The ancient Kahunas‘ hang out?

[oldmansurfer]

I would walk around these days but back then most of the time I would just paddle out but if it looked more difficult then I walk around. On most days if I was lucky I could get out without duckdiving. But on those really big days it was just a useless convention only good for adding torture to the process of surfing. On big days like that which was maybe 7 to 8 foot size you were going to get worked whatever you do. The less the better. Those other surfers were so spent from taking 10 minutes to paddle out they had to rest before they could catch a wave at all. They were paddling out when I drove up and made it out only shortly before I did. Beginning surfers often don't realize the easiest way out is not the shortest distance but these guys were all fairly decent surfers. There were no kooks on that day as they would have died just paddling out. The Hanalei rule where the elite surfer gets to choose who surfs and who doesn't was a bit foreign to me. I had heard rules like that at breaks on Oahu but not on Kauai even though I grew up there. There was a group of surfers who were the regulators. They took it upon themselves to clean up the breaks of kooks and jerks. I have heard from many people that were on the wrong end of that situation but I never was

[oldmansurfer]

That day at Hanalei was an interesting problem. Impossibles was breaking good enough to just surf there but the bowl was even better so you pump through the slack part of the wave and end up with a peak that was maybe twice as tall as the wave on either side of it. At some point it's going to pitch over and tube out which all happens in a couple seconds. Till then you are just trying to be in the right place when it does pitch so you can do the right thing to get tubed. If you just cruise to the bottom and are right there when the lip is coming over the result is a fantastically beautiful tube ride that you come out of after a while. A little bit slower and you don't make it. Faster and you have a much shorter less spectacular tube ride. But to backdoor it you need to be back a little from the ideal place and so you need more speed. This make timing incredibly important and being in the right place to drop down with speed and jam a very hard bottom turn. Depending on how fast you get to the peak you may have to wait between 5 to 30 seconds before you do whatever you are going to do and you have to avoid stalling out because the wave will just pass you by. It's not breaking there for that 5 or more seconds and you want to be at the top of the wave when it gets to the point of you making your move so you have the momentum of the drop and added power from the bottom turn.. I would make turns up and down the face just marking time and guessing at when it's going to pitch so that I can be at the top at that point. Anyway it was a very good challenge for me and while I am mentioning the Bowl, I might have gotten tubed already at the Impossibles section before I got to the Bowl.

[BoMan]

"One of the reasons why surfing has stopped producing individuals as we knew them is surf schools popping out clones of each other. Everybody's style is the same everybody approaches the wave the same, long gone are the days we self taught. Sitting there watching and learning, spending time in the water waiting and learning what was needed to surf the wave in our own style and sometimes perfecting it. Surfing is not an individual lifestyle if we all look the same. The conformity only comes from what the wave is requiring you to do to express yourself." - Peter Tait

There's no standard approach for me. I surf beach breaks and even at spots I know very well studying the water before paddling out makes all the difference. Tide, wind, swell direction, period, sandbars and other surfers are different every day. That said my 70 year old body can't always get to where my brain tells it to go!

[oldmansurfer]

After surfing and paddling out at Kealia for a lot more time than it should have took, I found that quite often I could paddle 6 feet over the left side of where everyone paddles out and get outside without duckdiving. It took a bit of paddling at first because of the current but once there I paddled out in an area that didn't need duckdiving. I told a couple of the boys at the beach before we all paddled out that it was easier to paddle just a few feet over and they laughed until I easily beat them to the outside. So funny because everyone paddles in the same place because overall it's a good place to do it but minor variations could make major improvements however there was the tradition. We all judged the other surfers (non Kealia surfers) by how they did there dealing with the various elements but we didn't judge ourselves much LOL Yeah getting old is unavoidable and unfortunately older body can't do what the younger one did.

[oldmansurfer]

When I learned to surf there were no surf instructors. There were beachboys employed by hotels to teach the guests to surf but if you were local you learned from your father/brother/friend/uncle or by yourself. Popularity of board size had just dropped to favor shortboards which were about 6 inches longer than you height and at the most 18 inches wide. If you hadn't already surfed on a longboard you might just start off with that size of a shortboard or maybe another couple inches longer for a beginner board. There were only single glassed in fin boards and no leashes. I asked my surfer friends how to learn to surf and they all said surf as much as you possibly can which for me was every day. However there was a convention or the normal way to do things because that is they way it is passed down from other surfers. For me that didn't work. I needed to understand stuff and quite often just came up with my own ways to do things which constituted of what worked for me. When I learned to surf on a surfboard, I was already intimately familiar with the ocean and the waves from years of bodysurfing and paipo boarding which in retrospect is a real advantage unlike skateboarding or snowboarding. I was already popping up on my paipo board to knee board or drop knee or sometimes to stand up on it. I was a swimmer as well and had spent a great deal of time learning to hold my breath underwater. It's like I was training to be a surfer all my life up to that point that I was actually a surfer.

[oldmansurfer]

I wrote this about a surfer girl. One of the first women I knew who surfed, was a surfer chic in high school. I'm just going to call her Gidget because she was the real life version of Gidget. She hung out with the boys always smiling laughing. Sun bleached blonde and cute and smart. She was older than me and I didn't know it at the time but I tended to like older girls anyway. She was particularly special to me because she treated me as a person not some pest not worth her time. During our short dialogs she gave me her attention and listened and communicated with me. So I really liked her maybe even more than her sister who was much closer in age to me and I loved her sister. Her parents were friends with my parents so we met up at various social occasions but her being older than me she did not spend much time with me. Anyway she was in my young eyes a fantastic person.

I ran into her a few years back and she revealed the truth about her back then. It turns out she wasn't exactly like Gidget and she wasn't really happy back then. I think I have met several women like this who outwardly seem to be happy, always smiling or laughing but they are sad inside. The smiles and laughs are to cover up the hurt they feel. She however was still smiling and laughing. Not sure what that meant but she assured me things were much better now. No longer surfing however, selling hot tubs or something like that. Anyway she is still a special person to me. She still treats me like I am a person and not the bothersome kid I have always been LOL. I still try to treat kids like they are worth my time because of how much that impacted me.

[BoMan]

Poignant thoughts by John Dory in the Swellnet Dispatch.

I suggest you do what you can whilst you can. Don’t wait, hurry up. Life is shorter than you think. Do everything you ever planned to do whilst you’re able. Get tubed. Do an air that touches the sky. Time and tide wait for no surfer.

This year I turned 71, lost paddle strength, and broke my longboard but I will never let it get in the way of having fun!

https://www.swellnet.com/news/swellnet-dispatch/2022/10/27/losing-my-religion?fbclid=IwAR331cXYxbENtOo70iDamsPs_kvx8CRP7U7bvIDxSnT8yMWZiLOVw402hm0

[jaffa1949]

Yo Bo go Bo,

[BoMan]

Thanks! I can surf at a low level for many years to come. I often see a married duo in their 80's getting out there on body boards. They are fun to watch!

[BoMan]

Did you ever have a name for your surfboard?

In 1971 I bought a friend's fish called "Purple Haze." He partied all the time and drove the board into rocks before giving it up. I made repairs and had a lot of fun before losing it into the rocks too!

[oldmansurfer]

As a youth I had my "Fast board" and my "slow board" and now I have my "oldmanoverweightoutofshape board"

[BoMan]

Common sense advice!

https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/agi ... _TbS5AlLeY

[oldmansurfer]

I wrote this 10 years ago "The waves were fun today but I had a potentially dangerous wipeout where the wave held me and my board dropped away, however I managed to keep one foot tip toeing on the board and pushed it away when the lip finally smashed me down. I actually touched the bottom which has only happened once or twice before at Horners but this time as before it was because I used the bottom to push myself up to the surface."

I have surfed Horners thousands of times because it's near where I live. The inside break is super shallow and I touch the reef there nearly every time I surf it but the middle or outside breaks are mostly deeper reef breaks where the waves break in deeper water for whatever reason. This incident was the Middle part. The water was close to two times as deep as my height and the waves were close to that height as well

[BoMan]

While paddling out I noticed the water swirling around 10 feet in front of me. Suddenly a group of minnows flipped onto my board and visions of Jaws popped into my head. I stopped and sat with all limbs out of the water just as a seal broke the surface and disappeared. They watch me all the time but I have never seen them hunt!

[oldmansurfer]

Scary! I dislike wildlife getting close to me while surfing because of the implications as to why they are there or what might be looking for them. Turtles are cool but what eats them are not as welcome. A school of fish jumping might be all it takes to get me to decide I have been surfing long enough for the day

[oldmansurfer]

I wrote this a while back

There is a surf break on Kauai a ways left of the dry cave beach park in Haena called Cannons. The reef drops straight off like an underwater cliff to a depth of at least 70 feet. It breaks in the shallow water over the reef and the break is a left and real hollow and fast and it often spits water out of the tube when the wave collapses. It's a backside wave for me so slightly more difficult. I went surfing there a few times because I wanted to be spit out of the tube by the famous wave called Cannons. It's not a break that I wanted to surf much because it is a dangerous break and I am sure that whether or not you get a serious injury there is just a question of time spent there. The first time I went there it wasn't breaking too good but I came all the way from the east side to catch this wave so I paddled out and caught some. I was very conservative and didn't manage to get tubed. The next time I went there I got tubed and the waves were better but no spitting out of the end of the wave. I was in the tube and came out and then the wave spit but not that heavy spray that almost blows you off your board kind of thing. The third time I went I finally got spit out and immediately went in after that wave since it was really a treacherous wave and I didn't want to push my luck. I never hear much about people getting injured there but I am certain it is a real dangerous break and that people have been injured there. It just has that feel and it sucks water off the reef leaving little cushion and you can see the reef clearly in parts of the wave. At least I can say I was spit out of the tube there but I have been spit out of the tube many places since then. At this point in my life I have no wish to ever surf that break again. Too old and out of shape to handle it.





I scuba dove off Cannons reef when there were no waves one summer. My friend and I made a tactical error on that dive. We jumped in the water from the dry cave side and dove toward Cannons from there. The current runs that direction so it made for an easy dive. That is easy until we tried to get out of the water after running out of air in the deep water off the reef. We considered swimming along with the current but neither of us were sure when the next place that we could come in at would be. We considered going against the current but that would have been a chore with the scuba equipment. So we decided to come in over the reef. This turned out to be a big mistake for my partner. As we came in over the reef there was a strong current going out in that area. The further we got in over the reef the stronger the current. Eventually it became impossible to swim against it but I found I could pull myself with my hands and found a narrow channel in the reef to follow in so I wasn't battered too much by the small waves (ripples really) in the extremely shallow water over the reef. I had gloves on for the dive and had switched to my snorkel since i had run out of air. For me it was a little challenging but not too bad. My dive partner was totally freaked out by this dive and got cut up a bit and had a real stressful difficult time coming in. He still was trying to get air out of his tank and it had run dry. He had put his gloves away before coming in over the reef and apparently didn't find a channel to come in through. Funny how different an experience it was for the two of us. He almost didn't want to go diving again after that experience. A later similar experience where I again had little trouble and he had real problems did finally cure him of the scuba diving bug.

[BoMan]

Funny how different an experience it was for the two of us. He almost didn't want to go diving again after that experience.

I can relate.

A friend and I enjoy skating a wide, gently sloped street with perfect pavement. We can easily carve to control speed and have a blast riding top to bottom. One day a neighbor's dog escaped from its yard and took off after us. My buddy turned straight downhill and made a Coleman slide to enter a side street. I escaped the same way but didn't make the turn and suffered a painful fall....worse I think than a dog bite. It took a couple of months before I was ready to go back.

PS - I am now the proud owner of crash pants!

[oldmansurfer]

My friend panicked and didn't realize he had a snorkel which he could have used and gloves that he could have used and instead went into panic mode and clambered around trying to suck air out of a dry tank and grabbing the reef with his ungloved hands. He wasn't injured so bad but I think going into panic mode made it much worse.

[BoMan]

Insights into old school surfing.

Living inland, it was hard to pick a good day and time to surf. We used newspaper tide articles, radio weather reports and phone calls to the local surf shop. Half the time we just went and struck out a lot!

[oldmansurfer]

I wrote this a while back. In it I say I never surfed a longboard before except a couple times and that was when I was nine years old or so and got pushed on a couple waves on a board that was so big for me that I could stand on it on it in flat water and the other one day when I borrowed my older brothers board which was an 8 foot or so longboard design and I caught a few waves but they didn't break.

So I was totally into surfing but decided I needed to got to college so I left my board behind because I was staying in a dorm and didn't know if there was a place to keep boards or how to transport it. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I went hiking up a trail along the edge of the valley that University of Hawaii was in. One day I was way up and looked out over the ocean and there were sets coming in at Waikiki. I ran down the mountain and hopped on the bus and went to Waikiki. It was breaking with about 10 to 12 foot faces and no one was out. I went to one of the board rental places and asked how much it was to rent a board and the beachboy said "We're closed. The waves are too big." I answered "But look how perfect it is." He asked me " Are you a surfer?" I said "Yeah" He said "Ok then just take a board and bring it back when you are done." The only boards they had were these huge heavy longboards and I had only surfed a long board on just a couple of small waves before. Other than that it was strictly shortboards for me. I paddled out and took off and dropped down tried to turn and fell over sideways. Had to swim in and get the board and paddle back out take off again and again fall down sideways. As I swam in to get the board, the beachboy came up to me and said "You never surfed a long board before." I answered "I guess it shows." (Big grin) He said "If you want to turn the long board you need to use your ankles first to angle the board then once it grabs you lean into it" I thanked him and went back out. That worked a lot better and soon enough I was riding the waves and even making cutbacks and stuff. Had a blast but wished I had my own board. I asked around the dorm and everyone said just bring the board and keep it in your dorm room. No one will care. So my next trip home I brought my board back with me although I never saw Waikiki like that again.