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Beachfront club in Waikiki, Hawaii; the world's oldest surfing organization, founded in 1908 by eccentric Hawaii booster and former New York newspaperman Alexander Hume Ford.

The Outrigger Canoe Club was chartered on one and a half acres of land between the Seaside and Moana hotels, and the original clubhouse consisted of two grass shacks purchased from a nearby zoo. Surfing had become almost moribund in the late 19th century, and Ford, since his arrival in Hawaii in 1907, had become the sport's top patron; thousands of Americans first learned about surfing by reading Ford's 1909 

 magazine article "Riding the Surf in Hawaii." The Outrigger Canoe Club, Ford's biographer later wrote, was conceived and developed "for the purpose of reviving and preserving the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing on boards and in outrigger canoes." Annual membership dues were five dollars. Pineapple magnate Stanford Dole was one of the Outrigger's first Presidents.

By 1910, construction had begun on a new Outrigger clubhouse with a dance pavilion and added storage space for surfboards. The all-male club had been instantly popular; it was, however, almost exclusively 

, or Caucasian. Hui Nalu ("Club of the Waves"), open to native-born Hawaiians, was formed in response and lodged in the Moana Hotel bathhouse next door. Hawaiian surfer and gold medal swimmer Duke Kahanamoku was a Hui Nalu co-founder, although in 1917, while retaining membership in Hui Nalu, he became an honorary lifetime member of the Outrigger; dozens of people would hold dual memberships over the years.

The Outrigger's first captain, George "Dad" Center (later an Olympic swim coach), along with Hui Nalu's John Kaupiko, were early sources for new and secondhand surfboards. "The Outrigger's grass shack on the beach," the 

 wrote in 1996, "was one of the first places where surfboards were built in the modern era, and probably the very first place where a 

 tourist, attracted to the sport of kings by Ford's promotional blitz, could obtain a surfboard."

The Outrigger Canoe Club had 1,200 members by 1915, with hundreds of people on a waiting list; in 1926 the club opened its membership to women; in 1941 it built another new clubhouse, with a dining room and cocktail lounge; and in 1964 it moved again, to a lavish new $1.25 million clubhouse at Diamond Head Beach, about a mile to the east. By the early 2000s the Outrigger Canoe Club had 4,500 members, each paying between $11 to $100 in monthly dues, according to a 12-tiered membership structure. Canoe racing, more so than surfing, has long been the club's main athletic focus.

The Outrigger: A History of the Outrigger Canoe Club

 was published in 1971. Dozens of non-affiliated Outrigger Canoe Club organizations have been founded around the world since the 1980s.

Outrigger Canoe Club, The

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