Surfshop Owners' Gnarliest Surf Spots

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Stewart Yerton 2007-09-05 13:30:00.0

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Surf these unbelievable breaks at your own risk

You can tell much about a place from the small shops that still manage to thrive in a world of big-box retailers and other faceless consumer outlets. In Hawaii, one of the defining local institutions is the neighborhood surf shop. There you'll find not just boards, but something far more valuable: solid advice.

Befriend the informal surf ambassadors who run the local shops, and they will impart wisdom not easily found in a surf map or guidebook, including personal insights into Hawaii's gnarliest breaks—places with evocative names like Point Panic, Suicides and Avalanche.

And, of course, there's perhaps the most famous break of all: the Banzai Pipeline.

"As we know, Pipeline is the best surf spot in the world. It's the standard against which others are measured," says James Cuizon, owner of Crank and Carve, a surf, bodyboard and skate shop in the North Shore town of Haleiwa.

See our slideshow of Surfshop Owners' Gnarliest Surf Spots.

A good day at Pipeline means an encounter with fellow surfers who can be as friendly as pitbulls with migraines, and waves that can shatter boards into kindling. And then there's the reef. At Pipeline there can be 10 foot waves blasting over just three feet of water, so if you fall on the reef or get caught inside the break, you're lucky if you come out merely sliced up. In 2005 alone, Pipeline claimed the lives of two expert watermen, Tahitian surfer Malik Joyeux and photographer Jon Mozo.

Pipeline "is not the wave that the average Joe goes out to surf," Cuizon says. His bleak advice for that particular break: "Stay out of the water."

Whether big spots like Pipeline are firing depends on several factors, one of which is whether a swell is hitting the spot. Because of the Pacific Ocean's size, storm-generated swells have the space to travel thousands of miles and organize into well-defined groups of waves, or sets, without losing energy as they approach Hawaii. When they jam into Hawaii's reefs, the swells rise up like great blue leviathans and normally flat spots can become monsters.

Castles in Waikiki is a case in point. "Only when there's a south swell, only at 10 to 15 feet, will Castles fire," says Toru Yamaguchi, owner of Surf Garage in Honolulu. Castles is not a particularly steep wave, but it has "huge water" Yamaguchi says.

When Hawaiian surfers talk about wave sizes, they normally refer to the back of a wave, not the face. Thus, a wave desribed as "15 feet Hawaiian" can have a face the size of a three-story building. "It's kind of scary," Yamaguchi says. "You can see the whole island almost."

See our slideshow of Surfshop Owners' Gnarliest Surf Spots.

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