By Hillary Cramer
Nalu Underground

Daring and Authentic—Kitesurfer Nalani Oda Flys Above the Mundane

Hawaii’s pro kitesurfer Nalani Oda has a story of extreme adventure and personal strength. Behind the friendly brown eyes and calm demeanor is an ardent drive that brought her into kitesurfing’s pro ranks only a year after picking up the sport. While the sport remains in developing stages, Nalani has sponsors Off Da Lip kites and boards, Underground for boards, Da Kine, Girls 4 Sport, Banana Bungalow Maui and Eye Catcher glasses backing her. In the last five years, Nalani has competed on the Kitesurfing World Tour, survived with a shotgun and canned food in the very ‘beary’ Alaskan wilderness, rockclimbed in Thailand, taught school in Japan, and faced personal demons with courage.

Nalani, now home on Oahu is a surf instructor in Waikiki and is preparing to go to dental school. Recently recuperated from shoulder surgery, Nalani is training again and pumped for the coming winter North swells. Born and raised in Honolulu, she attended Hawaii’s elite college prep school Punahou and continued on to Colorado College. Punahou has a knack for setting a bar of excellence, and has groomed a number of world-class athletes including Michelle Wie, Carissa Moore, Stein Metzger and Malia Kamisugi. After graduating from college, Nalani began a chapter of life that cultivated independence, strength, and extreme athletic prowess.

NU: How did you get into kitesurfing?
NO: I was living in Japan after I graduated college. I had just gone on a rock climbing trip in Thailand and I was on my way back home for vacation…I was talking to the guy sitting next to me on the plane…and the entire eight hours he was just going off [about kitesurfing]. He gave me a number of someone and I took a lesson, and then I was hooked.

NU: Kitesurfing can be pretty dangerous, can’t it? My mechanic broke his collarbone doing it.
NO: Yeah…a kite will pick you up and nail you into the ground in a split second.

NU: What are the extreme aspects of the sport?
NO: You can get 60 to 70 feet [airs]. People are also jumping off cliffs with the kite. They aren’t parachutes, but people are kind of using them like that. And it turns out you can get barreled. We weren’t really sure in the beginning of the sport…People are getting into really big surf.

NU: How would you compare regular surfing to kitesurfing?
NO: When you’re surfing, you’re a lot more at the mercy of the sea. On a kite I can go on a wave twice as big as I can on a surfboard. On a kite you can just run away from the wave or jump over it. It’s okay until you wipe out; then you’re in a lot of trouble. It’s such a rush just being out in bigger surf, and I love jumping high.

NU: How high can you get in the air?
NO: Hard to say because when you’re jumping; they all feel like 100 feet, but I think maybe 30 feet…30 to 40 feet…There are two styles. There are big jumps…and the other style is not as high, and perhaps people that don’t know the sport don’t think it’s quite as interesting. But the punishment is a lot more severe because it’s all really low and fast. Everything is super high power. You wipe out, you hurt.

NU: Where do you go for bigger surf?
NO: The main place is Mokuleia [on Oahu’s North Shore].

NU: It is sketchy over there.
NO: (Chuckles) Yeah, it’ll be like eight foot [Hawaiian] and you’re on the wave and there’s just coral heads sticking out of the water…The wave is super nice.

NU: Have you had any close calls?
NO: Yeah, I was at Mokuleia and my kite went down…I was all spun around backwards in the water getting deeper and deeper. We have a safety release but I couldn’t move out of this position to reach it…I couldn’t get up. Everything’s getting fuzzy, dizzy…These lines are meant to take 1000 pounds of pressure and the line snapped. When it snapped it let me come back up. My kite was ripped to shreds. It’s a dangerous spot, Mokuleia. One person’s died out there kiting. Another guy just broke his back.

NU: How big is the kitesurfing community in Oahu?
NO: I’d say 100 tops. Hawaii is one of the main places for it in the world. One thing that’s cool about kitesurfing is that it’s a smaller community, so everyone knows each other…You need help launching and landing the kite, and so everyone will help you out…Actually, the people on the beach got together after I did my first contest...and they bought me a new board. It was really cool. I had all old gear. The cool thing is this wasn’t only my super good friends; it was also just people on the beach.

NU: Where has kiting taken you?
NO: I spent last year competing [the World Tour] and I got to travel to Australia, Europe and the Mainland. We were in Austria, Belgium, Texas, and San Francisco. It was awesome.

NU: I read in an article that you have also had your struggles and battled eating disorders. How did you come out of that?
NO: It started when was I living in Japan. I was lonely, didn’t speak the language, didn’t know anyone, and the job was really hard…I became anorexic. That lasted for a year. I switched jobs and tried to get better…I tried to start eating normally. But you’ve built up all these defenses…and once you put a hole in the defenses you just eat. It turned into bulimia. That lasted for a year. It got really bad. I didn’t think I’d ever make it back here. Luckily I had some friends and a boyfriend at the time that were like, “You’re dumb, come home.” I felt like I was quitting but they said, “Just come home. Get help.” The most important thing was reconnecting because you cut everybody out…My good group of friends were all really supportive. And it helped because my parents let me come back home and take a time out in my life to get everything started again.

NU: Are eating disorders a problem in Hawaii?
NO: Yeah, I think it’s a huge problem. So many people that hear my story say, “I went through the same thing.”

NU: What other experiences have shaped you as a person?
NO: Right after college, I lived in the Alaskan wilderness for six months…it was seriously out of the 1800s. They dropped us on a mountain; we hiked in; we didn’t see anyone else for six months. There were seven of us. A girl that I graduated with, her family had this homestead and they had lost the lease on the land. They had bought some land next to it, so they had to take apart their cabins and move them…Our nearest neighbor would have taken two weeks to get to. We had a neighbor that was a day away that had frozen to death the winter before.

NU: What?!
NO: Yeah, serious roughing it. We had to carry shotguns because there are bears. No electricity, no water…well, there was a stream.

NU: Was there anyone there who really knew what they were doing and could lead you guys?
NO: We went in with the mom and the daughter of the family, but half way through their dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor. A helicopter showed up with a letter from him, and within a half-an-hour the mom and daughter were gone and the rest of us were there to finish it up. We took the cabins apart, and hauled the logs up stream and then rebuilt them. We got buff.

NU: What is your lifestyle like now?
NO: I get up at 6:30am, ride my bike to work; and after work, if there’s winds I go to the beach for the rest of the day. I like to read a lot, hike…I take care of my cousins a lot on my days off. It’s a lot of fun.