Stroke on the Water: Mike, Linda, and Ka Nai’a Outrigger’s Unsung Legacy

Montecitans Mike and Linda Ofner have been a dynamic team – as coaches, mentors, and life partners – through more than 50 years of marriage. Never mind that they’ve also been the backbone of a Santa Barbara waterfront institution for nearly 40 years – a beachfront outfit called Ka Nai’a Outrigger. “So, 1986,” son Greg Ofner says, rolling out the saga. “I was 17 back then. That’s the year Santa Barbara Outrigger splintered and Club Ka Nai’a was the offshoot.” Okay, let’s tap the brakes. Outrigger? Ka Nai’a?

An outrigger canoe (for purposes of this essay) is a vessel with a sort of second hull or support float attached to the main hull and parallel to it – such that the boat is effectively given a broader base on the water and is stabilized. If you’re paddling the 2,100 miles from Taiwan to New Guinea in 1500 BCE or so, a lithe little boat that won’t roll in the terrifying turbulence of the open ocean is a big deal. While today the outrigger is a symbol of collaborative waterfront sport and a challenged rotator cuff, the outrigger innovation is believed by maritime historians to have played a momentous role – about 3,000 years ago – in the spread of oceangoing humanity from the Southeast Asian islands to the greater Pacific and beyond. The shoulders burn just thinking about all that paddling. 

“We raced together,” Greg says in the here and now. “My dad and I have done Catalina to Newport, and I’ve done the Queen Lili’uokalani over in Hawaii. My mom’s done the Molokai channel over and back to Maui. That’s a 54-mile race…” 

A Civic Phenomenon

Mike and Linda Ofner are that particular civic phenomenon; beloved local mentors known to a select few over the years. Mike and Linda’s decades of quiet fire on behalf of their Ka Nai’a Outrigger Canoe Club has not been written across the sky or splashed around town, and they are totally cool with that. 

Today Mike and Linda Ofner may not be willing to rest on their laurels, but after nearly 40 years of coaching, training, managing, inspiring, and competing alongside the dedicated members of Santa Barbara’s Ka Nai’a Outrigger Club, they are taking a step back. Greg, a teen when Ka Nai’a launched, has lived the club his entire adult life and a fair chunk of his teens. There is an air of elegy in his tone. A page is turning.

West Covina to ‘Cito

Mike and Linda Ofner moved the family to Montecito in 1975. They’d been living in West Covina. “My dad was a schoolteacher, and my mom was a homemaker. My dad was building a tennis career through the eighties, and he coached for the West Covina tennis team at high school level.” In time, Mike and Linda had a tennis court built at their home and started offering private coaching group lessons and got involved with West Covina school athletics as well. Mike and Linda came to understand what it takes to put together tournaments, even as they became naturals at team building. When the time came in their new environs, they applied those skills to Ka Nai’a Outrigger together. 

The club’s website is an understated affair. The homepage features short clips of folk in Ka Nai’a Outrigger shirts paddling with metronomic synchrony. The water is crystalline and flat and sparkling in the sun, but the paddlers churn like they’re moving through cake batter. Outrigging through even calm water at speed – if outrigging is a proper verb – is a physical trial, and the rigors of the paddling passion can be seen in the musculature of the sport’s adherents. Mike and Linda are pictured on the website looking like a suntanned Jack and Elaine LaLanne, their upper arms striated with paddling muscle, their photographed grins and laughter indicative of a love of life on the water.

Over their long, salt-sprayed sojourn, these two Montecito Mer People have – apart from growing and nurturing Ka Nai’a Outrigger – taught canoeing classes at SBCC and Westmont, worked the summer Youth Outrigger program, and have taken part in many an Iron and Sprint championship as both athletes and coaches. Mike and Linda Ofner have given themselves over to a tidal, wind-blown milieu that has tested and improved them physically and otherwise. How could it not? From decades spent in a friendly and challenging tussle with nature emerges a positive core perspective – one that can be shared and celebrated with those who feel the same magnetic pull of the shoreline. 

In a town where names are etched into marble, emblazoned on plaques, and lauded in public gatherings, Mike and Linda Ofner have quietly steered the Ka Nai’a Outrigger Canoe Club of Santa Barbara to its place in the sun. Through these decades, how many lives have Mike and Linda touched? How many individuals have been introduced to this elevating, oceangoing space? How many have tested themselves against the sea and found exhilaration there, and collaboration, and peace? 

As Greg Ofner prepares to step in and involve himself more fully with Ka Nai’a, there is that welcome sense of continuity – the Ofner thru-line. Mike and Linda have steadfastly and lovingly built something that is now and forever an inseparable element of this sun-struck town’s landscape. Now another Ka Nai’a chapter begins in the ongoing story. This is the stuff of community. Greg remembers his own intro to the sport. 

“I was in high school and I was doing a junior crew at UCSB, so I was getting up early in the morning and going up to Lake Cachuma and skulling. And one day my dad said, ‘you ought to come down and try paddling.’” He laughs softly. “And I did. And I never looked back.” 

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