"THE KAENA POINT CHALLENGE," SURFING MAGAZINE (1983)

"The Kaena Point Challenge," unattributed, ran in the August 1983 issue of Surfing magazine. This version has been slightly edited.

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Ace Cool says he's going to ride Kaena Point. That puts him into the company of past famous talkers like Jim "Wildman" Neece, Mickey Dora and several others, who've planned to ride it, threatened to ride it, or said they'd ridden it. One surfer drove out to the Point on a 40' day back in the 1960s to check it out; he reports finding Mickey Dora standing beside his car with his board, combing out his wet hair. "It's not bad," Mickey said.

Ace Cool is Alec Cooke, a descendant of the missionary Cookes. He's the owner of Country Surfboards in Haleiwa, and is a radio surf reporter who describes himself as “sort of an underground counterculture hero." Lately he's been riding big waves; the biggest he can find.

Kaena Point is the westernmost tip of Oahu, a finger pointing straight at Hong Kong, 6,000 miles away. Extending out into very deep water, exposed to huge ocean swells from north or south or west, it attracts and focuses perhaps the greatest ocean energies on earth.

It has been said that to ride Kaena Point is to die. You can't make it to the bottom before it hits you and rips you to shreds. Even if you do make the drop, you'll drown inside. And so on.

"I want to do it for the money and because I'm crazy," says Ace Cool. "I'll be like Evil Knievel in the surf."

"He's going for it, for sure," says Warren Bolster, project photographer and amazed observer. "He's got real financial problems. I think he'd rather die than live in poverty like this. It's a desperation thing."

"Fred Hemmings has my resume," says Mr. Cool. "He's helping me with proposals to various potential sponsors. I have faith in him." Hemmings worked with Cooke on organizing the 1980 AMF Lightning Bolt Bodysurfing competition, which was successful.

"I think he's kind of overplaying my role in it," Fred says definitively. "I don't want any business connection with this whatsoever."

However, Hemmings does think that Cooke's serious, and that he's got the two necessary ingredients: "He's got big-wave ability and he's stupid enough to try it." Fred has passed along some ideas on safety procedures to Mr. Cool, including: early morning check-out, 6' weather balloon dropped into line-up to check size of surf, dye dropped into the lineup to check current movements, a dummy surfer dropped into the lineup to see what happens, a boat to tow Cool into the wave, a harness to pull him out, and a helicopter to do the pulling. Also: a three-minute air cylinder clipped to Ace's wrist.

"I don't want to sound negative or judgmental," says big-waver Ken Bradshaw, "but Ace is not really a very good surfer. He's obsessed with notoriety and impatient for success, and the quick way [to get there] is outlandish stunts." Bradshaw resents the implication that you have to be crazy to ride Kaena; he feels that carefully prepared big-wave riders will one day ride it, and he resents Cooke's apparent violations of big-wave etiquette at Waimea this season. "It's not cool to take off behind the peak and not make the wave."

According to Flippy Hoffman, another big-waver, who's ridden Kaena (along with Roger Erickson, Bradshaw, Mike Miller and Charlie Walker) on perhaps a 20' day: "It's a nothin' deal. We surfed it four or five times off a boat. It's a lot like Waimea. But if he goes off the beach, he's doing something bitchin'. If he goes off the beach, surfs it, and comes back to the beach, he's doing something really bitchin'!"

But Cool says he's going for the big north swell, the wave that breaks off the point at 30-foot-plus and peels off towards Hong Kong. "I've been building up in big surf for five years," he says. "But [the TV show] That's Incredible! only pays $3,000 for a feat, and I'm not going till there's more money in it than that."