigger] in three, two, one—here it is." Octavio says that remote steering requires hyperfocus on ocean and wind conditions, obstacles, positioning—and it's even more challenging because you're also navigating around other boats and making estimates about distances based on varying depth perception. "You can't always be close to the racer, so when he's coming to a turn, if I'm not lined up, I'm wondering, 'Is he at the turn? Am I going to clip the ama?'"
The paddler signals back to the steersman using gestures, like raising the paddle to indicate a problem. Initially, they tried earpieces for two-way communication, but the chatter was distracting. Generally, Baldwin says, when blind people need something, the world will make something for them to hear. "We don't want to cloud that auditory channel," he explains. "When they're out there they recognize things. They know when we're getting close, because they'll hear the airplanes overhead, or they know we're at Highway 1 because that bridge makes a particular sound."
By using off-the-shelf components and fabricating all the custom parts on low-end, 3D printers, Baldwin kept the cost of the CoOP under $250. He also incorporated feedback from the blind community to improve the design. The latest iteration indicates whether it's properly configured through sound rather than light. The ultimate goal is to minimize the number of people required to get one person out on a canoe. Ideally, CoOP can function with just a paddler and a remote steersman, though launching and landing requires assistance from someone on the beach. Octavio has also been working on a coaching manual to accompany the system that includes commands for verbally steering in case CoOP fails.
Relying on someone else to be your eyes and keep you safe on the water entails what many sighted people might consider an inordinate amount of trust. "In our conditions we don't have a choice. If you don't trust anybody, you can't be out there. The people here are good people—they are looking out for us," says Clary. "So many 'blindies' have limited opportunities to do anything—some have to plan their ride to the grocery store five days ahead of time. They're intimidated by the world. They're afraid to go out. This is something we have to fight. Just because you can't see, it doesn't mean you can't do it."
Team Makapo (the Hawaiian word for "blind") huddles up. The program has helped visually impaired athletes like Dill (pictured at center) to be more confident. "They're getting out and being a part of a community and being physically active," says Octavio. "A lot of them have never pushed themselves to train like this before."
Clary says he found Makapo at just the right time. "When you're told at 9 years old you're going to be blind before you're 40, it's pretty heavy. I did not carry that well. I spent most of my life angry and depressed without even knowing it," he says. "When I got here, it gave me a place to put my energy. Even if you're not conscious of it, paddling calms your soul."
"Even if I'm not balanced in the canoe, I've found more balance within myself," he continues. "My outlook has gone from not worrying about glass half-full or glass half-empty. I get a glass. And when you remember that, then it's always overflowing."
The Makapo team continues to do outreach with CoOP, eager to inspire other communities. It's their hope that in the not-too-distant future, CoOP can be deployed by other canoe clubs with blind paddlers. At the 2022 Queen Liliuokalani Race, where CoOP made its international debut, a woman approached the paddlers at the post-race luau with tears in her eyes.
"She wanted to give us all a hug," Baldwin says. "She said, 'I just found out I'm losing my vision, and I love to paddle. Knowing that there's an opportunity for me to be able to continue doing this just changed my life.' It was one of those moments where we were like, 'OK, we can't do this just in Newport Beach.'"
