[ Strong Current ]

Long after the whole Andy/Kelly world title show has packed up and gone home, and the Canon 600 mm autofocus lenses have been put away, after the Hawaiian season has again been branded a dud before it's even started, with barely a big budget Hollywood movie or MTV reality show in sight, who is left on the North Shore simply to go surfing?

By Tim Baker

The thing I love about Hawaii - apart from the thrilling surf and tropical sunsets and rich watermanly culture - is the fact that here, you can consume a tub of Haagen Daaz and a six pack of beer a day and still not get fat. Diabetic or alcoholic perhaps, but certainly not fat.

Is it just me, or has anyone else ever noticed how big your poos are in Hawaii? Like you are literally shitting bricks. Life's processes seem somehow heightened here. Humans, vegetation, even cars and houses seem pulled into the exaggerated cycles of growth and decay - as if it will all just end up as so much compost. "The quickening," North Shore veteran Robbie Page calls it, an accelerating of all bodily functions - heart beat, breathing, metabolism, adrenal glands, fight or flight reflexes - that lets you know very quickly how your physical state is holding up to the relentless pounding from the Pacific. It's like going to the doctor for your annual check up to find out what kind of condition your heart, lungs, and nervous system are in. Somehow, it was six years since I'd been here. How the hell did that happen? A run-in with an aggrieved local, mortgage, marriage, child, no free air tickets forthcoming from obliging editors. This apparently random combination of elements had conspired to keep me away from surfing's spiritual home for too long. It was now or never, I figured, before middle-age crept up and handed me a beer gut and a longboard and the North Shore became too big a leap to make. My mission (apart from not drowning) was to document the late season, long after the contests, pro surfers, and media hordes had packed up and gone home - to depict the North Shore in its natural state, and recognise those hardy souls who surf the entire season for simple love. In an age when the surf media focus has narrowed to a four week window in contest season, and fly away airs at Rocky Point earn more publicity than any maxed out Sunset heroics, surfing the North Shore in February is hardly a career move.

This noble pilgrimage would get to the heart of Hawaiian surfing, and the unsung characters who brave it's regularly life threatening waves for no fanfare or reward. The island and the elements would thus assist my passage, open up and reveal themselves in a depth and richness denied the great media stampede of December. But if I was looking for divine intervention, perhaps I had come to the wrong place. Or it would come in unexpected guises.

I was fearing for my life before I'd even set foot on Oahu's rich, red volcanic soil. Our plane was hit by lightning as we circled Honolulu around midnight, waiting for a break in the storm to land. A huge flash of light and an enormous crack of thunder simultaneously shook and illuminated our little flying tin can. On the ground, they interrupted TV shows to broadcast severe storm warnings. Rooves blew off houses and trees fell across roads. The turn off to the North Shore was blocked by one enormous toppled trunk and a police car with its lights flashing redirecting traffic. I was beginning to feel spooked, like someone, something was trying to discourage my visit. Were the Gods displeased at my return? What would I find? How had it changed?

Well, the first thing - and I can't believe no one told me, or organised a mass protest - is the classic old, landmark orange lifeguard towers are gone, replaced by shiny, new, pale, spew green plastic ones. They squat low to the ground like Apollo space craft and blend in with the green foliage behind, where the old, tall, proud orange ones stood out like beacons. I find myself feeling oddly upset. Hopefully, I won't need rescuing today anyway - it is mercifully small, onshore, grey, as I crawl out of the Backpackers, bleary-eyed and disoriented.

It feels amazing to jump in the water. I swear, the ocean here is alive, grabbing at your arms with each paddle like thick treacle, trying to pull you down into the deep. You can almost feel yourself becoming fitter, lungs expanding, muscles toning. The first person I see in the lineup is none other than ex-world champ Barton Lynch riding a 9'6" single fin switch foot at six foot Sunset. BL's clocked up two decades of North Shore winters and along the way has quietly morphed from ruthless contest machine to soulful salty sea dog. A small beach house at Backyards is one of the few remaining spoils of his pro tour glory days. "I feel more comfortable here than I do at home, most probably," he reckons.

Now a part-time surf coach, Barton still herds a bunch of his young charges over here each year to blood them in the serious business of North Shore survival. BL's young mate, WQS campaigner Beau Mitchell is laid up on the couch with a stuffed shoulder, but is still stoked with his month in the islands. "There hasn't been a wave over two feet at home and here it's hardly been under 10 feet for a month," he enthuses.

On land, the usual suspects inevitably bob up. Ross Clarke-Jones and tow-in partner Tony Ray are both laid up with injuries at the same time, for the first time in their careers. Ross speared himself with his board in a pinched death barrel at Jaws, and managed to crack a rib even through his life jacket. T.Ray met a similar fate at mid-sized Sunset, and copped stitches to his thigh. Ross is considering cortisone shots to get him out there if the swell comes up. All it takes is one massive wave caught on film to earn his salary for another year.

Kelly's still here too. I spot him one grey late afternoon, streaking through almost unmakeable barrels in that gleaming white springsuit at six to eight foot Haleiwa. "Whoa! Look at Kelly. Look at Kelly," one enormous Hawaii man bellows from the beach, as the White Knight claws his way into a collapsing tube on take off, disappears in a storm of whitewater, and somehow reappears at the base of the foamball as the wave shuts down over the shallow inside reef. The local crew are gathered round a picnic table and look up to admire the six-time world champ in action. There's not a photographer in sight. Eventually, Kelly's seven foot pintail washes in, the legrope plug ripped clean out of the deck, and he wades in after it. How have the waves been, I ask? I've heard a chorus of complaints about the flukey winds - not a hint of trades. "I like the different winds, because you surf all different places," Kelly reasons, keenly. It's a refreshing attitude, from the usual photographer and pro surfer gripes about anything less than pumping, front-lit, air brushed perfection. He looks keen and fit and in his element, hardly the wounded world title casualty he's been depicted as.

As the sun sets over Kaena Point, I score one of those sessions, with about a dozen mainly older local crew in the water, and hoots and laughs and a sublime vibe that even extends to unsteady, jetlagged haole hacks. Surrounded by superbly fit 50-something Hawaiians charging solid double and triple overhead reef waves, it's easy to imagine your surfing future stretching out ahead of you indefinitely. Pro tour use by dates and surf media youth fixations seem irrelevant here. That's why so many of the pro tour old boys club seem to cling to the place so keenly, I figure. I watch BL sitting out the back at Sunset one afternoon, happily chatting to North Shore pioneers Pete Cole and Steve Bigler and a bunch of other blokes 20 or 30 years his senior, and all of a sudden BL is looking like a grommet.

Another day at Haleiwa, I spot the truly legendary Ben Aipa charging solid eight foot waves on an enormous 10 foot longboard, complete with his trademark stingers and swallowtail, fitted with curved outside fins, and belting the lip like his life depended on it. Here's a proud local, 62 years of age, who's traded waves with every great Hawaiian surfer from Eddie Aikau to Dane Kealoha, Sunny Garcia to Andy and Bruce Irons. He didn't start surfing until he was 23, yet made the national team two years later. As a surfer, shaper and coach - who's revolutionised equipment, surfing styles and competitive strategies - few can rival his wide ranging influence and heavy rep. Yet he's friendly, approachable, keen for a chat, still surfing whenever it's on and heading into the bay every day to carve more foam. He's just been diagnosed with diabetes, he tells me seriously. "That's my next challenge," he declares. We arrange to do an interview. When I call him at his small shaping factory in town he answers the phone with, "How's the waves?" before he even asks who it is. Nice to think you can keep it that fresh for that long.

His shaping bay walls are covered with thank yous and testimonials from guys like Brad Gerlach and Sunny. "Thanks for getting me psyched," Bruce Irons has scrawled on a poster of himself at Pipe.

After another Haleiwa session, I get chatting to a thin, blonde bloke named Shaun, from South Africa, with a wispy beard and a gleam in his eye. He's got a bloodied shin and has been riding a miniscule 6'1" in six to eight foot surf. He creased his 7'4" yesterday in a barrel at Sunset, he says. Shaun's doing the full North Shore poverty grovel. He's been sleeping under the church, but has borrowed a tent from someone and just needs somewhere to pitch it now. He's got his eye on a battered second hand gun for $15 that he reckons he can patch up and make rideable. "The waves are so perfect, you don't need a good board here. You've just got to take off and set up the barrel," he reasons.

This is supposed to be the non-contest season, after the madness of December, yet during my two week visit there are no fewer than three events on the North Shore - a piddling one star WQS that never-the-less monopolises Sunset for four or five days, the Pipe Bodysurfing comp, and the Backdoor Shootout. No wonder the locals get testy. Kelly only decided to enter the Sunset comp at the last minute, pulled up to check the surf and was told there was a spare heat going out in a few minutes if he wanted to pull on a coloured jersey. He blazes all over mid-range Sunset all the way to the final, but is denied a win by Pancho Sullivan, playing like a big happy kid in his backyard. Sponger Mike Stewart wins the bodysurfing comp, proving his all round watermanliness yet again. I can't tell you who won the Shootout. I went to watch it one day and it was literally two to 10 feet. It would be dead flat for 15 minutes, not a wave breaking. You could have run back and got your 6'2" and paddled out for a grovel. And then every now and again a macking 10 foot closeout set would come through. The Volcom house is typically rowdy, and way down at Off The Wall a bodyboarder accidentally drops in on one of their boys. The infamous whistle goes and I split rather than witness the repercussions.

Up at Sunset, a totally different variety of North Shore surfers settle their disputes in a very different manner. I'm told the tale of the large mainlander who has been dropping in and abusing everyone he comes across in the lineup then, when he's inspired them to violence, he paddles in, goes to the police and gets a restraining order slapped against them. He's trying to take out the whole lineup, it seems, so he can surf it to himself. He's convinced he's one of the great Sunset surfers of all time, yet rides with a theatrical, hood ornament type posturing, with that classic American self-belief that he is actually killing it. A bunch of older locals get together and all slap restraining orders on him, making it impossible for him to surf Sunset when any of them are out. The litigious USA at its finest. I'm not sure which way of dealing with drop ins - the Pipe vigilantes or the Sunset litigators - I find more disturbing.

Here on the North Shore, you can pick your favourite loon, and guaranteed, you will start running in to them where ever you go. I'm torn between the buxom bodyboard lady with the boob job who raves to anyone who'll listen in the lineup or the car park, and the truly classic Sunset bike bath sweepers. The latter are two wizened old North Shore vets of indeterminate age, who have taken it upon themselves to keep the Sunset bike track clear of beach sand. As one can imagine, this is very nearly a full time job. Yet they expect no payment for this civic duty. They simply turn up at Sunset each morning with their brooms, install themselves at opposite ends of the bike path, and jump into action whenever any errant sand makes its way on to the fine bitumen path. I'm making my way in from a late surf at Kammies one afternoon when I run into one of them. He's cheery and chatty and sweeping away the last grains of the day, and keen to know how the waves are. "You right for something to smoke?" he asks me, a complete stranger. I'm touched by his kindness but decline the offer.

The bodyboard lady gets my vote, however, for a wonderful tale I hear about her finding herself out the back of massive, closing out Sunset with a certain former Australian pro surfer some years ago. Bodyboard lady had recently had her breasts augmented and as 15 foot bombs detonated all round them, and the rest of the lineup was washed in to the beach, she asked our pro surfer boy if he would like to inspect her new appendages. She was a stripper by trade and so this was an offer that usually came at our price, but in the circumstances she was gonna make it a freebee. She even offered him a feel. The image of pro surfer boy manipulating the newly pneumatic breasts of bodyboard lady out the back of maxed out Sunset is one not easily shaken from the consciousness.

I'm looking for a room to rent. I join the drifters hovering round the Foodland noticeboard. I see one advertised down by Alligators and go to check it out. Just as I pull up, a weathered old surfer looking dude, somewhere either side of 50, wanders out of the driveway to a dilapidated van and I approach him. He generously offers to share his thick, stubby little roll your own ciggy and before I know it, quite inexplicably, we seem to be cocooned in a warm fuzzy green cardigan of friendship. It's not his house. He's living in his van right now. The back is a mass of scattered clothes and belongings strewn over a stained, foam mattress. He tells me stories about surfing with Pat Curren in the '60s. He'd be a thoroughly unique, wonderfully eccentric figure anywhere else in the world, like Harry Dean Stanton's character in "Paris, Texas," except the North Shore seems inhabited by hundreds of these guys. There's that warm acceptance displayed by a lot of those older hoboe types a little down on their luck that embraces any human as potential companion. He tells me to tell the owner of the house he's my friend. He drives off, I ring the bell on the gate and an enormous rottweiler announces its intention to dismember me. A woman comes out, 40 or 50 something, kind of guarded. Asks what kind of rent I want to spend. I suggest US$250 a week, kind of on the low end of market rates, I figure. "Watch out," she warns firmly. "for that kind of money you're going to end up in drug houses."

You forget sometimes this is the 50th state of the good ol' US of A, until you find yourself at the check out at Foodland, reading the front page headline of Weekly World News: "Saddam wins US Lottery weeks after his capture. It's only $100 but it will buy him a cigar and a bimbo." Really? Or turn on the TV and discover some surreal reality TV share house debacle featuring '80s white rap star Vanilla Ice and ex-porn star king Ron Jeremy and the Hispanic motorcycle cop from CHIPS. Some teen popstar type girly is getting sloshed on white wine and hitting on Vanilla, who fends her off with stoic declarations that he loves his wife and kids, upon which she decides Ice Baby is an "asshole" and kindly Porn Ron tries to put her to bed like a caring, creepy uncle.

Then you go outside for a small lazy later afternoon sesh and the Logs to Sunset stretch is like seven miles of small fun D-Bah and a good proportion of the island's inhabitants are peppered along the peaky fun park on all manner of surfcraft in perfect, harmonious aquatic bliss. It all resembles one of those etchings produced by the early European explorers when they first came upon the carefree Hawaiians merrily cavorting in their ocean playground. It is the only place I've seen bodysurfers call people off waves and get taken seriously. Families are having barbecues in the beach parks and there are those inflatable jumping castles everywhere and it seems like you'd have trouble getting a gruff word out of anyone on such a blessed afternoon. Even the black, jacked up monster trucks look kind of comical, like some Noddy and Big Ears dreamland.

I come in from one such joyous session and bump into Noah Johnson on the beach in the fading light, who's just proven himself as adept in these skate ramp peaks as any outer reef cloudbreak. "Smiles all round," he beams. And he's right. Noah is one of those classic North Shore locals who has evolved from hot rat new schooler to serious charger over the space of a decade of quiet commitment.
"They keep calling 20 foot swells and they're only 15," he complains, though I find it hard to share his disappointment.

Or you can drive across the historic Haleiwa bridge and see a crew of young golden skinned Hawaiians launching their outrigger canoes for an arvo paddle out through the harbour. And against the setting sun and the majestic Kaena Point backdrop it could be precisely any time in the last millennium, when the local folk have been doing the exact same thing.

I check small Pipe at dawn one day, barely light and apparently four or five feet. Two bodyboarders scamper out in the new greyness. A guy in the car park has checked the buoys and tells me it's on the rise, to a predicted six to eight feet, with the odd 10. I'm terrified of this stretch of beach over head height, but I figure if I'm ever going to surf Pipe by myself on a rising swell, this is it. It's super clean and ridiculously fun - for about five minutes. That is the time it takes for about 30 bodyboarders to stream out from every little right of way to the beach like rows of ants and infest the lineup. I am the only person on a surfboard. It is oddly unsettling being so outnumbered by our prone, flippered cousins and eventually I retreat to the beach on an inconsequential right in the face of the unremitting invasion.

Small Pipe is an hilarious spectacle. On another mellow day, I duck out for a couple and there is a large, American helmeted chap issuing stern commands like a sergeant major in the heat of battle, with a tone of urgency that seems to say, "We are all in this together and if we stick together, well, hell, we might just make it." "Outside set," he bellows as a rare four footer looms on the reef.
"Wide one," he hollers at a pack of startled boogers.
"Right, right, go right," he orders a hapless grom.
And all the time firmly convinced he is engaged in a Serious Ocean Adventure Of The Highest Order.

You could expire from exhaustion while trying to document all the wonderful varieties of human strangeness on the North Shore - the unfailingly polite Japanese who have the neatest surfer households on earth, the cult-like Brasilian rasta crew camping behind the Taste of Paradise food van at Rocky Point, the bike path sweepers, the GI's, the tourists in buses and stretch limo's who look at you admiringly like a superhero as you stride out of the Sunset shorebreak, even if you didn't manage to catch a wave, the heavy locals who can make you break out in a cold sweat with just a glance.

Despite our relentless overcrowding and exploitation, there is still much to admire about the North Shore and the resilience of its surf culture - the way anyone will stick a stray board up in the sand when it washes in, so you can see it as you swim in, the camaraderie that can still sprout up in random sessions that exude all the old aloha, the unfailing good humour of the lifeguards who quietly caretake the whole insane carnage, the simple acts of kindness of virtual strangers offering to lend you a board or a legrope because they don't want you to miss out on a surf.

No shit can stick to the North Shore. You can plaster your surf brand stickers all over your quivers and road signs and erect the biggest contest structures and banners in history, build the most ostentatious beachfront palaces, but in time the ocean will wipe it all away. Nothing lasts here except the all-conquering might of the ocean - and perhaps the spirits of those hardy souls who most closely align their lives with the its rhythms.

Hawaii is our temple. Sure, there are money lenders at the gate, tramps and hoboes, prostitutes or conmen loitering around its steps. But get to the heart of it, out at sea, sitting astride a bigger board than you've ever ridden, swinging the nose around to point you shoreward at the approach of a cresting set, not knowing whether to catch the thing, try and dodge it, whether to paddle out to sea or back to the beach or cry like a baby, and you will know what it is to be truly alone with yourself.

My last surf at Sunset, the swell's coming up fast as the sun goes down. It's big and scary and crowded and the pack is neatly split in two - as Gary Elkerton once succinctly put it - into the hunters and the hunted. I watch in awe those surfers who stroke past me frothing, into a watery version of the running of the bulls, ready to meet the might of the ocean head-on, and marvel at the idea of all the surfers who have come here over the decades and pushed themselves across that line. Simply, that journey of only 100 metres or so, from Sunset's shoulder to its peak, is still the greatest test of a surfer.