The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Waianae natives likely rode Makaha in the centuries before Cook’s arrival, but nobody knows for sure. The break’s only premodern surfer of record is Kuho’oheihei “Abner” Paki, the partially Westernized high chief father of Hawaii’s revered Queen Liliuokalani, who rode Makaha during the mid-nineteenth century on a 14-foot, 150-pound olo monstrosity. When Kelly and Froiseth began riding Makaha, they did so believing they were the first. They eased into it. Full-size Point Surf was too much for the early hot curl prototypes, but the Empty Lot Boys were confident in their new equipment and pumped to the gills with immortal teenage swagger. They understood that new big surf techniques were theirs to invent; three or four years later, they were confidently paddling into waves bigger than anything they’d ever seen in Waikiki.

  Other Waikiki surfers were curious enough about Makaha to venture out and give it a try, but just a few made it a regular thing. “We’d lose guys in two ways,” Froiseth recalled. “We’d drive out there, bragging the whole way about the surf, and it would be totally flat. And they’d say ‘Ah, you guys are bullshitting,’ and there was nothing to do then but turn around and drive back. The other thing that happened was, the surf would be so goddamn big they’d just sit on the beach, scared shitless, and not go out at all. Same thing. They couldn’t wait to get back to Waikiki.”

  * * *

  Froiseth, Kelly, and a few others also began making day trips to the North Shore, after hearing stories from visiting California surfers Whitey Harrison and Tarzan Smith about a powerful reef break near Haleiwa Town. The North Shore was about the same distance from Waikiki as Makaha, but much easier to get to: drive straight across the island on the well-paved Kamehameha Highway, through the cane fields and past the tent rows at Schofield Barracks, then bear right, about one mile inland, just past the big gray smokestack at the Waialua Sugar Mill.

  The North Shore was a different world compared to Makaha. Everything about the West Side was isolated, including Makaha, and settlements were strung out along a coastal road that eventually funneled down to nothing. The North Shore formed a corridor between two plantation towns, Haleiwa and Kahuku. It was rural, but not empty; family farms took up many of the one-acre lots on the inland side of Kam Highway, and a handful of modest wood-frame cottages were scattered along the beachfront, most of them owned by the Honolulu gentry and used as weekend retreats.

  The two surfing environments were different as well. As terrifying a big-wave break as Makaha could become at times, its location—in the lee of Keana Point, Oahu’s fang-shaped western corner—was actually protected from much of the year’s biggest surf and heaviest weather. The North Shore squared up directly against both incoming waves and storms, which meant bigger surf, mixed-swell combinations, plenty of rain (nearly double the amount that fell on the West Side), and stronger, less predictable winds. A vast network of reefs began at the water’s edge and moved seaward in an irregular progression for up to a mile offshore. The seven-mile North Shore wave zone that began at Haleiwa was denser and more complex than any other like-sized area in the world, with breaks often shingled one on top of the other. It was overwhelming, particularly in the early years. A handful of locals surfers rode Haleiwa in the 1920s and early 1930s, but only the small nearshore waves. When they paddled out on a bigger day in 1938, Tarzan Smith and Whitey Harrison were subjected to a good long watery beating. Wally Froiseth and the hot curlers, driving out to the North Shore not long afterward, were right to think of the North Shore as a surfing wilderness.

  Sunset Beach quickly revealed itself as the North Shore’s most consistent break. Like Makaha, Sunset is a right-breaking wave with a variety of component parts. Unlike Makaha, it takes shape as a wedge, not a wall; it has alternating steep and flat sections and a takeoff area that ranges fifty yards in any direction from wave to wave. Makaha Point Surf breaks with force equal to that of Sunset. But Sunset is a more complicated spot, and harder to ride.

  SUNSET BEACH, OAHU.

  WOODY BROWN.

  BROWN, BOTTOM RIGHT, AT MAKAHA.

  Premodern Hawaiians called the break Paumalu (a 1910s land speculator named it Sunset Beach), and it was famous across the island chain. A handsome wave-hunting prince from Kauai, according to a popular myth, traveled to Oahu to try Paumalu, and there he met and fell in love with the Bird Maiden, who invited him into her cave on a hillside above the break. A few months later, while leaving the water at Paumalu, the prince accepted a kiss and a flower lei from a beautiful admirer who’d been watching from the beach, and thus broke his vow of fidelity to the Bird Maiden. Vengeance came quickly; the prince only made it halfway up the hillside before the Bird Maiden turned him to stone.

  Sunset was the first North Shore wave Wally Froiseth, Fran Heath, and the rest of the hot curl gang rode. They liked it well enough, and were awed by the sheer number of breaks along the North Shore. Makaha, though, remained their favorite surf-travel destination. Chasing bigger waves was a thrill, but it was also time-consuming and intense; by focusing more on one break—Makaha—instead of roaming the coast from Haleiwa to Sunset, the whole operation was a bit more grounded. The North Shore became their second choice; a place to go when the West Side surf was down.

  Small but crucial changes were made to the hot curl design during the late 1930s and early 1940s, always with an eye toward improving the board’s grip on the wave face. Most of the work was on the hull, near the tail: a V-shaped bottom was tried and rejected, as water churned back on itself as it moved across the V’s spine, which threw the board into a drift. As Froiseth described it, the real aim was “calculated drag”—where water essentially vacuumed onto the board’s tail as it flowed past. On later versions, the hot curl’s tail section became more U-shaped, with a gently rounded planing surface through the middle. Width, length, and thickness all came down, as the hot curl surfers discovered that less volume allowed the board to knife deeper into the wave face, especially at higher speeds.

  Surfers rode waves differently on the new boards, aiming to lock onto an angle parallel to the curl and shoot across until the wave backed down (“trimming,” as it would later be called). Angling translated directly into more speed, and each new hot curl design change was like adding another top-end gear to a car. Surfing style changed too. Tricks were out. No more headstands or backward-riding. Good surfers still rode from the center of the board with their feet close together, touching if possible, like the older plank riders did, but the new flourish was to arch the back while in mid-trim, as if a basic upright stance just couldn’t be maintained in the face of such heavy acceleration. When the wave slowed up, the hot curler shuffled back a foot or so, stomped the tail, and made a pivoting direction change—nothing too sharp—then quickly shuffled forward to get the board planning again.

  Showmanship was still important. At Queen’s in Waikiki, beachboy Rabbit Kekai would get into trim, then arch with teenage insolence as the curl spilled over his knees and waist; near the end of a ride, just to put a little flair into his pullout, he’d stutter-step to the front of his board, crouch down, bury the nose and lean bodily into the wave face, throwing the tail out and around like a huge wooden scythe. Paddling back out, he’d smile and yell “society turn” whenever he saw an older surfer guiding a plank through a slow, deliberate change of direction. Small but well-muscled, Kekai was more aggressive than anyone with the hand-plane and sanding blocks; he eventually pared his favorite hot curl down to a thinned-out 7 feet 6 inches—in calm water, a bigger surfer could stand on Kekai’s board and pin it to the bottom.

  Kekai was an early addition to the Makaha crew, joining Wally Froiseth, John Kelly, and Fran Heath. Another newcomer was Woody Brown, a high-society-born New Yorker and record-holding glider pilot who sailed for Honolulu in 1940, at age twenty-eight, grief-stricken after his wife died in childbirth. He bought a bike and rode aimlessly around Oahu, staying with whoever would take him in; he also returned to surfing, something he’d picked up four years earlier, while living in San Diego County
. The first friend he made in Hawaii was Wally Froiseth. Brown had built his own gliders, and rightly believed that much of what he knew about aerodynamics could be applied to surfboards, so he jumped right into the ongoing hot curl project. Froiseth and the others thought Brown was a bit of an odd duck—he was older, widowed, agnostic, vegetarian—but he was smart and enthusiastic, and just as ready as they were to paddle into big surf. Brown rode Makaha like he was born there, and it wasn’t long before his sleek boards were getting noticed as well.

  And so it went for the Empty Lot Boys and their hot curl converts, into the fall of 1941. They lived at a nearly surreal remove from the rest of the world, both geographically and psychologically. Jobs were still hard to come by in Honolulu. The war in Europe raged on. Japan was carving up Southeast Asia. Yet none of that seemed to matter. The winter wave season had just arrived, and Hawaii’s surfing vanguard spent the first three weeks in December riding Makaha, or making plans to do so, and talking a lot about who had a faster board, Froiseth or Brown. These were the important things.

  World War II and a Tragedy at Waimea

  On December 7, 1941, a California surfer named Don James set the autotimer on his camera and took a photo of himself and two friends standing with their boards in front of a rented bungalow at Topanga Beach, near Malibu. “Sixty bucks a month rent, split three ways,” James said more than fifty years later, looking at the image. “Right about then news came over the radio about Pearl Harbor, and suddenly everything changed. We all looked at each other, and we all knew we were going off to war.”

  Nearly every able-bodied surfer over the age of seventeen enlisted, and within six months American lineups were close to empty. Hawaii, in particular, was transformed. Martial law was declared across the islands. The Lurline, the Mariposa, and the rest of the elegant creamy-white fleet of Matson ocean liners that for years had delivered tourists to Honolulu were commandeered by the U.S. Navy. Razor wire was unspooled around the beach perimeter at Waikiki and Makaha to guard against the expected amphibious landing of Japanese forces, the entire Royal Hawaiian Hotel was leased out as a Pacific Fleet R&R center, and gun emplacements were built on the slopes of Diamond Head. It was rumored that soldiers would direct a blast of machine-gun fire over the head of any surfer who lingered in the water past curfew.

  In Australia, the war further burnished the already heroic reputation of the nation’s surf lifesavers. A 1941 newsreel included shots of Bondi Surf Club members while a solemn voice-over noted that surf clubs had “an enlistment record second to none” and were “the crucible from which fighting material emerges.” Manly Surf Club alone placed 271 members in the service during the war; to fill the void, women were recruited into surf lifesaving and sometimes even given beach-patrol responsibilities. Australia was also an active combat zone: Japanese fighters repeatedly bombed the Northern Territory port city of Darwin, over a half dozen merchant vessels were sunk off the east coast, and twenty-one sailors were killed in a daring midget sub raid on Sydney Harbor.

  In California, surfboard production came to a near-halt as building materials of every kind were claimed by the military. A Long Beach surf break named Flood Control—the most popular spot between Palos Verdes and San Onofre—was destroyed when the Army Corps of Engineers surrounded the area with a huge Pacific Fleet–protecting breakwater. The Coast Guard built a station at Malibu and put a barbed-wire fence around the point; two or three Coast Guard surfers had permission to ride there, but Malibu’s perfect waves were otherwise off-limits for the duration. Same with San Onofre, now part of the Camp Pendleton Marine Base. The Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships were cancelled. Rationing made surf travel a lot harder: government-issued coupon books allowed most civilians just four gallons of gas a week, and a lightly enforced but still annoying “Victory Speed Limit” was set at 35 miles per hour. Night driving wasn’t illegal, but using headlights was.

  Most American surfers enlisted in either the navy (which then included the Coast Guard) or the marines, and their wartime experience, like that of soldiers everywhere, was generally mundane and occasionally tragic or heroic. Palos Verdes Surf Club founder John “Doc” Ball was a dentist on a Coast Guard transport ship. Navy man Charlie Butler, another PVSC member, went down with the USS Edsall during the Battle of Java Sea. The peripatetic Tom Blake, by then a forty-year-old Miami Beach lifeguard, became a Coast Guard dog handler. Naval Petty Officer Pete Peterson did at-sea repair work on battle ships and destroyers in the Philippines.

  John Kelly and Fran Heath served together on a navy escort ship in the South Pacific; their easygoing captain let them travel with their boards and granted them wave-riding shore leave at Midway Island and Christmas Island. Later, both surfers did underwater demolition work, and Kelly received a Navy and Marine Corps Medal for recovering an unexploded submarine torpedo. The day after Pearl Harbor, Kelly, then a Naval Reservist, began a two-week detail crisscrossing the oil-blackened waters of the harbor in search of dead bodies, which he loaded two at a time into plywood boxes.

  “SUNSET LOOKED ABOUT TEN-FOOT, AND SAFE ENOUGH. BUT JUST AS WE GOT OUT PAST THE BREAK, A TREMENDOUS SET APPEARED ON THE HORIZON. I SAID TO MYSELF, ‘THIS IS IT. IT’S ALL OVER.’”

  —Woody Brown

  Woody Brown, a pacifist and registered conscientious objector, remained in Hawaii, surfing and riding his bike—but tragedy found him anyway. On December 22, 1943, Brown drove across the island to the North Shore with a gung-ho high school surfer named Dickie Cross. Brown, thirty-one, had remarried and was living in a rented apartment above the Waikiki Tavern, a plank-walled beachside eatery that would soon become the favorite gathering place for visiting California surfers. Cross, a headstrong seventeen-year-old from a moneyed Honolulu family was on Christmas break during his junior year at Punahou, Hawaii’s best and most expensive private school.

  Arriving at Sunset Beach in the midafternoon, Brown and Cross rushed out into what appeared to be ten- or twelve-foot surf. Approaching the lineup, they realized that it was much bigger—too big, in fact. Without catching a single wave, both surfers turned their boards around for a quick retreat to shore, and discovered that the outgoing current in the channel was too strong to paddle against. Turning around, they sprinted hard to make it over the top of a fringing twenty-footer, only to see the ominous blue-black ribbons of an even bigger set in the middle distance. Ten minutes later, safe for the moment and a half mile offshore, Cross and Brown realized that all routes to the beach were now filled with huge, impassable lines of whitewater. Brown suggested they first move out even further, as a precaution, then paddle three miles west to Waimea Bay, where the North Shore’s deepest channel might still offer a clear passage to the beach. Forty-five minutes later, approaching Waimea, Cross peeled off and aimed for the bay’s eastern point, ignoring Brown’s yelled order to hold back until they’d lined up a straight shot down the middle of the bay.

  Sure enough, Cross was caught on the shoreward side of a breaking wave and lost his board, at which point he began swimming furiously toward Brown. But an even bigger set was coming, and Brown, hoping to clear it, had to paddle away from Cross, who was now shouting for help. The first wave lumbered up to vertical, fifty feet from trough to crest, twice the size of anything Brown had ever faced. He didn’t have a chance. On autopilot as the crest folded over, Brown shoved his board away and swam down until the water pressure clamped onto his eardrums, waited until the concussive force passed by overhead, then stroked for the surface. He had time for two or three ragged breaths, and it was back down for the next wave. Then another. And another. Each time Brown managed to get deep enough to avoid the worst of the turbulence. After the fourth wave, he finally surfaced into calm water.

  Gasping and light-headed, further out to sea than he’d been just a few minutes ago, Brown looked back toward shore as the set’s final wave churned up the beach, the entire bay now carpeted in a thick residue of foam. Cross had vanished. Brown floated for a moment, taking stock. The late afterno
on was turning to dusk, and he wouldn’t survive the night at sea even if he positioned himself farther offshore. There was no choice. He began to swim for the beach, intending to put himself in the path of the next two or three sets. By not avoiding the whitewater, he hoped that he’d be pushed to shore before he drowned. That’s exactly what happened. Fifteen minutes later, tumbling forward naked on a shorebreak wave—his trunks long since ripped away—Brown dug his hands and feet into the sandy Waimea berm and began crawling. He was pulled to safety by a group of soldiers who’d spotted Brown from the highway and rushed down.

  Brown was hospitalized overnight, and for two or three years refused to go back to that side of the island. Cross’s body was never found. His death, and the unimaginable two-hour lost-at-sea horror show that he and Brown experienced beforehand, became a cornerstone for what the next generation of big-wave surfers often called the “North Shore voodoo.”

  In peacetime, Dickie Cross’s drowning would have been headline news. As it was, he got three short paragraphs on the Honolulu Star-Bulletin obituary page. Soldiers were dying the world over. German factories were in flames along the Rhine, U.S. Navy destroyers were fanning out across the South Pacific, and a million American servicemen were drilling in the United Kingdom for what promised to be some kind of huge European offensive. These were the things that Hawaii and the rest of the country were paying attention to.