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HONOLULU / JANUARY 1990 Islanders of the Year Their magnificent obsessions were finally put to rest last summer: In the space of a month, Honolulu developer Tam Gentry and tour boat operator Rudy Chat' achieved lifetime dreams of becoming the fastest men to cross the ocean. In separate quests, in different boats, in different oceans, they went after their Halt' Grails and got them. In July, Tom Gentry and his crew revved up the turbo-charged powerboat Gentry Eagle, zoomed out of New York Harbor and reached England in a retard-breaking 62 hours and seven minutes. In August, Rudy Chat' and his crew hoisted the sails of the catamaran Aikane X-5, sailed out of San Pedro, Calif., and arrived at Diamond Head in six days, 22 hours, 41 minutes; 12 seconds-also a record. Their feats made the two businessmen instant heroes at home. Gov. John Waihee hailed them far brining international attention on Hawaii as a major ocean activities center, and praised their courage and perseverance. Their achievement had indeed taken courage: They had cried the two biggest oceans in the world, had taken an the incorrigible meteorological farces of nature, and had not only survived, but had sailed to the finish with flying colors. It had indeed taken perseverance: Both men possessed an enduring devotion to boats and had spent their lives chasing speed retards. They had both suffered demoralizing failures, including earlier attempts at the records. Just the year before, Tam Gentry had set out from New York on the same transatlantic quest and had been driven back by turbulent storms. Rudy Chat' had gone after the transpacific mark three times before and had ended up wallowing in windless seas. But last summer they were willing to try again, and this time they prevailed. Tom Gentry crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his powerboat and sped into history; Rudy Choy crossed the Pack Ocean in his catamaran and sailed into glory. The magnificent obsessions of these men had fueled incredible efforts and produced two remarkable achievements. For having their magnificent obsessions - and tenaciously pursuing them to their noble ends - Tom Gentry and Rudy Choy are HONOLULU Magazine's Islanders of the Year. BREAKING THE RECORD ON WINDPOWER "We saw the lights of Maui early in the morning. And then we approached Kalaupapa Peninsula about dawn. When we turned, dawn was with us. The sun was up. And we were flying toward Oahu." Flying straight and fast into a new transpacific sailing record. With his 62foot, state-of-the-art masterwork, Aikane X-5, Rudy Choy proved once more, as he had time and again, that the catamaran is the fastest sailing vessel in the worldand that his is the fastest catamaran in the Pacific. Choy and his crew made the crossing from San Pedro, Calif., to Honolulu in six days, 22 hours, 41 minutes and 12 seconds. When they sped over the finish line near Diamond Head at 8:41 a.m. on Aug. 24, they had knocked nine hours off the old record set by Bob Hanel's 64-foot cat, Double Bullet, in 1983. For Choy, the achievement was truly gratifying. He had failed three times before and had decided this was his last attempt. It was now or never, and throughout the crossing he had worried that it was going to be never. "One of my most terrible apprehensions was to go out a loser," he says. But as the catamaran approached Oahu and Choy saw Koko Head low on the horizon, he knew-he was going out a winner. No one deserved winning this one more than Rudy Choy. The 66-year-old had spent more than 30 years stoking his passion for catamarans. He had racked up 15 completed crossings of the Pacific, and had sailed-"unofficially"-in five Transpacific Yacht Races (and had come in first every time). Beating the California-Hawaii mark had been on his mind for four years, ever since he came up with the X-5. His lifetime of designing catamarans had gone into the creation, and he was positive he had the fastest cat around. He decided to prove it with the transpacific record. He went after it in 1985-and failed. In 1987 he tried again-and failed. In 1988failed again. The winds just wouldn't cooperate. In between attempts he made improvements on the boat, outfitting it with the latest high-tech features. The most radical modification was the replacement of the conventional rig with a rotating wing mast, which made for smoother air flow and greater efficiency and drive. The changes were expensive. The new Kevlar mainsail alone cost $25,000; the spinnaker was $10,000. In all, says Choy, he sank $600,000 into the X-5. "If you want to set a record, you can't conserve your resources;' he explains. "You've got to give the boat every opportunity you possibly can to break that record. If you don't, why even bother? You're just wasting your time. You're just depending completely upon luck:' Last year, when he was broke and needed new equipment, Tom Gentry came to the rescue. "When I explained my circumstances to him," says Choy, "he didn't try to get a pound of flesh out of me. He just said, `OK, Rudy, I'll help you.' Bang, he wrote a check." But the effort was starting to wear on Choy. He decided to give the record one last try, and that was it. He couldn't afford to do it anymore. "It takes such an effort -the boat becomes almost like a money eating monster. You j ust keep on throwing money at it, and it just consumes it by the thousands." Last June he rounded up his crew again-his son Barry, co-skipper, who had faithfully sailed with him in every crossing; Mike Elias, navigator; Gary Craft, mastman; John Conser, sail maker helmsman; Roy Seaman, super-helmsman; and Neal Forn, VHS operator-and got everything ready in San Pedro. At first it looked like it was going to be another washout. Three times they started out, three times they had to turn back. Critical equipment kept breaking on them, like the sail track. It was frustrating, says Choy. "Postponed, postponed, postponed -you think you're going to do it, and then you don't do it, you have to turn around. You've got all this food that you've got to put in storage again, or eat immediately, and you have to fly crews back and forth between Hawaii and Los Angeles." Finally, three false starts and two months after their original launch date, they left on their 2,225-mile journey-at 1 p.m., Aug. 17. The first night was rough, with confused seas and strong winds, not ideal sailing conditions. "You want good steady trades, like 15 to 20 knots, steady, steady;" says Choy. About halfway, they found that five strands of one of the half-inch-thick steel wires holding up the mast had broken. The crew jury-rigged reinforcing with Kevlar rope, but the problem nagged at Choy's peace of mind for the rest of the trip. Later a strand in the head stay broke, then a part in the main boom. With somany opportunities for things to go wrong, the crew conducted inspections every four hours-"just to make sure that something wasn't breaking or chafing." Then, a couple of days out from Honolulu, they got stalled by light winds for half-a-day. "That really kicked us in the `okole," says Choy. Whatever troubles they had with the weather and the boat, they had no problem at all keeping track of where they were. They had brought along three satellite navigation systems-Magnavox SATNAV, GPS and Argos-that could give the boat's exact position within a hundred feet. They also had an instrument that gave them true wind direction, which Choy says is hard to figure out sometimes when you're at sea. It also gave them the wind speed and boat speed. They had a single sideband radio which enabled them to communicate with their ground control people, Rae Tang in Hawaii and Bud Tretter in California, and anywhere else in the world. They even had a weather fax machine on board, but Choy says they didn't rely on it too much. Like all weather forecasting devices, he says, it worked on the S.WA.G. method: "scientific wild-ass guess." With the makeshift repairs and the constant inspections, plus the normal chores involved in sailing a boat, the crew was kept busy all the time. The crew members alternated in shifts, sleeping in bunks in the hulls or on mattresses set up in the portable cabin. Choy says the men did plenty of joking around during the voyage. But he refuses to elaborate beyond, "There were a lot of sexual jokes." They managed to take their meals together at normal times-breakfast, lunch and dinner-with lots of snacks inbetween. Rae Tang had pre-cooked the crew's favorite dishes (like Hawaiian beef stew and spaghetti), and frozen them. She had even bagged the rice in correct amounts so they wouldn't have to measure it. The crew managed to find time to admire the scenery too. Says Choy: "It's extremely beautiful out there. There are no city lights, no mountains, nothing but ocean. And we have moonlight, moon on the water. Beautiful sunrises, beautiful sunsets, beautiful cloud formations." Along the way they encountered several rain squalls, but the cloudbursts were a help rather than a hindrance. "Usually with rain squalls you have more wind," says Choy. "And when the rain squall is with you, you're going like dynamite." As they got closer to Hawaii, they started seeing shore birds, a sure sign that they were nearing land. It was Aug. 24, and they were into their sixth day at sea. They knew they were near the end. The first island they sighted was Maui, and then Molokai. From Molokai they could see the clouds over Oahu. As they sped through the pre-dawn darkness, Choy began wondering if anything else would go wrong in the final hours of their effort. And then-"And then we heard another `thunggg!'-the sixth strand of wire broke. I said, `Mast, if you want to fall over the side, go ahead, fall over the side, I don't care.' I knew that we could drift downwind fast enough to still break the record, without the mast and sails. We had enough of a reservoir of time. "We were flying. The wind was beautiful. And we were going faster steadily than we'd ever gone in the entire trip. From Molokai on, I took it to the finish line." The finish line stretched from the Diamond Head lighthouse to the Diamond Head buoy. After crossing it, the X-5 pulled into the Hawaii Yacht Club at the Ala Wai, where a big aloha awaited them. A huge crowd of friends, family, well-wishers and the news media had gathered to congratulate the record breaking voyagers. Choy found out that while they had been at sea, phone calls had poured into his office asking for status reports. His staff had found it necessary to send out regular bulletins to the newspapers to head off the calls. Choy remembers his strongest emotion that day was relief, and apparently it showed. "I was sitting there, with some of the girls in my office around me. And one of them said, 'Rudy, all you're doing is going ahhhh.' " It was understandable. The race was over, and he was going out a winner like he wanted to. He had proven his point-that the catamaran is the fastest sailboat in the world. No one should have doubted it, for no one knows more about the catamaran than Rudy Choy. He was there when it was invented, in fact. As a Waikiki beachboy in the 1950s, he had assisted the two friends who had come up with the idea, Woody Brown and Alfred Kumalae. In 1955, they built the first oceangoing catamaran, the 40-foot Waikiki Surf, and sailed it from Honolulu to Los Angeles. This practical training with Brown and Kumalae was the extent of Choy's early education in catamaran design. (Choy got a degree in English from the University of Hawaii, but has had no formal education in engineering.) Two years later, Choy designed the first Aikane for local businessman Ken Murphy. They sailed it in the Transpacific Yacht Race, and came in 26 hours ahead of the first monohull. "It turned the whole yachting world on its ear," says Choy. In spite of the impressive showing (or maybe because of it), the yachts would not accept the catamaran as a legitimate entry in the race. Officials did not approve of any deviation from the monohulls, and disdained the cats as unsafe and unproven. Says Choy: "They looked at us like we were two-headed monsters from Mars who didn't belong on their ocean in their race against their boats." Choy moved to Newport Beach, Calif., and spent 15 years designing catamarans for other people, including movie stars James Arness and Buddy Ebsen. In 1969 he returned to Hawaii and put the catamaran to use in the visitor industry, which was just then starting to take off. He capitalized on the idea of taking tourists out on short evening cruises and providing them with dinner and entertainment. The idea caught on, and so did his Aikane Catamaran Cruises. Today Choy's fleet consists of two 190-passenger catamarans and a 150-passenger cat originally owned by developer Henry J Kaiser, the Ale Ale Kai V. His dinner cruises bring in $4 million a year and employ 120 people, including son Barry, who is executive vice president of the company. In 1976, Choy's most illustrious design creation was launched. Hokule`a, the world-famous replica of an ancient double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe, made a successful crossing from Hawaii to Tahiti. Choy had been the Hokule`a's primary technical designer. He is still pleased at its performance. "I'm proud that she has proven herself to be seaworthy in all of her trips to the South Seas and back," he says. "She has suffered no major structural failure. I tell myself, `Hey, the reason she's that way is because of us-we designed it.' " Designing catamarans for more than 30 years has made Rudy Choy the most fervent promoter of the vessel. He truly believes that it's the fastest sailing craft in the world, and has proven it over and over. Five times he has sailed in the Transpacific Yacht Race, and five times he has come in first. And five times he has been denied recognition by the race officials. He has strong feelings about the issue. "You take their fastest monohulls, and we'll go by them so fast they'll look like they're anchored. I sound like I'm bragging, but it comes from righteous indignation." It's not surprising that Choy supports the catamaran Stars and Stripes' claim to the America's Cup. His reasoning is, why blame the San Diego Yacht Club for being smarter than the New Zealand club? "Why should you condemn technology? If a catamaran is superior, it's superior." Choy concedes the Stars and Stripes enjoys the reputation of being the fastest sailboat in the world. "But it's not true," he says. "She's the fastest sailboat in the world off San Diego-smooth water, light winds. In anything up to 10 knots of wind, there's nothing that can touch her today. But if she had to sail in 20- to 30-knot winds like we do, she'd fall apart. "So I'll say this: Aikane X-5 is without question, in my mind, the fastest sailboat in the Pacific Ocean." Aikane X-5 also happens to be Rudy Choy's favorite creation. "As a professional designer, I submitted to myself years ago that I would never have any favorite boats. Because if you do, you cannot be a good designer. But I allowed myself to do it with this boat. Because of our disappointments. Because of our failures. Because we tried so hard and it seemed like we could never ever get our Holy Grail." Choy calls the X-5 a "pathfinder boat." He also accords the Hokule'a that honor, and the first Aikane. "A pathfinder boat," he says, "is a boat which opens up new frontiers-which does something dramatic and historical. It has its own karma, if you will, to do something magnificent." Rudy Choy himself fits his definition of a pathfinder-a man whose
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