Nevertheless, détente between local and mainland surfers was the rule, and for every brown-on-white brawl there was an offsetting example of respect and affection. Rabbit Kekai, Waikiki’s hottest young surfer, got along well with nearly all the Californian surfers, traded boards with them, and led everyone into the lineup on big days at Publics and Castle Break. Hawaii locals George Downing, Wally Froiseth, and Russ Takaki crashed in a lot of guestrooms during their 1949 California surfari, and they struck up friendships that in some cases lasted more than fifty years.
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The Waikiki Surf Club anchored the Hawaii surf scene for nearly a decade after the war. Founded in 1947 by a Long Beach–raised haole transplant named John Lind, the club was located about three hundred yards on the Diamond Head side of the Royal Hawaiian and was attached to a popular beach-front restaurant-bar called the Waikiki Tavern. The homely basement-level retreat was light on amenities, but it did have a row of board lockers, a single shower, an aging termite-filled outrigger canoe, and a young Chinese-Hawaiian attendant to run errands, sweep the floors, and take out the garbage.
Unlike the venerable Outrigger Canoe Club, which had long since transformed itself from a hardcore surfers’ group to a brunch-serving society organization, the Waikiki Surf Club was casual in the extreme, with cheap dues and damp trunks hung everywhere. Also, it was a mixed-race organization, open to visiting surfers as well as residents. Over five hundred members signed up by the end of the Waikiki Surf Club’s first year. Lind and the other founding members would later organize surfing events and canoe races, but the club served primarily as a lounge area and meeting place. Proximity to the Waikiki Tavern was a main attraction; cash-strapped visiting surfers would often hand over a few coins to friends dining on the Tavern’s $1.25 all-you-can-eat buffet, loiter around outside, and wait for food to be passed over the veranda wall. (The buffet was also used by visiting surfers as a training ground for their occasional assaults on M’s Ranch House, home to the ultimate steak challenge: polish off a four-and-a-half pound sirloin with all the trimmings in an hour or less, and the meal was free. Pull up a few bites short, and it was a budget-busting $9.95. All but a half-dozen surfers failed. Winners and losers alike were often carried out doubled-over in pain. Big-wave powerhouse Buzzy Trent, in 1954, devoured his portion in a record-breaking twenty minutes and walked out smiling.)
The hottest surfing in Waikiki took place at Queen’s, a snappy little wave almost directly in front of the Waikiki Surf Club. In his late twenties just after the war (and a dedicated surfer since the age of five), Rabbit Kekai was the break’s nimble-footed ace. Kekai rode a slender redwood hot curl board, trimming high across the clean Waikiki peelers like Napoleon surveying the infantry, heels touching and hands cupped together at waist level, biceps flexed, back straight, hips forward, head slightly cocked—the very model of mid-century Hawaiian surfing style. Kekai sometimes hired on as a longshoreman, but for the most part he worked as a beach-boy. Not long after the war, using a hundred-dollar stake earned in a craps game, he bought a fleet of brightly painted hollow boards and propped them up around a beachfront banyan tree next to a “Surfboards for Rent” sign. Friendly and talkative, Kekai was a favorite surf instructor among visiting Hollywood celebrities in the fifties, and he launched Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, and Gary Cooper, among others, into their first waves. Cooper so enjoyed Kekai’s company that he invited him out to an upscale night on the town; when Kekai admitted that he didn’t own a suit, Cooper found him a tailor and paid to have one made.
A few years later, Paramount hired Kekai to work on Blue Hawaii, and he got into a shouting match with Elvis Presley. “I could’ve handled him, no problem,” Kekai once said with a shrug. “But instead I went to the director and told him, ‘Hey, I’m out of here.’” And it was back down to Queen’s for an afternoon surf and an easy sawbuck or two on board rentals.
George Downing: Rocket to Makaha
There were still a few challenging surf spots waiting to be discovered along the sparkling four-mile necklace of reefs between Diamond Head and Honolulu Harbor, and this would keep Waikiki in general (unlike California’s San Onofre) in surfing’s forefront during the years to come. But the real Waikiki, the soft-lit beachfront of song and story—Queen’s Surf and Canoes and the rest of the interlocked breaks in front of the Moana and the Royal Hawaiian; crossroads for Duke Kahanamoku and Jack London and David Niven and the Prince of Wales and Rabbit Kekai—was already fading into surfing’s historic past. It was Makaha, the dehumidified West Side outpost, and Waikiki’s polar opposite in terms of glamour and comfort, that kept Hawaii at the center of progressive surfing.
In the early 1950s, several surfers decided to tackle big-wave riding as a kind of Manhattan Project. John Kelly and the other original hot curlers had first ridden Makaha in 1937, and over the next fifteen years ambitious Hawaiians had continued making occasional day-trip visits to test themselves in bigger waves. They hadn’t made much progress, though, and the Makaha trip was always a risk. With their still-finless boards, it didn’t do anyone much good to leave the tiny winter surf at Waikiki only to arrive at Makaha and find the point loaded up with unrideable eighteen-footers.
Surfers from Hawaii and the mainland contributed equally to the new charge on Makaha, but George Downing, a slender Waikiki regularfooter and the youngest and most tightly wound of the group, went at it harder than anybody. Downing was twenty in 1950, but as the protégé and nephew by marriage to early hot curl pioneer Wally Froiseth, he already had years of Makaha experience. His surfing was more graceful than flashy, and he had a reputation as an excellent sailor and canoeist, as well as a deadly paddleboard racer. Like Bob Simmons, Downing focused on ocean sports with a scholar’s obsession: on calm days he snorkeled over reefs to better understand how they affected incoming waves, he studied weather charts to better decipher swell creation, and he invented a way of corkscrewing his body into the water during a wipeout to minimize the punishment. Downing found as much joy in riding waves as anybody. But he regarded the amount of surf-based knowledge left to be unearthed as both a challenge and a responsibility—almost a burden. Downing didn’t take many days off.
In the early 1950s, the details of wave formation were still largely a mystery—not just to surfers but to science itself. A New York–born oceanographic engineer and underwater diamond prospector named Willard Bascom, however, was then conducting research that would help explain things to both groups. It was understood by this time that storm winds create waves, and bigger storms make bigger waves. (Although even this primary bit of wave science was new to a lot of people. “Wind has nothing to do with big surf,” Tom Blake wrote in his 1935 book Hawaiian Surfriders; large waves originated instead from “the jars, the shaking, the vibration from inside of the earth.”) How big the surf will be, and of what grade and quality, Bascom learned, depends on a long and complicated set of variables: the speed, duration, and fetch of the wind as it blows over the ocean surface and transfers energy from air to water; how far the resultant wave-loaded “swell” travels between storm and shoreline; any combining or crosshatching, during that journey, with secondary or tertiary swells; and the angle of approach as the swell moves ashore. An unbroken ocean wave moves through the water as a partially submerged gyre of energy—sort of like an invisible rolling pin. It slowly decays as it travels but compensates by riding lower in the water, which preserves energy. Bigger waves, furthermore, cluster together in “sets,” thus conserving energy in the same way as bicyclists drafting off one another during a road race. Two to five waves per set is average, but ten-wave sets aren’t unheard of. Frequency varies, but on average a set will pulse through the lineup about every seven or eight minutes. (All of this would be explained in detail in Bascom’s flat-toned but essential 1964 book Ocean and Waves.)
As Bascom noted, the farther a swell travels, the greater the distance is between individual waves. This wave-to-wave interval is called “period,” and it is measured, alway
s in seconds, as the time it takes for two consecutive wave crests to pass a stationary point. As big-wave surfers soon figured out, period, more than wave height, is the data that really counts. A given swell, at a fixed point in the ocean, filtering through a sensor-loaded oceanographic buoy, is described in binary terms, with wave height as the first number and period as the second. From a surfer’s perspective, for any kind of decent surf, the period usually has to be at least double the wave height: four feet at ten seconds, for example, or six at twelve, or eight at twenty. Because a long-period swell has so much of its energy packed away below the surface, a wave-height figure alone is close to useless for evaluating how good the surf will actually be at the beach. A five-foot-at-nine-second swell might produce head-high surf, while a five-at-sixteen swell at the same break could mean waves double-overhead or bigger. Today, surfers memorize these binary figures, and the type of waves each set of numbers is likely to produce, like a catechism.
Tracking waves as they make their final charge for shore is a different matter. Science, here, often goes out the window. Refraction, drag, bathymetry, interrupted orbital motion—all the basic descriptors pulled from the oceanographer’s lexicon to describe the forces behind a breaking wave—will draw blank stares from even professional-level surfers. Or especially professional-level surfers, whose nearshore wave knowledge isn’t studied but beaten and caressed into existence, and then tapped without conscious thought. This morning’s new long-period southwest swell laid over a fading local wind swell, for example, means chest-high double-up wedges at the north end of the beach on the outgoing tide. Academic to the wave-observing scientist. The day’s meat to a surfer.
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By the fifties, George Downing understood the mechanics of big waves better than any other surfer. He wasn’t unequaled as a big-wave board designer—Joe Quigg, for one, had plenty of arrows left in his quiver—but he was the best combination shaper/test pilot in the game. Downing was fourteen when Froiseth helped him remake an old redwood plank into a sleek hot curl he named “Pepe.” It was a slow, labor-intensive project, undertaken in Froiseth’s garage with a drawknife and a hand plane, and as Downing whittled his new board into existence he collected the shavings in a pair of burlap potato bags, which he occasionally slept on. In 1948, when Downing and Froiseth toured the California coast, Bob Simmons showed him how to use resin and fiberglass, but for over a year Downing held off on using the new materials for his own boards. Furthermore, he rejected the new Malibu chip design, with its full profile and half-moon stabilizing fin—Downing believed he could hold just as high a line using a narrow finless hot curl as the Malibu surfers could on their wide-nosed chips. But by 1949, Downing realized he’d taken the hot curl as far as it could go, especially in bigger waves.
Downing then built the Rocket—a 10-foot, 35-pound, balsa-core beauty now regarded as the first great piece of specialized big-wave equipment.
Made for the upcoming 1950–51 winter surf season at Makaha, the Rocket was essentially a hot curl crossed with a Malibu chip. Downing kept the hot curl’s streamlined shape, but flattened out the back hull, knowing that a nonrounded surface would run faster through the water. The board was fiberglassed, like the chip boards, and had a strange 10-inch redwood-lined slot routered into the bottom, near the tail. Downing had changed his mind about the fin; he was now convinced that it would be the key stabilizing feature in big surf, but he wanted to try a few different sizes and shapes—his “fin box” would allow him to experiment. Three longitudinal strips of redwood, one of them down the board’s centerline, were set between the balsa planks, and the resin coat had been fine-sanded and polished to a gleam. The Rocket looked fast just laying in the sand. It took Downing a few weeks (and a few cartwheeling Point Surf wipeouts) to come up with a fin solution, but from then on it was a big-wave surfer/surfboard partnership like no other. Downing rode the Rocket for ten years. “I had so much confidence in this board,” he later said, “that never once, if I got it trimming right, did I feel like I couldn’t make it to the end of the curl line.” In 2010, sixty years after launch, the Rocket still had a place in Downing’s board collection.
Buzzy Trent, King of the Big-Wave Beasts
Downing, Froiseth, Woody Brown, and a few other Waikiki surfers were all riding finned boards at Makaha by the end of 1951 and stroking with confidence into fifteen-foot-plus waves. The new equipment was fast and stable, and miles ahead of the hot curl in terms of traction. The boards weren’t all that maneuverable, but it didn’t really matter. A high, tight, cleaving line to deliver you from the Point through to the Bowl on the heaviest wave of the day—that’s what mattered.
The big-wave push was further boosted when a small and equally committed group of Californian surfers turned up at Makaha. It was a nice, quiet, easy scene. Apart from the occasional beered-up weekend scuffle, everybody got along well. Makaha was too remote and provided too much surf for there to be any territorial problems, and plenty of bonding opportunities were generated by shared moments of big-wave terror and accomplishment.
The mainlanders were led by Walter Hoffman and Murray “Buzzy” Trent, both of them young Malibu regulars in the early postwar years. Hoffman was a big, strong, overfed nineteen-year-old who got along well with everybody. He’d met and befriended George Downing in 1949 at Malibu, and later that year sailed to Waikiki for a three-month summer visit. He returned the following year; in 1951 he extended his trip into the winter season and began surfing Makaha regularly. Hoffman had an 8mm movie camera, and he mailed a few rolls of Makaha footage back home to his older brother Phillip (“Flippy” to friends and family) and Trent, both of whom watched and rewatched the grainy color film until the projector bulb finally blew out. All three surfers flew to Hawaii the next winter, in 1952, along with a revolving crew of another half dozen Californians. They camped on the beach at Makaha for days at a time, in army surplus tents and lean-tos made from tarps and scavenged wood; they ate triple-decker peanut butter sandwiches and went through a few hundred cans of Van de Camps pork and beans.
Just about every photograph Walter Hoffman took that year embodies the frontier surfing ideal: empty waves, coconut palm-frond hats, boards scattered along the beach, a nine-surfer group shot with everybody tanned and smiling and barefoot, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. It was all that. It was also consecutive days of flat-surf boredom, violent bouts of diarrhea, staph infections, and an assortment of tropical-borne skin conditions. “We all got sick,” Flippy Hoffman remembered. “We all had boils. Carbuncles. It looks pretty in the pictures, and it was. But a lot of the time it was awful.”
Living conditions were much improved the following year when the Hoffmans rented a pitched-roof wooden shack a few hundred yards off the beach, at the foot of Makaha Valley. More Southern California surfers showed up, including surfboard designer Bob Simmons, in his first and only visit to Hawaii. (Simmons drowned less than eighteen months later while surfing Windansea in San Diego.) Walter Hoffman and Trent had by that time distinguished themselves as the company’s two most gung-ho surfers. Both were well off the mark set by Downing in terms of skill and wave knowledge, but they matched him for raw courage. Hoffman, in big surf, was as cheerful as he was fearless, paddling out like it was a mess-around summer afternoon at Queen’s or Malibu. Trent’s focus at Makaha, on the other hand, had shifted from intense to monomaniacal.
Trent made a lot other surfers nervous. He was a chatterbox, and liked attention, and on a lazy afternoon among friends he’d hold court for hours, telling jokes and stories, pulling faces, and making big sweeping gestures with his arms. Everybody laughed—but Trent was a little off somehow, as if all settings had been turned up to “10” and left there. Raw ass-kicking masculinity came off him in waves. Trent had cinder-block arms and shoulders, a tiny danseur waist below a row of corrugated abs, and a smash-nosed face set low on a huge, blunt head. He was a fighter and a loudmouth in high school, as well as an all-state fullback who could run a ten-secon
d 100-yard dash. Trent’s birth father taught Buzzy that “suffering makes you like steel”; with a note of approval, Trent later said his father was a “mean son of a bitch” who used to turn loose the family dogs on any Depression-era poor who made the mistake of stopping by the family house to ask for food. Trent’s stepfather, meanwhile, passed on a deep and abiding love for German military history and Teutonic glory.
BUZZY TRENT, SUNSET BEACH.
During Trent’s Malibu apprenticeship in the forties, he came under the tutelage of Bob Simmons. They sometimes drove out to ride the winter heavies at a break near Santa Barbara called Ventura Overhead, and Simmons told the younger surfer, “You ride anything, got that? You’re a big chicken if you don’t take off on these waves!” Trent nodded and did as instructed. He became a tight, clenched surfer. He couldn’t swim very well, but he’d been diving for years, and he could hold his breath underwater for three minutes—wipeouts weren’t especially scary to him. Plus every bad wipeout, he believed, made him that much harder and tougher.
Trent arrived in Hawaii in late 1952 and never left. While the big surf meant a lot to all the visiting Californians of the era, and three or four others would also move to Hawaii permanently, nobody took it on the way Trent did. He lifted weights, skipped rope, shadowboxed, and set out on long thigh-burning runs through the sand at a time when training was nearly unheard of among surfers. He closely examined other surfer’s big-wave equipment and had new boards built that were even longer and racier. He also formulated a grim, heroic, death-or-glory view of big-wave riding—an attitude that was passed on virtually unchanged to each succeeding generation of big-wave surfers.
The History of Surfing Page 18