The Big Juice: Epic Tales of Big Wave Surfing

by John Long

  We pulled into a stretch of deep water near a bombora, an area where waves break over a submerged rock shelf, sand bank, or, in this case, a reef. A wave came through, and my heart hit rock bottom. It looked 6 to 8 feet and little more than mush. Jeff's face lit up, saying, "No, it's an easy 15 feet."

  Despite the thrashing the skis had received, mine was running perfectly, and it was time for a reconnaissance. With Billy and Jamie on the back, we motored around the impact zone. A solid 20-footer loomed, reeling off left and right. The ocean was still as raw as hell. Huge lumps appeared from the deep and belched over the reef, disappearing as they passed into the deeper water off the backside.

  Finally knowing we weren't in for a total skunking, we watched a behemoth lurch up and across the horizon. The next second we found ourselves drawing up the face of a 15-foot wall, the top half capping. I punched through the whitewater, narrowly escaping getting sucked back over the falls. Wow! Now it would be a case of just wait and see what the boys might get their fins into.

  Jeff dragged Jamie into the first set wave, coming up short on speed and location, leaving Jamie teetering on the top of a 20-plus-foot crest peering down into the bowl. Next wave he's in, and things looked good for the first part. Not for long, though, as it closed out. Jamie bailed, trying to punch through the wave and out the back. He was sucked up and over, the curl detonating like a bunker buster. Jamie got worked satisfactorily.

  As the morning unfolded, the wind died off, and the sea calmed, though it still was a warbled mess out there. But at least the faces were smooth, helped out by the drawing of so much energy off the reef as each wave rolled through. Sometimes the ocean would go silent, and with no obvious markers to line up on, it was impossible to tell where we were until the next mountain shouldered up. Fortunately for Marti and James, I was in the right position to nail a couple of beauties.

  Bones managed to contradict the text messages by staying entirely alive. The Bronte surfer who works on the docks had his first taste of big wave surfing.

  Visser was dubbed "the Shadow" because he was never seen until it was time to surf. Even though the wave was a two-way peak, I concentrated on the right-hander, as that's where the majority of the waves were ridden. We did see him drop into a lefty-apparently he scored a massive tube (so he says). Perhaps he did, as there were some solid ones out there.

  Billy got a pit. Jamie's take: "It was the second-to-last wave surfed of the day. It was the wave before the sick shot Harro got of Billy, and this one looked especially thick. As soon as I saw it, I remember whipping him in and being able to look over the shoulder; I just saw this thing drawing off the reef. I got the best view of him bottom turning, and the thing was so square and hollow, I swear you could have fit two kombis in it. I just remember thinking, 'Fuck, man, you got to make it. 'cause I was scared when I saw what was behind him, and, yeah, he pulled it off. I'll never forget it."

  The storm had passed, there was no wind, and the angst of wondering if we'd even score a new wave was gone. More Coopers were cracked, and the Venus Bay prawns were grilled. The fivehour journey back in was glorious. There was a soft, rolling ocean, a beautiful setting sun, and dolphins taking flight all around us.

  Day 5. The Aftermath

  At 5:30 a.m. the next morning, we were up again, charging 4WDs down the coastline and around dirt tracks to a hidden wave in the middle of nowhere. The swell was still pumping and the wind offshore-a blue-bird day. For the next few hours, the boys traded spiraling pits. It was the ultimate detox from the head-splitting dose of adrenaline and punishment of being thrown around the trawler twenty-four hours a day.

  I spent eighteen hours driving home along the coastline of Australia, my mind now even further fueled by the possibilities available for the next trip. Crikey, could it get any better? I aim to find out.

  By 2003 Sam George, then editor of Surfer, had spent twentysix consecutive winters on Oahu's North Shore, the 9-mile stretch of golden sand and scary waves long considered surfing's ultimate proving ground. He was joined by just about every notable surfer on Earth in what over the past half-century has become the sport's greatest gathering of the tribe, a mighty clash of big waves, big boards, and big egos. Yet, having first surfed these waters as a twelve-year-old gremmie back in 1967, George developed a long-running fascination with the history of the North Shore's remarkable surfing culture and offered up some highlights (and lowlights) in this loosely arranged timeline.

  1700s

  Hawaiian folklore tells of an adventurous alii from Kauai named Kahikilani, who sailed the treacherous 90 miles from Lihue to the North Shore of Oahu with the express purpose of riding the thundering waves at Paumalu, the site today's surfers call Sunset Beach.

  There the handsome, daring surf-prince ran afoul of a beautiful bird-maiden who, furious at how he rushed from her arms every time the surf came up, made Kahikilani at least promise that he would never kiss another woman. But while out surfing the inside bowl he attracted the attention of another beautiful wahine strolling on the beach. So taken was she by his performance that when Kahikilani beached a ride she approached and gave him an ilim lei-and a kiss. But the bird-maiden's spies were on the wing, flying back to tell all to the bird-maiden. She rushed down from her cave in a rage of jealousy, tongue-lashing Kahikilani for his faithlessness. The hapless surfer, protesting his innocence, chased the bird-maiden back up the hill toward her cave, but a few feet shy, she turned him to stone.

  Kahikilani, having played out a romantic melodrama that would repeat itself countless times in surfing's centuries to come, sits to this day on the North Shore, his stony face peering out of a kiawe patch alongside the Kamehameha Highway, just north and across the road from the A Taste of Paradise Grill.

  2002

  Jon-Jon Florence, age ten, walks into the back yard of an opulent, beachfront home that looks down on Ehukai Beach Park, known to all as "Gums." Next to Florence a surfer over twice his age waits for an assessment, deferring, perhaps, to the little blond-haired grommet's nine years of experience surfing these waters.

  "How's it look, Jon-Jon?"

  Jon-Jon pushes the hair from his face, shades his eyes with a tiny hand, and looks out over the shoreline, his view taking in a panorama that stretches from Kaena Point to the west-the Mokuleia coast hazy and indistinct, Haleiwa, Laniakea, and Waimea Bay hidden by a curve in the coast-to the wide, sandy beach fronting the surf of Log Cabins, Rockpile, Off-the-Wall, Pipeline, and Gums and then around to the north toward Pupukea, Gas Chambers, and Rocky Point, Sunset Beach smoking in the distance.

  "It's insane," he says.

  1832

  Having survived the long, arduous sea voyage from Boston, Protestant missionaries Reverend John Emerson and wife Ursula Sophia embark on a circumvention of the island of Oahu in the brigantine Thaddeus. Putting in near the mouth of the Anahulu River in Waialua Bay, the Emersons come across a village known as Hale'iwa (hale, home, of the iwa, or frigate bird). The Emersons are met and welcomed by Haleiwa s Chief Laanui, who convinces the Protestants to establish a church in the village, backed to the southwest by lush, rolling hills rolling down from the plains of Wahiawa, and facing, to the north, the wide, blue Pacific. The Emersons' journals make no mention of what the surf was like that first day in 1832, but it would have to be imagined that the New England couple witnessed plenty of North Pacific power during their years in Haleiwa. Their Liliuokalani Church still stands, as does the structure of their original adobe home located in Haleiwa across from Matsumoto's Shave Ice.

  1994

  After more than five years of detailed analysis, costly feasibility studies, and countless design proposals, the Honolulu Department of Transportation installs a sign on the Hi Freeway, located approximately 2 miles west of Pearl City, just past the last exit for Waimalu and Waipahu and in conjunction with the Wahiawa/ Schofield Barracks off-ramp. In familiar green backing with white lettering, the State of Hawaii's newest and certainly most poignant freeway sign reads, simply: NORTH SHO
RE. One hundred sixty years after the Protestant missionaries' arrival, it's finally official.

  1932

  Andrew Anderson Jr., son of the manager of the Bank of Hawaii s Waialua branch, takes up surfing at the nearby Army Beach. The ten-year-old Anderson borrows a redwood plank from a local Hawaiian named Solomon Kukea, who, by all recorded accounts, is the first surfer to ride the North Shore in the modern era.

  1951

  Phillip "Flippy" Hoffman and Bob Simmons rent a small, clapboard house tucked between palms and pandanas in the Paumalu neighborhood, several miles west of Kahuku and adjacent to the reef break already known as Sunset Beach. Although surfed tentatively in the early 1940s by pioneers like Woody Brown and Fran Heath, then more regularly in the decade by island greats George Downing and Wally Froiseth, the newly dubbed "North Shore" has yet to be colonized by intrepid mainland surfers as has Makaha, located on the west side of the island. Hoffman and Simmons, avoiding the communal Makaha camp, which included early frontiersmen like Flippy's brother Walter, Buzzy Trent, Jim Fischer, and Billy Ming, hole up on the sparsely populated North Shore, first-surfing many of today's popular lineups by day, eating rice and fish and arguing over fierce chess games at night. Innovations abound, including Flippy's attempt to control the drift of his wide-tailed balsa board in the grinding sunset peak by affixing a thick hawser to the transom, letting it drag behind like a sea anchor. Almost forty years later surfers would make a similar performance leap by towing into waves on a rope rather than towing one behind.

  1943

  Having been trapped outside by a fast-building northwest swell at Sunset Beach, Woody Brown and Dickie Cross make the wrenching decision to paddle down the coast to Waimea Bay, which, though unridden at the time, has never been seen to close out. Both make the journey through and around offshore cloudbreaks that today would host numerous tow-in squads, arriving off Waimea Bay in the late afternoon. Caught inside the point by a huge set, Brown barely crests the bowl, while Cross disappears, perishing somewhere under the avalanche of whitewater. Brown makes it to shore; Cross's body is never found. Big wave surfing retreats to Makaha for the next decade.

  1957

  Greg Noll, Pat Curren, Bing Copeland, Del Cannon, Mickey Munoz, Mike Stang, and Bob Bermel ride Waimea Bay for the first time, paddling out en masse on a clean "15- to 18-foot" day. Aside from the specter of Cross's drowning, Munoz remembers, the bay's ominous reputation is that of being shark infested. Locals line the rim of the bay to watch the crazy haoles deal with the steep drop and run for the shoulder. Munoz, riding his balsa Malibu hotdog board, shows plenty of gumption but wipes out on every wave he catches. A relatively anticlimactic session, it is still a landmark day. A session much less mythologized, however, comes later on the same day, as under stormy skies the swell builds to a solid 25 feet. Late in the afternoon, as the setting sun fires the tops of the dark-bellied clouds, a very game (considering his earlier performance) Munoz joins the more experienced Stang in legitimately terrifying, maxed-out conditions. Dodging clean-up sets, Munoz clings to life on his Malibu board while the bearded Stang sits up and hurls Shakespearean taunts at the elements: "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; / Or close the wall up with our English dead!" Munoz survives the go-out, returning home to the Mainland the next day to resume spring semester of his high school junior year in Santa Monica.

  2002

  A mid-December, west-northwest pulse peaks in the small hours at 30 feet. Dawn reveals a confusing mix of swell on the water, most of the strip roiling with unruly whitewater and messy sections. Waimea Bay is just breaking on the boil; the outer reefs are awash. Confounded by the conditions, Californians Mike Todd and Dan Malloy decide to paddle out north from Waimea, back toward Sunset Beach with plans to beach themselves through the surf at Gas Chambers, near Pupukea. Together the duo, who both distinguished themselves paddle-surfing the Bay during a late-November swell, route-find their way through a labyrinth of booming offshore reefs and cloudbreaks, unknowingly re-creating in reverse the desperate journey of Brown and Cross some fifty-nine years earlier. Todd and Malloy, however, both make it to the beach alive and in time for supper.

  1958

  California transplants Fred Van Dyke, Peter Cole, and Rick Grigg, all North Shore pacesetters, share a house on Between charging big winter waves from Avalanche to Outside Velzyland, Cole and Van Dyke find work as teachers-math and science, respectively-at Honolulu's prestigious Punahou School. Students include Paul Strauch Jr., Fred Hemmings, Gerry Lopez, Jim Blears, James Jones, and Jeff Hakman, all of whom would eventually graduate with honors in their teacher's North Shore classroom.

  1960-2002

  While its history seems dominated by the exploits of West Coast transplants, and there are other regions of Oahu with larger populations of Hawaiian ancestry (Waianae, on the West Side, has the greatest percentage), a number of notable Hawaiian surfers have followed in Kahikilani's footsteps, modern bird-maidens notwithstanding. A partial list includes Kealoha Kaio; Paul Strauch Jr.; Eddie Aikau; Clyde Aikau; Ben Aipa; Tiger Espere; Barry Kanaiaupuni; Tom Stone; Tom Padaca; Reno Abellira; Larry Bertlemann; Michael Ho; Dane Kealoha; Louie Ferriera; Buttons Kaluhiokalani; Tony Moniz; Max Medieros; Derek Ho; Johnny Boy Gomes; Sunny Garcia; Myles Padaca; Malia, Mikala, and Daniel Jones; Tory and T. J. Baron; and Mason Ho.

  2001

  Primary location photography begins along the North Shore for Universal Pictures' feature film Blue Crush, the latest in a long line of Hollywood surf and romance epics-this time around from a female surfer's point of view. Appropriately detailed actresses are assembled and posed against suitably dramatic backdrops at power spots like Avalanche, Pipeline, and Makaha, while a team of top women pros Taft-Hartley their way into well-paying double work. Injured while riding decent-sized Pipe, go-getter Rochelle Ballard, doubling for lead actress Kate Bosworth, is relegated to the beach. She is replaced by diminutive former Quiksilver/Eddie winner Noah Johnson, surfing in a blonde wig and bikini, who provides the film with its climactic-and, in fact, its only successful-Pipeline tube ride.

  1962

  Having convinced producers of Columbia Pictures' Ride the Wild Surf that he is a true big wave legend, Malibu stylist and merry prankster Miki Dora must now join the film on location on the North Shore and surf, for the first time, Haleiwa, Sunset, and Waimea Bay. Dora, his back to the wall, so to speak, performs creditably at every venue, including a big day at the Bay, where his midface, turn-and-trim approach, while snickered at by the gun-and-run heroes of the day, closely approximates what will be considered high performance Waimea surfing for the next three decades. Stealing the RTWS scene, however, is Dora s ersatz friend Greg Noll, who barges into so many waves that filmmakers later write a character named "Eskimo" into the script, played by almost-famous James Mitchum, resplendent in Noll's trademark "jailhouse" striped trunks.

  1965

  Fred Van Dyke is approached by Honolulu night club promoter and entrepreneur Kimo Wilder McVay, who pitches him the idea of a "professional" surf contest to be held on the North Shore. McVay calls it the "Duke Kahanamoku Invitational." Not coincidentally, McVay owns Duke Kahanamoku's, a struggling night spot located in Waikiki s International Market Place. While no actual prize money is offered, appearance fees are paid to a select list of twenty-four elite invitees, the whole group being feted about Waikiki in grand style. With Van Dyke at the helm, the inaugural Duke runs on a single day in perfect 10- to 12-foot Sunset and is won by sixteen-year-old Jeff Hakman, who shocks the established North Shore riders with his "New School" approach.

  2002

  Jamie, the nineteen-year-old son of North Shore fixture Mick O'Brien, competes in his second Pipeline Masters trials. The previous year Jamie, who grew up on the beach at Pipeline, surfed his way to a berth in the main event finals. In this year's trials, the blond regularfoot is a berserker, charging heedlessly into long barrels and unmakable sections. Despite his electrifying performance, O'Brien places third and is eliminated from
further competition but is described by the event commentators as a promising representative of the North Shore's "New School" performers.

  1980

  Larry Blair, a charismatic young goofy foot from Maroubra, Australia, having won back-to-back Pipeline Masters in '78 and '79, arrives on the North Shore in fine fettle. Rocketing onto pro surfing's center stage after winning Sydney's prestigious Coke contest in 1978 as a complete unknown, the theatrical, if often ungainly, McCoy team rider (who actually attended acting school and once played a corpse on a popular Australian soap opera) is described by a leading Australian wetsuit manufacturer as the "hottest kook in the world." A proprietary cross section of North Shore locals, unimpressed with both Blair's acting credentials and bold claims to take out yet a third Pipe title, deal out their own response. Accosted on the beach at Pipeline before the contest, Blair gets punched out and has his boards stomped on. He is later gangblocked in the Pipe semifinals, eliminated from the event, and is never again a significant presence in professional competition.

  1962

  Having been ridden first by Phil Edwards, who the season previous paddled out and caught several fast curls at the urging of surf filmmaker Bruce Brown, the Banzai Pipeline quickly becomes one of the North Shore's premier arenas. On the period equipment, wild wipeouts dominate, but from amid the carnage Honolulu local John Peck stands out on his backhand. Utilizing the novel approach of crouching to grab his outside rail while still dropping in, Peck can avoid the speed-scrubbing bottom turn and trim high in the curl through the middle of the wave. Fourteen years later, during the fabled "Free Ride Era," South African Shaun Tomson would use the same approach to "redefine" Pipeline surfing. Six years later still, Hawaiian Michael Ho would add his touch to Peck's line, winning the Pipeline Masters with his right hand, the one that holds the rail, in a fiberglass cast-rumored to be the result of a pre-event brawl.