HOME OF THE WAVE : The North Shore--Where Man and Ocean Merge

SUNSET BEACH, Hawaii â€”  s been called surfing’s Yankee Stadium. Several generations of Southern California parents have told young, lean sons that they can go there “when you’re old enough.â€�

It’s a place where dreams come to life in thundering Pacific explosions.

Sunset Beach. The Pipeline. Waimea Bay. They’re all on Oahu’s rural North Shore, the beaches where practitioners of the ancient sport of surfing have matched, and been overmatched by, some of the biggest waves on the planet.

At first, you wonder if you’re heading in the right direction. Driving around Oahu’s east coast from Honolulu, you see chicken ranches, small sugar cane fields and dairies.

Cattle graze on lush grasses growing out of rich, red soil, and the odor of manure is in the air. Wind turbine props spin lazily on a bluff, set back half a mile from the coast. When roadside trees screen out the Pacific, you feel as if you were driving through Idaho or Utah.

Far from the glass and concrete towers of Waikiki and Honolulu, 30 miles away, North Shore is another world, and, in a sense, another time.

“The thing about North Shore I dearly love is that in spite of everything, the rural integrity of North Shore has been preserved,� says native Hawaiian Fred Hemmings, a former world champion surfer. “It’s still like driving into the 1950s up there.�

North Shore. It’s a chain of small communities linked together by the two-lane shoreline road, Highway 83. You have to look long and hard to find a building that looks less than 20 years old.

D’Amico’s Pizza ($1.25 a slice), for example, just before you reach Sunset Beach, looks so 1950s that you expect to hear Fats Domino on the jukebox. Nearby, the tiny, old self-serve laundry next to Kammie’s Market has a bulletin board with 17 notices tacked up, 14 relating to the sale of surfboards or windsurfing boards, two for apartments and one announcing the identity of the new Avon representative.

Sunset Beach. Somehow, after a lifetime of hearing about giant Sunset waves, it’s a letdown. First, it’s a low-surf day. Second, it’s a small beach, and not a very tidy one at that. A garbage can overflows with empty beer cans.

A girl with blue hair pulls up in a red sports car. Her surfboard, wedged behind her passenger seat, sticks up almost vertically. She looks at the relatively small waves, backs up, and drives away.

It’s mid-morning and Jim Blears, Honolulu County lifeguard, is preparing to go on duty atop Sunset’s only lifeguard tower. Blears, it turns out, is the son of Lord James Blears, a 1950s television wrestling villain.

What’s it like to rescue someone in house-sized surf?

“It’s not the kind of problem you think,� Blears says. “When the surf gets to 15 to 20 feet, we close the beach and the Civil Defense people are out here. When it’s that big, we worry more about cars getting knocked off the road than we do about people in the water.

“I’ve been here 20 years now and the surf was so big in the winter of 1969 it not only smashed cars, but a few houses over there, too. We had 60-foot waves.�

“We have a lot more rescues in six- to eight-foot surf than we do in big stuff. When it’s medium-size surf here and I see a rental car from Waikiki pull up and some guy from Nebraska jumps out, well, I watch those types like a hawk.

“There’re a lot of beaches in the country more dangerous than this one. We have maybe one or two drownings a year here. The most I ever heard of was six in a year. From this tower, we have maybe 50 rescues a year.�

Blears looks out at the surf line and foresees an uneventful day. Several dozen small children are playing in the foamy water at the beach’s edge, but not a single surfboard can be seen. Around the point, to the east, windsurfers are leaping over waves in the area known as the Backyards by the locals.

“This wind is just about right for the windsurfers,� Blears says. “That sport has really grown rapidly on Oahu in the last five years. It’s reached the point where the surfers now have something to do when it’s windy and the surf is down, like today.�

Fred Hemmings sat behind his desk, on the seventh floor of a downtown Honolulu office building. He talked about a boy and his board on a Waikiki Beach few can remember today, and why he and a lot of other Hawaiians are worried about North Shore.

Hemmings, 40, world surfing champion in 1968, was elected in 1984 to the Hawaii state assembly. He also helps promote pro surfing events at North Shore, and works as a commentator at televised surfing events.

“When I won the world championship in ‘68, I didn’t fit in with the group, socially,� he said. “I’ve always been a conservative type, and most of the surfers I competed against in those days were wearing Nehru jackets, long hair and were flashing the peace sign at everybody.�

Hemmings could almost be a character out of James A. Michener’s “Hawaii.� He’s more than a native Hawaiian. His great-great grandmother arrived in Hawaii in 1883, from Portugal, to work on a sugar cane plantation. His father first saw Hawaii in 1920 as a U.S. Navy seaman, returned shortly after leaving the Navy, and stayed.

“When I was a kid growing up in Honolulu, the beach was my playground, not gyms or football fields.� Hemmings said. “When I learned to surf at Waikiki, the only big hotels were the Moana, the Royal Hawaiian and the Surfrider. That was it. The feeling of Waikiki then was totally different than today. Today, Waikiki is Manhattan.

“But that’s OK. I mean, Waikiki is a gold mine for this state, and it should be kept that way. But a lot of us draw the line at North Shore. There’s a lot of pressure for development up there. Tourism is a great industry for us, but it’s a resource that should be managed with great delicacy. It’s very important to me and a lot of others that the rural integrity of North Shore be preserved.�

Hemmings is also interested in improving the surfer’s image.

“I was disappointed that Corky Carroll did that TV beer ad,� he said. “Surfers have done a poor job of promoting themselves over the years, and we didn’t need Corky at this late date perpetuating the myth of the surfer as a shiftless beach bum.�

Hemmings also said that big surf, such as occurs naturally on Oahu’s North Shore, can be created elsewhere, that municipal governments can make it happen.

“I’ve never been able to figure out why some of the coastal cities of Southern California haven’t been more enthusiastic about surfing reefs,� he said. “You can create very good surf by simply sinking an old barge and turning it on its side.

“A city government doesn’t think twice about spending a couple of hundred-thousand dollars to contour the land and put tennis courts or golf courses on it, so why are they so reluctant to contour the ocean bottom for the surfing community?�

Mother Nature, of course, is solely in charge of North Shore’s monster waves. The same storms originating in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea in the North Pacific that eventually deposit snow for skiers on Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain slopes, also produce the big surf that pounds Oahu’s North Shore.

The north coast of Oahu is directly in the path of the swell pattern for such storms, and the waves become magnified as they pass over offshore reefs.

North Shore. Hemmings said it rejuvenates him, every time.

“When I drive up there--this is sort of hard to express--but I feel like the North Shore makes me a wealthy man, wealthy in the sense of appreciating my environment,� he said. “I feel lucky to be so close to a place so important to me, yet a place that is unspoiled, almost in a natural state.�

North Shore. A decade ago, when construction began on a major hotel on the shores of Turtle Bay, just east of North Shore, surfers came at night and pulled up the surveyors’ sticks.

It didn’t work. The hotel was built anyway.

Recently, in the coffee shop of that very hotel, the Turtle Bay Hilton, two members of the North Shore surfing community, Bernie Baker and Randy Rarick, talked about the North Shore’s cottage industry.

“A lot of guys who come over here to surf, and stay, find jobs that give them maximum surfing time up here,� Rarick said. “Many of them are night skycaps at the Honolulu airport. Others are night-shift waiters, a lot of them at this hotel. Others work as surfing craftsmen, shaping surfboards and windsurf boards.�

Said Baker, Hawaii editor for Surfer magazine: “The older guys, the ones who remember the huge opposition to the building of this hotel, are the ones most concerned about additional development here.

“We keep hearing about another big hotel in the works, on the other side of Turtle Bay. So we’re worried about the North Shore. We wonder if the rural feeling up here is fading away.

When we hear things like it’s now cheaper to import pineapples from the Philippines than it is to grow them here, we wonder what’s going to happen to all the land on this side of the island that’s in pineapples.�

Said Rarick: “Have you driven through the town of Haleiwa yet? Almost every structure in that town is in the Hawaii State historical register.�

Baker estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 mainland surfers visit North Shore every year. “You almost have to know someone to come and stay for any period of time,� he said. “There aren’t any motels, so you need to know someone you can stay with, in an apartment or a condo.�

An apartment-to-share ad posted on the laundry bulletin board: “Must be clean, honest, mellow to be considered. $325 per month, plus electric. No tobacco.�

Baker, 36, once was a visitor, too. He stayed.

“I grew up in Santa Barbara, surfing at Rincon Beach,� he said. “I studied journalism at Santa Barbara City College, came over here to surf, did some surfing writing and never went back.�

The life style of mainland surfers visiting the North Shore has changed considerably. Said Blears, the lifeguard: “Twenty years ago, a lot of the guys who came over from Southern California were vagabond types. You’d find three or four living in a van, or sleeping on the beach, and living on Spam and candy bars. Now, things are more civilized. Guys who’re here for a month or two are in apartments or condos.�

Rarick, who promotes pro surf competition in partnership with Hemmings, said that winter is the peak time.

“There’s always at least decent surf on the North Shore, and for 30% of the days between mid-December through March, you have 10-to-12-foot surf or bigger,� he said.

In the last years of wooden surfboards, roughly three decades ago, Rarick said that the North Shore wasn’t the focal point for Hawaii’s surfers.

“Until the late 1950s, when foam boards were first in widespread use, most of the surfing activity was at Waikiki. You just couldn’t handle big stuff on those big, heavy wooden boards. Then, in about 1957, some guys on smaller foam boards like Phil Edwards, Fred Van Dyke, Pat Curran, Joe Quigg, Peter Cole and Mickey Munoz were discovering they could consistently ride big waves at Waimea Bay, and the North Shore has been a surfing mecca ever since.�

Surfing, of course, predates the North Shore. It predates America.

The first westerner to observe surfers was Capt. James Cook, who wrote extensively of surfing and outrigger canoeing in his log when he “discovered� Hawaii, in January of 1778.

In his book, “Surfing--The Ultimate Pleasure,� Leonard Lueras Wrote: “Cook’s detailed account of surfing corroborates what all surfers know: Surfing, then and now, has a near hypnotic effect, and if the waves are good, nothing will distract a surfer from his sport . . . and Cook, a lifelong mariner with a great love and respect for the sea, well understood such preoccupation.�

Surfing probably reached a peak among native Hawaiians the day Cook sailed into Kealakua Bay, on the big island of Hawaii. The population of native Hawaiians, believed to be roughly 300,000 when Cook arrived, decreased because of diseases introduced by westerners to about 40,000 by 1893.

Hawaii’s “sport of kings� made a comeback between 1910 and 1950, thanks in part to the writings of Jack London, and then publicity attached to Duke Kahanamoku’s swimming exploits at the 1912, 1920 and 1924 Olympic Games.

The size of surfboards has been reduced from the 14-to-16-foot, 100-pound wooden boards of the 1930s to, in some cases, less than 6-foot and 15-pound foam boards of today. Lueras, in his book, quoted Honolulu surfer Dave Rochlen, describing a special feeling of successfully riding a big North Shore wave:

� . . . the breaking wave is the single most exciting thing happening in the ocean. And perhaps the strongest thing you can say about surfing is that it gives you, like nearly nothing else does, the excitement of playing with the ocean.�