At 17, Soquel High senior is taking on the ‘Mount Everest of paddling’ across Hawaii’s channel of bones

Squinting into the sun, 17-year-old Ryder Walding crouched down to adjust his watch mounted on the 12-foot stock paddleboard before him. 

He put in his earbuds in, picked up the board and shuffled into the ocean before hopping on and rising to his knees. Digging his cupped hands into the water, two at a time, Walding propelled himself with strokes of impressive force, quickly disappearing into a dot on the horizon.

This was the beginning of a 1-hour, 8-minute interval workout, one of his last before he planned to fly to Hawaii on Monday for his biggest paddling race yet: the Molokai 2 Oahu Paddleboard World Championship this Sunday, July 27. 

The incoming senior at Soquel High School is one of the youngest competitors out of 33 participants from across the world this year in the invite-only prone paddleboarding race — a grueling 32-mile toil across the Ka’iwi Channel between the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Oahu, that his father, Jacob Walding, calls “the Mount Everest of paddling.”

The Ka’iwi Channel literally translates from Hawaiian as the channel of bones. It’s known for its ever-shifting conditions and sizable open-ocean swells supplemented by white-capping wind waves. And the channel has a deadly history. The most famous example was when renowned Hawaiian big-wave surfer and lifeguard Eddie Aikau died paddling away from a shipwreck on his surfboard in 1978, never to be found.

The punishing race isn’t even Ryder Walding’s final race of the season. He’s on his way to compete in another renowned 32-mile race, from Catalina Island to the pier in Manhattan Beach on Aug. 24. Molokai is seen as more difficult in a technical sense, with competitors trying to surf the wind waves, while Catalina is a pure, flatwater grind.

Despite nearly a year of training and support from the best coaches, board shapers and boat captains in the sport, Walding has no way of knowing what either race day will truly feel like.

“The races are somewhat notorious, like, these are the two big races,” Walding said. “I want to do these – I’m not doing it for anyone else but myself. I just want to see what I can do and push myself to my full abilities.”

‘A crazy endeavor’

Duke Brouwer met Walding at a lifeguarding clinic he had organized when the teen was in fourth or fifth grade and is now a family friend. He has watched Walding since his very first sprint paddles at lifeguarding competitions. He’s always been impressed with his “laser focus,” even from a young age.

Now, Brouwer is sitting back, amazed that Walding is racing what paddlers consider to be their “crown jewel.”

Brouwer is a paddler, too, though more of the recreational type. Over his 20 years of paddling experience, he’s done a slew of local races in Santa Cruz and even been in escort boats for the Molokai 2 Oahu race, aiding other competitors, though he’s never raced himself.

Brouwer said the Ka’iwi Channel, where the competition takes place, will be a complete learning experience for Walding, or any other first-time competitor, for that matter. The navigation aspect of the race is made more difficult by backwash from islands and competing currents that force paddlers to constantly fight against the shifting direction of the ocean. That, combined with extreme heat, exhaustion and potential dehydration makes Molokai especially challenging. 

“Molokai 2 Oahu, that’s like the Super Bowl of paddling,” Brouwer said. “To be honest, it’s kind of a crazy endeavor. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

While Walding isn’t setting any specific time goals. Everyone around him has been surprised at how well he’s done in each of the Southern California qualifiers this season; three qualifying times are required to enter in the Catalina Classic race. Jacob Walding said in one of those recent competitions, Ryder finished just 5 minutes off the first-place finisher in a 14-mile race. In Jacob’s words and his coach’s opinion, a “negligible” gap.

Even as he turns heads, Ryder Walding keeps his head down and does the work.

“I want to get to the finish line and think I did everything I could to prepare for it, and I did everything in that race I could do to give myself the best race possible,” he said.

Walding will be on the board alone during the competition, but he hasn’t been anywhere close to alone in preparing for it. His dad serves as a sort of manager to help him coordinate everything; he’s got a top-of-the-line board from Joe Bark, a renowned paddler and board shaper; and he’s coached by Mick Di Betta, whom Brouwer deemed “arguably, probably the world’s most accomplished paddle coach.”

Di Betta has coached three to four of the top 10 athletes in almost every race since Di Betta won the Molokai 2 Oahu in its first edition in 1997. This includes coaching Jamie Mitchell, who won Molokai 2 Oahu for 10 years straight in a reign that revolutionized the sport.

The training is working. On an average, non-windy day, Walding can move his watercraft along at 5 miles per hour, or about a 12-minutes-per-mile pace. A few weeks ago he clocked in at 3 hours and 35 minutes for a 19-mile paddle back from Davenport.

When he started training, each stroke of his arms took him 14 feet gliding in the water. Now, that number’s up to 19 feet.

“I love the improvement that I get out of it,” Walding said. “I don’t necessarily love paddling all the time, but I do like seeing how much better I’m getting. And it’s definitely cool to have something that unique. Not a lot of people do it.”

29-mile journey at age 13

When Walding was just 13 years old, he and a friend paddled 29 miles across Monterey Bay with the Bay for Breath Crossing annual fundraiser for cystic fibrosis, becoming the youngest person ever to complete that route. He was among 19 paddlers who raised over $56,000 for the Living Breath Foundation in honor of Melissa Pappageorgas, a Central Coast surfer who died in 2018. 

“It was quite a bit scarier than what I’m doing now, because I really didn’t know if I could do it,” Walding said. 

The ride wasn’t easy or comfortable. There is a point, Jacob told his son before the Monterey paddle, when you are far out in the middle of the ocean, you are completely exhausted, when neck, back and shoulder pain overwhelm you and the thoughts of quitting start drifting into your mind. It’s what you do then that matters.

“When we were going across the bay, you know, he was like, ‘Hey, Dad, my I’m hurting really bad,’” Jacob Walding said. “And I was like, ‘All right, what’d I tell you?’ He’s like, ‘I’m not stopping, Dad.’ And he just kept going.”

That gave Jacob the faith he needed to sign Ryder up for this year’s immense solo races and support him through training a few years later.

One source of motivation for Ryder Walding to race the Catalina Classic came up when he was at the California State Lifeguards eight-day, intensive training boot camp at Huntington Beach. His dad’s friend had given him a Catalina Classic shirt some time back, and one of the instructors noticed him wearing it and asked what his time was at Catalina.

Before he could finish saying he didn’t paddle it and just had the shirt, the instructor cut him off and said, “Oh, so you’re just a poser.” The instructor himself was a “legend in paddling” of world champion status, Walding said, declining to name him out of respect. 

“It stuck with me because I never want to be a poser or be called a poser,” Walding said. “I always feel like I want to earn my stuff.”

Walding came away from that with the fire in him to prove that instructor wrong. He still wore the shirt after that incident but much less often and with much less pride than before. 

Growing up on the ocean

Walding’s dad grew up in Cocoa Beach, Florida, fishing and surfing, always on the water. Jacob has lived and worked on the ocean his whole life, and he wanted to raise his kids this way, too. 

Jacob said Walding gets his grit from both him and Walding’s mother. Melissa Walding, a teacher at New Brighton Middle School, played rugby for Penn State, something that necessitates being “cut from a different cloth,” her husband said.

And his dad isn’t worried about Ryder’s safety out on the channel, just as he wasn’t worried when he surfed 25-foot waves during a massive storm earlier this year. He said he’s passed on the knowledge of how to be safe around the ocean to both his kids. 

“This takes a lifetime of skill,” Jacob said. “Ryder’s lucky that his lifetime is literally from birth.”

Ryder Walding said being a “waterman” means being more than someone who surfs or fishes as individual pleasures. He said he feels “tied in with the ocean,” with a somewhat unique connection to it.

“For me, waterman, it describes kind of my lifestyle,” Walding said. “Just being in the ocean every day, surfing, paddling, fishing, lifeguarding — like my whole life, pretty much right now, revolves around the ocean.”

After the two races this summer, Walding will complete his final year at Soquel High School — he’s already doing summer homework for a few of the Advanced Placement courses he’s signed up to take. He doesn’t let up focus on academics despite the time commitment it takes to paddle, surf and work as a lifeguard.

Jacob Walding said Ryder would come home from his paddles late and stay up to complete all his homework and stay on top of his schedule. Or surf three hours after work for fun in the summer on his off days from paddling. 

“It’s exhausting just thinking about what his weeks are like,” Brouwer said. “So I think his focus and dedication and commitment and discipline are very commendable.”

Ryder Walding said he is considering applying only to colleges near the coast, primarily in Southern California or even maybe Hawaii. He can’t imagine being cut off from the ocean; anything landlocked is a hard pass. He hopes to study physics and is considering a career as a pilot, which would give him more flexibility and ample time to spend on the water on his off days, Jacob said.

Jacob sees paddling as a sort of metaphor for life and a preparation for what might come along in the future. Ryder lives in a state of near-constant exhaustion from training, and Jacob sees this as proof his son will be able to make it through.

“When you can get through and push through times like this, there’s going to be hard times in your life, as you know, where you’re just going to have to get stuff done,” Jacob said. “You don’t have a choice. You just have to work until it’s done. So, yeah, I’m just proud.”

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