Haleiwa Town, entry point for the North Shore of Oahu, is an easy 30-minute drive from the tropical urban sprawl of Honolulu. But drive through Haleiwa late in the year with an arsenal of boards strapped to the roof and the atmosphere suddenly feels heavier, more pressurized. This isn’t just a surf trip. You’ve ventured to the center of the surfing universe.
How this affects you depends on several things. The number of North Shore visits you’ve made in the past. Local connections. Your World Tour ranking, if applicable. Above all, your place on the sport’s invisible but finely calibrated scale of gnarliness. Badass veterans with reef scars on their feet and shoulders can usually keep the anxiety in check. The mood for most newcomers is roughly three parts dread to one part anticipation.
North Shore waves are famously big and powerful, but the truly distinctive feature here is how tightly clustered the breaks are. Beginning near the harbor mouth at Haleiwa and moving east, more than three dozen surf spots, many of them exceptional, are squeezed into what has long been called surfing's "Seven Mile Miracle." From late fall to early spring, the surf generally ranges from five to 15 feet. A few times, it jumps up to 20, or 30, or even 50 feet. Nowhere else does the velvet glove fit more snugly over the iron fist. Warm sand, aquamarine water, tropical blue skies, plumeria-scented trade winds—and beneath it all a vast submerged plateau of lava reef, knuckled and ribbed and crevassed, shaping North Pacific swells into fearsome and occasionally life-altering waves, especially at Waimea Bay, Sunset Beach, and Pipeline
With few exceptions, every wave rider of note from the past half-century has come to the North Shore. Long-gone people and events flicker constantly around the edges, just out of sight. Big wooden boards washing ashore at Laniakea like matchsticks after a cleanup set in the late fifties. A generation later, Barry Kanaiaupuni leaning into turns at Sunset Beach with enough force to peel his lips back from his teeth. Donny Solomon, a rookie from Southern California, punching through the lip of a 25-footer at Waimea in 1995, nearly safe on the wave’s far slope before getting sucked over the falls, backwards, to his death.
These days, roughly 500 surfers from around the world spend most of November and December on the North Shore. The surf media follows. Photographers, filmmakers, reporters, and bloggers focus on the North Shore the way the fashion media focuses on Paris and New York. A framework for the season is provided by the annual Triple Crown contest series, which concludes with the Pipeline Masters, the final stop on pro surfing’s ten-event world tour. Rides at Pipeline are short but spectacular, and often disastrous, and the reef itself is close to the narrow beach, which is backed by a row of vacation houses whose front porches look out to the lineup like Yankee Stadium box seats. Pipe has played host to a half-dozen nail-biting down-to-the-wire world-title finales. Kelly Slater has had his finest moments as a pro at the Masters, as did the recently deceased Andy Irons. The list goes all the way back to Gerry Lopez, the original tube-riding deity, who won the event twice in the early seventies.
by Matt Warshaw, Outside | Read more:
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