doldrums

The surf in Hawaii is not perfect.

Those mental images you have of endless waves, of pumping perfection, of consistently cranking peaks, of you and a dozen guys honing your big wave act in endless days of waves at Sunset. That’s not real.

The truth is, it gets flat and it gets cross shore. And it rains. And it does that for days on end. And that’s where we find ourselves today, on day two of cross shore knee high surf, and on day 3 of sub-par surf and rainy weather.

And when it gets flat, it also gets pretty boring. I spent all day trying to get some juicy gossip from somewhere, anywhere, but there is none. Truth is, the pro surfers were just doing stuff that normal people do, the stuff that they would probably be doing every day if they weren’t pro surfers.

They played tennis, they went to movies – James Bond is by far the most popular - and they stocked up on food from Foodland and ate chocolate cream pies at Ted’s. Some went to Honolulu, and a couple were cruising Haleiwa, poking through the surf stores, sushi bars and art galleries.

And still the rain fell - so much so that the municipality was forced to bulldoze open the mouth of the Waimea river this morning, making a wicked little sandbar in the process. And even though the Waimea shorey was only one foot today, it still packed enough punch for some solid body surfing. The sand build up had created an awesome A-Frame peak, with a double up left and right running off it following the same line every time.

Swells would stand up at Pin-balls, and then drop into the depths of the bay, before collapsing onto the beach. And that’s where we found ourselves all afternoon, getting barrelled on our tummies, sharing wave after wave, playing in the surf and sliding up the beach with tourists from Beijing, Tokyo and Chicago. The water was warm and soft, the sand crunchy underfoot, the sun hot on our skin and we were the only surfers on it.

I guess another cool thing about the North Shore is that even when it’s flat, it still does flat a whole lot better than any other spot you’ve been to lately.