We splashed through a lot of puddles left over from the rain as we drove slowly along our North Shore town called Princeville. It was quiet and pitch black as we headed down the windy road that leads from the bluffs to the surf spots in and around Hanalei Bay. We clattered across the old one-car steel bridge that marks the official start of the North Shore. The bridge is too narrow and low for big trucks, so this part of the island has only cars on the road. Sometimes heavy rains close this bridge, stranding everyone who lives past it. Personally, I think kids who live there don’t mind at all: they get to miss school!
In the darkness we passed lots and lots of surf spots: the Bay, the Bowl, Pavilions, Pine Trees, Middles, Chicken Wings, Wai Koko. We were headed for the very end of the road called Pauaeaka. Even though it was dark, with the windows down we could smell the beauty of Hawaii: perfumed plumeria and pikake flowers, the wet earth, grass, and salty air. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes so I could picture it in my mind’s eye. Hawaii has this ability to reach out and stir all your senses. It’s truly a magical place, and I wouldn’t live anywhere else on the planet. I looked over at my mom, who was smiling as well—she felt the same way I did about our home.
We drove past the old Waioli Church and the mission house where some of the first missionaries to Hawaii lived, worked, and died. Finally, we crossed over a very narrow wood bridge that marked the end of our journey.
the calm before the attack
The sun wasn’t even up yet. I got out of the car to take a look but it was too dark to see the water. I couldn’t hear much either. If the surf is really big, you can actually hear it crashing on the reef from a long way away. “It doesn’t seem like much is happening,” I told my mom.
Pretty soon the sky east of us began to lighten, and I could see that the surf wasn’t anything like it had been the day before. The small waves dumped right onto a sharp coral reef instead of barreling past it. I was itching to get on my board, but the water was just not going to cooperate. If you surf a lot, you get used to this kind of thing. This island has some of the best waves in the world but my friends and I still get skunked sometimes. There is nothing you can do about it; just go home and do something else.
“I guess we should head back,” Mom sighed. She was equally disappointed. “Maybe the surf will come up tomorrow.” I knew that if I didn’t surf I would be home doing social studies, English, or math. Even though I’m working to be a pro surfer and get to be homeschooled in order to help with those goals, my parents pile on the homework.
As we were driving away, I gave it one last shot: “Let’s just check out Tunnels Beach,” I suggested. Tunnels is a short walk from Pauaeaka. It’s called Tunnels because of all the sand-filled alleys that run through the shallow part of the reef. For tourists it’s a popular place to snorkel. Surfers like it because way out on the edge of the reef is a lightning-fast wave that is good both winter and summer.
“Sure, we can go take a look,” Mom replied. She did a wild U-turn under the trees and pulled into the last space in the parking lot. While she waited, I walked down the little sand path and watched the waves for a while. Still nothing much. And I didn’t really want to paddle out by myself. So I figured that I was doomed to schoolwork and trudged back to the Blue Crush. Suddenly a black pickup truck turned into the parking lot. It was Alana Blanchard, my best friend, her sixteen-year-old brother, Byron, and her dad, Holt. They, like me, were on a mission to find something to surf in.
“Okay,” I thought, maybe this wouldn’t be a total washout after all. Even though the wave conditions were crummy, everything else was working: it was sunny, the water was warm, and my friends were here to hang with.
“Can I stay, Mom?” I asked. “We think we’ll paddle out for some small waves.” Why not make the best of it?
“Just make sure Holt brings you home” she called, and with that, I raced down the jungle trail with my friends to Tunnels Beach. I dug my toes into the warm sand and watched the rising sun illuminate the blue sea. Amazingly, the rain hadn’t clouded the waters here. Even with all mud-filled rivers pouring into other surf spots, it was as clear as glass.
I glanced over to see Holt putting wax on his board (to keep his feet from slipping). I put the surfboard leash on my left foot, and my Tim Carroll surfboard under my arm. I was happy that I was going surfing; I was happy to be with my friends. I felt the warm water slosh against my ankles, and just before I jumped in, I looked at my watch.
It was 6:40 on a beautiful Halloween morning.
2
roots
A lot of who I am comes from my parents. They’re incredible people who’ve always worked very hard to reach their goals. I know a lot of teenagers think their parents are total aliens from another planet, but I actually think mine are pretty cool. They not only support me in everything I want to do, but they also really inspire me to be a great surfer and even more important, a great human being.
My dad was the ultimate surfer nut. Picture this (when I do, it cracks me up!): it’s the dead of winter in Ocean City, New Jersey. Icicles are hanging from the edges of buildings, and the snow is swirling around the sidewalks, rapidly burying the curbs and making huge mounds against the buildings. Everyone is bundled against the cold and scraping the ice off their car windows. Along comes my dad, Tom Hamilton, this skinny seventeen-year-old, trudging through the snowbanks with a surfboard on his head and his beaver tail hat (à la Davy Crockett!) flapping behind him. Dressed in a primitive thick, black diving wetsuit, he would grease his armpits with thick Vaseline to ward off wetsuit rash. And looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, he would head out—blizzard and all—to his favorite Ocean City surf spot, Tenth Street.
There he’d meet up with his best buddy, Monk, and the two of them would cross a deserted beach, frosted white, to surf the icy gray Atlantic in conditions so severe that their eyebrows would often freeze solid. Tom and Monk started surfing together as little kids, around age thirteen and fourteen, in the summer of 1962. Within a few years, both boys were dedicated fanatics who took their sport seriously year-round.
“In the winter we would do anything we could think of to keep warm,” my dad has told me. “There were no leashes on surfboards, so if you fell off during the winter months the swim to the beach was brutally cold. We came up with the idea to pour hot water down our wetsuits before going surfing to give us a little edge in the cold. We would be steaming like teakettles all the way to the beach.”
I always wondered how my dad knew he was born to be a surfer. When I ask him, he says it was more like destiny took him by the hand and led him to the waves. His parents, George and Mary Hamilton, moved with their four kids around New Jersey a few times before settling in Ocean City. While George set up his dental practice, Mary made sure that my dad and his two brothers and his sister were deeply involved in the sport of swimming.
One day, my grandpa, “Dr. George,” brought home a surfboard for my dad. It was a factory-produced pop-out model (as opposed to a normal hand-shaped surfboard) that was on sale at, of all places, a hardware store. One try and Dad was hooked. Soon he and Monk were part of the regular surf scene on the Jersey shore. If Grandpa had only known the daily ritual he created!
moving on
In 1968 my dad graduated from Ocean City High School. As a graduation gift, my grandparents sent him to Manhattan Beach, California, so he could spend the summer surfing. This was the best gift he could ever have imagined. There he prowled up and down the coast tasting firsthand the waves he had only heard about in magazines. But there was a war on. Student deferments were ending, and eighteen-year-old boys everywhere were being drafted and shipped off to the jungles of Vietnam. My dad, hoping that he could find a way to stay around and surf a bit more, joined the reserves but found his unit quickly activated. So, hoping to stick close to the water, he enlisted in the navy.
In 1970 he was sent to Vietnam, and his job was to blast the ship’s big guns in support of troop movements. That powerful n
oise would damage his hearing for life. And though it was not exactly the place that a surfer kid imagined himself winding up, this too proved to be fate.
On his ship, Dad met a young sailor named Robby from Hawaii. Since they both loved surfing, they immediately bonded. Dad was awestruck by the incredible surfing tales Robby would spin. “When this thing is over,” Robby kept telling him, “You come to Hawaii!”
During Christmas of 1971, Dad made his first visit to the islands. It was love at first sight. Who could resist the warm tropical trade winds, the transparent, inviting water, the powerful winter waves and the casual, relaxed lifestyle? “One day . . .” he told Robby—making a wish on the waves. Because at that time, since he had completed his service, California was home. He settled in San Diego, enrolled in Mesa Junior College, and, of course, spent all of his free time surfing along the reef-lined Sunset Cliff area.
But it wasn’t easy to keep his mind on his studies. His thoughts were someplace far away; he was consumed with getting back to Hawaii. And after two semesters, with my grandparents insisting he had lost his mind, Dad quit school, took the little savings he had from his part-time job, a backpack, and a surfboard, and caught a one-way flight to Hawaii.
He ended up on the island of Kauai. From the airport, Dad hitchhiked to the North Shore, catching a ride in the back of an old red pickup truck filled with buckets of pig slop. The jungles outside Hanalei town had been taken over by a strange breed of hippie surfers. Some, like future world champion Margo Oberg and her husband, Steve, had actually built comfortable and substantial tree houses out of scrap wood and plastic tarp. Others lived a more gritty existence in mildewing tents or rough makeshift shelters. The place was called Taylor’s Camp, because the land these squatters lived on was owned by a relative of actress Elizabeth Taylor.
My dad was new to Hawaii, and admittedly pretty clueless. Anxious to get settled and get surfing, he selected a nice ditch to call home. He built a wooden platform for his tent and went surfing every day at Pauaeaka, Tunnels, or at the huge point waves wrapping into Hanalei Bay. But early in rainy season he learned his first lesson: The ditch was really a dormant riverbed, and when he returned from surfing he found that his “home” and all of his belongings had been washed away!
a perfect match . . . a world away
Around the time my dad was thawing out his frost-bitten toes in New Jersey, on the other end of the continent, in the warm California sun, my mom, Cheri Lynch, and her older sister, Debbie, were slowly dragging a heavy rented surfboard across the sand in Mission Beach, a funky seafront community just north of San Diego. My mom was just twelve, and she could barely wrap her arms around the massive board. She pushed the long, thick hunk of foam and resin toward the horizon, stumbling from time to time in small underwater potholes the current had dug in the sand.
When my mom talks about that moment—her first time surfing—it’s as if she’s living it all over again. For anyone who truly is a surfer, it’s the greatest thrill on earth. I like to hear her talk about it, how she did it, and how she felt: When the water had reached her waist, she swung the nose of the board toward shore and then awkwardly lumbered on board and started to paddle. A rush of rolling white water picked up the surfboard and raced it toward the sand. She rose to her feet, and in a wide beginner stance, rode her first and last wave of the day all the way to the beach. “It was a monumental moment in my life,” she often tells me. And I know what she means. Surfing is an addiction, a pleasure rush indescribable to anyone who has not experienced it. And when it grabs you, it won’t let go.
My mom drove her parents crazy with pleas to drive her the twenty minutes down Interstate 8 to the surf rolling in at the foot of Law Street in Pacific Beach. Luckily, my grandparents loved the sand and surf as well. My grandpa, John Lynch, was a football and wrestling coach at San Diego High School. And since his summer schedule was light, it was easy to load up the family (my grandma, Dorothy, Mom, and Aunts Debbie and Karen) into the car and spend the long summer days at the beach.
When not surfing, Mom would snorkel over the kelp-covered reefs of La Jolla searching for legal-size abalone, which they would pop off the rocks with an ab iron. Mom was a daredevil. Some days she and her sisters would spend the afternoon at Marine Street and join others in the lunatic fringe sport of “body whomping” (a crazy kind of body surfing where, if one is not careful, the shallow draining wave will smack its rider into the dry sand bottom with a “whomp!”)
Back in her day, girl surfers were a rarity. It was a boys’ club, mainly because the early surfboards were heavy and unwieldy. Strong swimming skills were mandatory and leashes were not used. You had to be a real athlete—and she was—to surf with the guys. And frankly, the men didn’t mind at all: “I never had to carry my heavy yellow 9’6” surfboard to or from the beach,” my mom likes to brag, “There was always a bunch of boys around who were more than willing to help.”
When mom graduated she moved to Planet Central for anyone in the hippie, surf, and weirdo scene: Ocean Beach. But she, too, was on her way to Kauai. After pinballing around Southern California, and doing a short-lived detour into the skiing culture of Mammoth Mountain, California, she decided she needed a less hectic lifestyle and a more challenging surf. Kauai, in the early ’70s, had not yet been discovered by most tourists but Hollywood had already come knocking. Elvis made a movie there (Blue Hawaii) in 1961. And in 1958 Mitzi Gaynor and John Kerr used the North Shore as a backdrop for the film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. But for the most part, it was slow-paced, rural, and rich in Hawaiian tradition.
My mom, tired of traveling alone, had talked a casual friend, Chris, into joining her on the adventure. She arrived at the small airport in Lihue, her gear unloaded directly in front of her on slanted steel-covered tables. Weighed down with surfboards and backpacks, the pair made their way to the main highway with the intention of hitchhiking the thirty miles to the North Shore. It took eight hours before a VW van full of surfers finally allowed them to pile in.
Mom had some money saved up so she was able to surf and camp. She immediately found the surfing conditions on Kauai much bigger than anything she was used to in California. She spent her days developing her skill in the large waves and her nights around a campfire with many other surfing expatriates and hippie characters who had migrated to the shores of Kauai.
ladybug and tunas get acquainted
My dad got a job as a banquet waiter at the Kauai Surf Hotel. The hotel was located in the town of Lihue, quite a way from his tent on the North Shore. Since he had no car, he would hitchhike to and from work. But getting a ride home late at night was difficult. There were times when he only got halfway home. Shuffling through some small town at two in the morning, miles from his final location, he would occasionally creep into a local church and sleep on the pews, wrapping himself with the preacher’s robe when he got cold.
The North Shore is almost like a small town. Everyone comes to know your neighbors. It didn’t take long for my dad to notice the pretty blonde who had been given the nickname Ladybug by her fellow surfers. (He had a nickname as well. He was called Tunas because he used to swim laps in the ocean during his breaks in work so often that everyone said he was like a tuna fish.)
But Mom wasn’t interested. She had a boyfriend at the time. She and my dad became friends, but that was it. Until one day, Mom will say, “I didn’t have a boyfriend anymore. And things started to happen . . .”
On the following Valentine’s Day, which is also my mom’s birthday, dad popped the question. “Your mother burst into tears . . . then she married me six months later,” Dad explains. And it was a given that any children this couple would have would be quickly introduced to the sport that both their parents loved.
There was, after all, saltwater in the bloodline.
3
a serious
competitor
“Two brothers!”
That’s my answer when people ask me why I am
so competitive. After all, when you’re the youngest of three kids and the only girl, you kind of have to learn to hold your own. But besides the whole anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better thing going on between us, my brothers really did inspire me. They’re both so different. Noah is twenty-one and a stand-up surfer—just like my mom, my dad, and me. He’s pretty skinny, and very quick on the waves. He’s also into still photography. He shot most of the great pictures I have of me surfing. What do I admire most about him? When he gets into something he goes all the way. He is very determined and focused.
My brother Timmy is seventeen and he enjoys being the odd guy out—and the class clown. When Noah got into surfing, Timmy decided to be a body boarder. A body board is a hunk of soft foam just over a yard long that is used like a surfboard, except you don’t stand up on it. Body boards don’t have fins on the bottom; they have hard edges that are used to control turns. Body boarders wear swim fins to help them catch waves with their smaller boards.
Many stand-up surfers don’t give body boarders any respect. They call them “spongers” and ignore them in the water or even try to take waves from them. But a good body boarder can really put on an impressive show. They get deeper in the tube than surfers do, take off later, and do crazy aerial stunts. So you can see why Timmy was drawn to it—crazy stunts are his specialty!
Timmy can always crack me up—that’s how he is with everyone. He has this natural talent for knowing exactly what to do or say, that one thing that will put a smile on your face no matter how grave or serious the situation. He’ll do anything—and I mean anything—for a laugh. For example, after my attack, a national TV show was interviewing him, and he was acting all goofy and grooming his hair on-camera. “Who cares if the world thinks I’m nuts?” he told me when I teased him about it. He just wanted to make sure his buddies back home were laughing at Timmy the maniac on TV! But Timmy is more than just funny—he does all the editing to the hours of video my Mom and Dad take of me surfing. He gets really creative and puts cool music to the pictures.
Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board Page 2