Surfing in 1000 BC

Viva Caballito!

Out of the Blue

A Surfboard for Everybody

Lono Wept

The New God Doesn't Surf

A Sport in Decline

The average Polynesian peasant-surfer likely banged together his new surfboard with no more godly thought than a woodcrafter making a door. At the royal level, however, boardmaking was a serious matter, filled with rites and rituals. A craftsman would search the highland forest for a suitable tree. Small and midlength boards were usually made of koa, a fine-grained hardwood, or the softer breadfruit. Longer boards were generally made from wiliwili, the same lightweight wood used for canoes. Once an appropriate tree was found, a red 

 fish was ceremoniously placed at the trunk, the tree was cut down, and prayers were made as the fish was then placed in a hole dug in the root system, as compensation to the spirits. (Canoe-building was a more serious undertaking; for a voyaging canoe, the root hole might be consecrated not with a 

Branches were then removed from the trunk using a basalt-headed adze, and the trunk was cut to length, skinned, and hewn into a rough board-like form. This was carried to a shaded beachfront work shed. All the channels and ruts left by the adze were smoothed out using coral heads of various textures; pumice stones were used for fine sanding. A glossy charcoal-based finishing stain was often added. Boards made from wiliwili were sometimes buried next to a freshwater spring so that mud filled the porous wood surface and, after drying, created a seal. All boards were waterproofed with a rubbed-in coat of nut oil. There were no stabilizing fins.

High-end boardmaking from start to finish took about a week, and more rites and prayers were made over the finished product before it was launched into the water. (Commoners not only skipped most or all of the ceremony, but also the finishing work, which probably reduced production time by half.) After use, the board was left out to dry, again rubbed down with coconut oil, and usually stowed prominently in the rafters of the family house. Fastidious surfers kept their board wrapped in tapa cloth.

Because premodern Hawaii had a barter-based economic system, a surfboard was either presented as a gift or offered in exchange for goods or services. Either way, building one represented a real investment of time and energy, and as such it was expected not only to perform well in the surf but to reflect favorably upon its owner. Visiting British ship commander George Anson Byron, first cousin to the poet Lord Byron, dropped anchor in Hawaii in the early nineteenth century and, recognizing a status marker when he saw one, wrote that “to have a neat floatboard, well-kept, and dried, is to a Sandwich Islander [Hawaiian] what a tilbury or cabriolet, or whatever light carriage may be in fashion, is to a young English man."

Hawaiians developed three basic types of surfboard: the paipo, the olo, and the alaia. The round-nosed paipo was the smallest of the three, and it was used mostly by children in nearshore surf. A child’s paipo might be 3 feet tall, 16 inches wide, and a half-inch thick. An adult version could be as long as 6 feet. The best surfers could stand on a paipo board, and a kneeling position was used, too, but mostly it was ridden prone. Jack London put himself in the middle of a paipo-riding swarm at Waikiki during a 1907 visit to Hawaii: “I joined some little Kanaka boys in more shallow water, where the breakers were well spent and small—a regular kindergarten school. When a likely-looking breaker came along, they flopped upon their stomachs on their boards, kicked like mad with their feet, and rode the breaker to the beach.” London tried but had no luck. “We would all leap on our boards in front of a good breaker. Away our feet would churn like the sternwheels of river steamboats, and away the little rascals would scoot while I remained in disgrace behind.”

The showpiece of ancient Hawaiian surfing was the royal olo, the wiliwili colossus used exclusively by the ruling alii class. Specs for the olo surfboard were almost cartoonish: 20 feet long by 2 feet wide, 200 pounds, and domed along both the deck and bottom so that the center thickness swelled out to as much as 8 inches.

Modern surfing’s fascination with the olo began in the mid-1920s, when Tom Blake, America’s first surfing champion, visited Hawaii and restored a pair of weather-beaten olos that for too long had been hanging on an exterior wall at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. Blake was the first surfer of his generation to take a real interest in ancient surf history and lore, but part of his response to the olos was a simple wide-eyed awe, like a rural schoolboy seeing his first skyscraper. A few years later, Blake and Hawaiian surf icon Duke Kahanamoku each made themselves a 16-foot olo replica, more than half again longer and heavier than the average board of the time—Duke’s olo weighed a full 130 pounds. Both surfers reported that the “long boards” worked especially well in large waves. “During our last big surf, which only comes three or four times a year,” Blake wrote in 1935, “the Duke did some of the most beautiful riding I have ever seen on his new long board.”

While just a handful of examples survived into the twentieth century, the olo has nonetheless come to be viewed as the showpiece of ancient Hawaiian surfing. Replicas stand in museums and are sold to collectors for tens of thousands of dollars. Yet the olo has about it a kind of grand absurdity, like a stretch limousine or a floor-dragging ceremonial robe. There are no eyewitness accounts of olo surfing, but it seems likely that the boards were used for the sole purpose of riding unbroken waves. “It is a good board for a wave that swells and rushes shoreward,” nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar John Papa Ii said of the olo, “but not for a wave that rises up high and curls over.” Huge, heavy, and finless, the olo would have been nearly impossible to guide or steer—less a surfboard than a small canoe, which was also used by the Hawaiians to ride waves, but with the operational advantage of a paddle. The kapu laws that prevented commoners from using the olo may have been a matter of public safety, given that a loose olo would blast through the wave zone like a log through rapids.

Another theory surf historians have suggested is that the olo may have been designed for big surf. Large waves move faster through the ocean and are much harder to catch than small waves, and the olo had a great paddling advantage over other types of boards. Even more so in big surf, however, it seems likely that the idea would have been to steer clear of breaking waves. Many Hawaiian surf spots have a deep-water channel adjacent to the break, allowing the surfer to paddle out without running into any broken waves. Some of these breaks, too, have a broad shoaling area beyond the surf zone, where open ocean swells first begin to tilt. This may have been the intended field of play for the olo.

Tom Blake also used the olo as a design starting point for his magnificent high-speed paddleboards. It’s a more prosaic idea, and there’s nothing in the records saying as much, but it may be that the Hawaiians regarded the olo as more of a paddleboard than a surfboard.

Surfing as the world knows it—stand-up riding on a wave that curls and breaks—was for all practical purposes invented on the alaia, a thin midsize board about half the size of an olo. The alaia was round at the nose, tapered and squared-off at the tail, and slightly convex along the bottom. Most were 6 or 7 feet long and weighed about 45 pounds. Although similar in width to the olo, the alaia was much leaner; most were less than 2 inches thick, and some were pared down to a very breakable half inch. It “vibrates against the rider’s abdomen, chest, [and] hands,” a nineteenth-century Hawaiian noted, describing the sensitive ride of such a thin craft. The alaia was the Hawaiian standard, used by monarchs and villagers alike; it paddled well enough to catch unbroken swells on the intermediary offshore reefs, but was responsive and maneuverable enough to let the surfer ride in the steep, fast, curling section of the wave.

Unlike the hulking olo, an alaia board could be paddled directly through the wave zone to the lineup—the surfer’s ready area, located just beyond the breaking waves. A modified crawl was sometimes used in the early going, with the rider floating alongside his board, one arm locked across the deck of the board, near the nose, the other stroking forward; the front of the board was pulled underwater as each broken wave passed by. Once in the lineup, the surfer either sat on his board or remained prone, eyes to the horizon, and watched the incoming swells for a likely wave. When it came, the board was quickly wheeled around and aimed shoreward, centered beneath the rider—some knee-paddled into waves, but most went prone—and with a few churning strokes the wave was caught. Timing, more than speed, was essential. The idea wasn’t so much to match the wave’s speed as to be positioned on the swell’s upper slopes just as it tilted up, allowing gravity to do the work.

Without a stabilizing fin, the alaia provided only limited control, so that performance was judged less on the route taken across the wave, as with today’s surfing, and more on the rider himself. The best surfers moved smoothly from position to position: belly-down, kneeling, sitting, and hardest of all, standing. They also rode at an angle to the wave face, just ahead of the whitewater, doubling or even tripling their speed compared to the novice surfer heading straight for the beach. There were other ways to demonstrate expertise. At the south end of Kealakekua Bay, on the Big Island, where lava outcroppings spill off the beach into the water, part of the game was to finish off a ride by shooting through gaps in the nearshore rocks. Pulling back at the last moment, as one early Western observer noted, was not only “reckoned very disgraceful,” but often led to “the loss of the board, which I have often seen, with great horror, dashed to pieces at the very moment the islander quitted it.”

Bodysurfing was its own separate form of wave-riding, and was also done ad hoc as the fastest way to chase down a loose board. Canoe surfing was popular, too. Forms were sometimes combined. Using the royal prerogative, King Kamehameha would load his board into a canoe, paddle into a swell, stand, pick up his board, and jump from the canoe into the wave, leaving the unmanned craft stalled in his wake while he rode to shore.

Myths and chants describe heroic performances in big waves. “Big,” though, has always been a relative term in the sport. Without a stabilizing fin, and a half dozen or more not-yet-invented design features, the ancient surfboard would have been a truly unwilling partner in bigger surf—anything above, say, eight or ten feet. If larger waves were ridden, they must have been smooth, gently sloped, and top-spilling, breaking near a deep channel; to maintain control, even on a ten-footer, a surfer likely would have had to take the most cautious route possible toward shore. That said, there is evidence that oversized surf was ridden, and not just in myth. Under certain conditions, a big-wave spot on Oahu’s North Shore called Sunset Beach offers the kind of rolling, broad-based wave described above. Ancient Hawaiians called the break Paumalu and regarded it as surfing’s ultimate challenge.

Mostly, surfing was spirited good fun. But not always. Umi-a-liloa, the son of a ranking fifteenth-century Big Island chief, traveled incognito to a festival near Hilo, where he bragged about his surfing skills and was called out by a local royal named Paiea. Their initial penny ante stakes quickly doubled and redoubled, until finally the wager was set at four double-hulled racing canoes. Competition rules for this event were probably typical for the period; the two surfers would take off on a wave together and both aim for a nearshore finish line consisting of a pair of tethered floats. “Umi and Paiea paddled [into] the high surf, pushing their boards through heavy breakers until they reached the open sea,” one early Hawaiian scholar later wrote. “They spent considerable time maneuvering for best position, [then] selected a large wave and paddled madly toward shore. They stood up simultaneously, feet firmly placed on the convex deck of the boards, [and] came with great speed.” Paiea was first to cross the finish line, but along the way he railroaded his opponent, causing Umi to loose a bit of skin on a rock. It was a dirty trick, and not forgotten. When Umi came to power years later, he ordered Paiea’s capture and—depending on what version of the story is being told—had him either slow-baked in an oven or splayed and gutted on a stone altar.

When surfing was exported from Hawaii to the rest of the world, centuries later, it never failed to present itself beautifully. Introduced as the exciting and romantic Sport of Kings, it won converts at every stop. But the germ of violence was passed along as well. All that passion noted by early-contact Westerners—the habit among native surfers, as one nineteenth-century observer put it, for “waving their arms and uttering exultant cries”—was bound to be redirected and perverted now and then. Of course, it’s been centuries since aggrieved surfers could resort to eviscerating or slow-roasting their fellows. But like the olo board and the dramatic big-wave tale, bad behavior in one form or another has its own long and unbroken history in surfing.

When one ancient Hawaiian chief came to power, he captured an old surf rival and then—depending on what version of the story is being told—had him either slow-baked in an oven or splayed and gutted on a stone alter.

Chapter: 1

Out of the Blue

A Surfboard for Everybody

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