- Time Capsule -
MacLaren's 1970's Hawaii Photos
from the North Shore of Oahu
Page 1: The Waimea Photos - Image 1
| Hawaii Stories - Table of Contents |
Ordinarily, I'd do this in strict chronological order, but the interest level that I've encountered over the years with these few blurred and beat-up Waimea photographs dating from a far-distant time when Richard Nixon was the President of the United States, is telling me to place them at the head of the line, first in order. The rest of the photos (and there's not very many at all) have generated far less interest, so we'll keep them out of the way right now, and save them for the next few pages.
The Waimea stuff is dramatic, and people really seem to like dramatic stuff, so instead of placing the original scan of this damaged and time-beaten photograph at the top of this page like I should, I'm going to (once again) accede to the wishes of the majority, and put the most dramatic restored version of this photo first, and then follow that with background information and the original, much less dramatic, scan which I feel necessary for the presentation of things in as complete and honest a rendering as I can.
So ok. So here you go.
MacLaren (out in front, and the guy behind did not make this wave) at Waimea, 1973.
Of immediate note with this image is that it's a crop, taken from a larger original which you'll be seeing here in a bit, and also that it's a scan of a photographic print which was developed at a common store with a machine for doing this kind of work in a back room somewhere, which was where you used to take your film to get it developed into proper photographs back in those days, and for whatever reasons at the time, the positive print which you're seeing, was done on textured paper, and its that texture which you're seeing in the image as a sort of fabric-looking overlay pattern of bumps on the paper.
This image has been heavily reworked in an attempt to overcome the extensive physical and color-cast damage to the original print, including a bit of direct touch-up work, but is in no wise unfaithful to the original photograph (and of course you'll get to see for yourself about that, and come to your own conclusions about things, soon enough).
Ok. Enough with technical considerations of the image. What about the wave?
And I guess we'll need a little background as to how I came to find myself, in this image, on this wave, and to do so, I guess we'll need to talk about Waimea, and do so via context of some paleo-James-MacLaren from the early 1970's, which is when it all went down.
Scroll down past all these words to see the original scan below, or additional images on subsequent pages, but if you're interested in the story, well then, ok. Here we go.
I fetched up on the North Shore in early Autumn, 1972, direct-shot with no intermediates, departing Brevard County, Florida where I had grown up from earliest childhood and had never once surfed outside of, excepting that thinnest sliver of Indian River County which encompasses Monster Hole, southward across open water from the north jetty at Sebastian Inlet. The gentleman who took this photograph had gotten to Oahu a year ahead of me, and wrote a letter to me, where I lived in South Melbourne Beach at the time, renting a room, telling me that he had a place to stay, and did I perhaps want to come stay there too?
And I was on probation at the time I received that letter of invitation to come live in Hawaii, (I was a juvenile delinquent back then. Nowadays I'm an adult delinquent, possibly even a senior-citizen delinquent, I dunno.) and my three-years period of probation expired on the last day of September, 1972, but the miserably-tenacious fucks at Florida Probation and Parole held on to me for two full additional days, because the last day in September 1972 fell on a Saturday, and the first day in October 1972 fell on a Sunday, and no, we're not going to sign you out of our system until the next business day, and fuck you if you don't like it, kid, and so, the following Monday, bright and early, I hitchhiked to the fucked-up Probation and Parole Office in Melbourne, Florida, signed the goddamned mandatory paperwork (Why don't they just.... let you go? Why do they compel you to come down into their dreary little office filled with dreary little people.... and sign for it?) affirming my successful completion of the term of my probation, and yes, you're now free as a little birdie to travel wherever you might wish to without first asking us for permission, and...
...BANG! GONE!...
And I got off the plane in Honolulu the very next evening, and it was the evening of October 3, 1972, and I had 74 dollars in cash on my person, and a few scraps of clothing and a few personal effects in a white laundry bag which was my luggage, and I hitchhiked through the night, sleeping in an abandoned car alongside the roadway somewhere near the entrance to Mililani Town along the way, and from thence around to the post office at Hau'ula the next day, by way of Wahiawa and Kahuku, having no idea whatsoever where I was or where I was going, counting on the kindnesses of those who stopped and picked me up from the side of the road to safely and successfully get me where I was going, and I found my benefactors there in Hau'ula, and was in Punalu'u forthwith.
And I never in my life had the slightest intention of riding anything with any actual substance to it, and instead, it was my fondest desire as a newcomer to Hawaii from the Flatlands of Florida, to be a crumbsnatcher, and in so doing, perhaps get a wave or two to myself from the leftovers that everybody else out there who actually knew how to surf did not even deem fit for riding, leaving them to lower life-forms such as myself, and in truth, it wasn't such a bad plan, and I had a lot of fun in the small stuff as the days of October passed by, one after another, and the North Pacific Ocean slowly awoke from it's summer-long slumber, in the El Niño year of 1972, back when nobody even knew what an El Niño was, or what it might mean on the North Shore of Oahu when a particularly strong one kicked into gear.
And I had no idea what was coming my way, even as it was stealthily creeping in my direction from a hidden place I never suspected the existence of.
NONE.
And one fine day, I found myself standing near the literal grass shack (one of the pair that were still standing in 1972) I slept in, which was constructed by a literal Hawaiian Prince (who, alas, died the year before my arrival, but who's passing caused his elderly wife, Myrtle, who was a radical lady, possessed of a towering intellect and bizarrely-smooth exterior which concealed an astounding grittiness and inclination to go right at things, to need to find someone to keep the acreage reasonably neat and organized against the unrelenting onslaught of the tropical rainforest environment which obtained there on the Windward Side of Oahu in Punalu'u, which is how I, indirectly, came to wind up staying there).
And I'm standing there, bathed in warm steeply-slanting sunrise rays of light which are beaming through the forest of coconut palms on the grounds there at Myrtle Ka'apu's (not Ka'apu, really, although that shortened version was what was used in all cases, but instead, Ka'apu'awaokamehameha, which was Prince David's actual last name, and it derived from the fact that his ali'i family was the bearer of the kava cup to King Kamehameha, who enjoyed the stuff just as much as anybody else enjoyed it) place in Punalu'u, and Billy says "Let's go look at the waves."
And so we did.
And that day may have been November 2, 1972, or it may have been November 3, 1972, but I'm pretty sure it was November 3, and the Goddard and Caldwell Data Set for 1972 tells us that it was 15 feet on the second of November that year, and it was 18 feet on the third of November that year, and those "feet" which get used in the Goddard and Caldwell Data Set are actually Hawaiian Scale Feet, and to get yourself a "Hawaiian Scale Foot" you take the face size of any given wave, and divide it by TWO, unless it's for large readings at Waimea, which are not quite so ridiculous but are still plenty bad enough to cause trouble, so it's more than just a little bit understated, and if you're not careful, it just might sneak up on you, if you let it, and they're not actually setting out to deceive you, they're just attempting to standardize things using the lingua franca in use at the time, and they even give you a little extra to help you with the formatting, which is terse in the extreme, and also machine-readable, which makes it a little tricky for us humans to do a little reading, too, but the information is all right there in plain sight, and... ok.
And of course back then there was NOTHING for surf forecasting, and we didn't know Larry Goddard from the Man in the Moon, and if you wanted to know what it was doing, you went down to the edge of the water and looked at it with your own two eyes, and we drove to the North Shore from Punalu'u early that morning, and when we turned the corner past Kahuku, and gained our first look at the ocean, it was GIANT, and so we decided to drive onwards past Sunset Beach without so much as even slowing down, because it was rolling through, solid whitewaters, completely closed-out and out of control, from a full mile out there, and we kept right on going until we parked in the empty parking lot at Waimea Bay Beach Park, and walked across the soft green dew-covered grass over to the beach itself to the north side of the bay, and there was not a single soul out there in the lineup, and even though it was breaking, it was breaking weirdly (which we did not realize at the time, and only figured this out quite a bit later), and instead of just coming over in one horrendous death-dealing explosion and then backing right off like it usually does at Waimea, it was actually peeling, and as anybody who's looked at Waimea from the beach over there can tell you, it didn't look all that bad or personally unsafe (Waimea is extraordinarily deceptive that way, and not only does it never look as big as it really is, it also never photographs as big as it really is, and anybody who's familiar with the place will tell you that exact same thing, and nobody knows why, and that one has always mystified me, and it must further always be taken into account lest you make a mistake when sizing the place up.), and Billy flipped his wig, and started bouncing around babbling about how he'd always wanted to surf Waimea, but he didn't want to paddle out there alone, and I found myself reluctantly agreeing to the proposition of paddling out there with him, despite my never in my life EVER having been anywhere near waves this size (to this point, I had never even ridden medium-large Sunset Beach, and once it got somewhere in the middle there between double-overhead and triple-overhead on my own personal six-foot one-inch frame, I shifted gears, happily, and went from being a participant, to being a spectator), and further agreeing to let Billy ride my 7'-6" which was longer than his 7'-2" (I outweighed Billy by almost thirty pounds at the time, and why I ever agreed to a thing like that, I'm sure I'll never know.), and by golly we ran back to Billy's car, raced around the north end of Oahu to Punalu'u, grabbed the boards, and flew back to Waimea smoking a couple of fat ones on the way, and we paddled out, and there were never more than four or six other people in the lineup for the whole multi-hour session, and then and there we started calling the place "Secret Spot," and we rode it, and I did not die, and all of a sudden, it's like... "I can do this," and it turned out to be one of those fall and winter wave seasons when The Bay broke surprisingly often, and...
So ok.
So Waimea.
Sure, why not?
So by the time the image at the top of this page was taken, roughly one full year after my initial arrival in Hawaii, I had already completed my personal transformation (which never in my life, until it actually happened, would I have so much as imagined that a thing like that even could happen) from Florida Crumbsnatcher to Competent Large-wave Rider, and by this point I was actually looking forward to riding Waimea whenever it broke, which, even in El Niño years, isn't all so very often, looking forward to that weird butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling you get when you're standing right there at the edge of the water with a big-wave board under your arm, feeling the uncannily-enjoyable complexities and interactions of fear, pleasure, and anticipation, as the adrenaline levels in your bloodstream continue to ramp up just before you time your entry into the water, run like hell into the surge racing up the steep sandy slope of the beach, shove the board down on to the equally-steep slope of the water's surface as you hop on top of it, and start paddling for the distant horizon like all holy hell, taking advantage of the speed increase you get from the surge as it turns around and runs back downslope as it's getting gathered back up into the steepening face of the next incoming wall of water, which you very much want to be able to paddle over, before it breaks, because if it gets you, it will just blow you completely to hell and beat the living shit out of you as it roars you right back upslope to where you started from, perhaps to stagger out of the water and find your surfboard nearby in one piece, but perhaps not...
So ok.
So Waimea.
Sure, why not?
And as for the ride itself...
As for that part of things which you're seeing in the image up at the top of this page...
I dunno. You really do want to share things with people. You really do want to let them experience the unexperienceable through you...
You really do...
But can you?
Can you actually instill the sensations in them?
Sensations that flash like the most powerful strokes of lightning through your own nerves and muscles so fast... so intensely... coupled with visions of whole worlds that flicker into and out of existence in the blink of an eye... vivid to the point of electric shock in a way that mere reality can never duplicate... even though they are all too real... horrifyingly real... worlds no other traveler can ever see... worlds so sublime and beautiful and terrifying that you yourself are unable to make proper sense of them, and oftentimes find yourself only able to deal with some kind of vague blurry afterglow, not really knowing precisely what it was that you just experienced?
I wish I knew...
I wish I had...
The power to convey it to someone...
In terms that they could make actual use of...
for themselves.
...to convey a frighteningly-violent and all-too-literally breathtaking thing...
...a revolving-door portal which gives entrance to both heaven and hell... simultaneously
...and which occasionally kills those who pass through it...
...and very often thrashes to within inches of people's lives...
...and yet, which those who have endured...
...willingly...
...eagerly...
...look forward to returning to with sufficient strength of feeling...
...as to cause them to put aside...
...jobs
...friends
...families
...lives...
There can be no possible way to convey such a thing.
Let us return to the image.
We have no business talking about the ride.
Let us return to that frozen-in-place thing which we can at least see, degraded and damaged, ravaged by time as it may be.
Here's the original, and it bears faint resemblance to what you've already seen up above these words, even though it's the same wave, the same people, the same photograph.
Quite a bit less dramatic, eh?
Feel free to give it a close comparison with the highly-post-processed version at the top of this page to see where and how I cropped it, color-corrected it, removed obvious blemishes, and did a tiny little bit of outright retouching on it, too.
And now that we find ourselves playing around with the image, well then, lets play around with it.
Here it is again, color-corrected and cleaned up once again, with a slightly different crop to let you see the solidity of the lip coming over back there, and it links to a fairly-large version that's 4845 pixels in width.
Waimea backs off into a giant mushball in a hurry, but when it first comes over, it's a strictly no-fucking-around proposition, and that lip back there, pitching thick and hollow top-to-bottom, is not something you ever want to be getting in front of, or getting mixed up with, the wrong way.
And of course, back in the early 1970's, we were just bare-handing the damn thing without any sort of safety net to fall back on if things took a turn for the worse.
No cords, no flotation vests, inflatable or otherwise, and no water patrol on jet skis.
No training, no health and nutrition regimen, no coaches or advisors of any kind, hell.. nobody at all, period.
No nothing.
Pick up the board, jump in the water, have at it. You're on your own, bub, for better or for worse. Best of luck with it.
Just you and that goddamned wave.
Make the mistake, take the fall, pay the price, strictly pass-or-fail the whole way, and with all of the rewards and punishments being dished out immediately.
It was not one of those things that you could "fake it till you make it" or bullshit your way through it to even the slightest degree at all.
Waimea would say, "Take THAT, loser!" and we would.
And of course you'd never want to bullshit your way through it, in the first place.
What the hell's up with that shit?
That defeats the whole purpose of the thing, before you even get started with it.
The whole idea was to tackle something of consequence, and know in your own private heart that you could DO it.
Something significant, that not just any old body could do. Something with a bar set fairly high.
"I think I'll become a famous high-jumper, and I'll do it by jumping higher than anybody else has ever jumped, but I'll use a ladder to kind of help myself along with it, just in case it turns out to be harder to do than I'd like it to be."
Who the hell in everlasting holy fuck would ever want to do something like that?
The absolutely-brutal honesty and simplicity of it all was one of the very best parts of it, and any kind of success at all, on that brutal of a level, is one of the most delicious things you'll ever experience in your whole life.
Ok. Enough already, MacLaren. Knock it off. You've made your point.
Let's get back to the wave, how 'bout?
Waimea's a funny wave in several different ways, and one of those ways is how it shoulders off steeply on some waves every once in a while, but on most other waves of the same size, it does not.
In our original image on this page, and in the reworked version below, you can see that it's shouldering off quite noticeably, which is a bit unusual insofar as it usually does not do that when it's got any kind of substance to it at all, and instead it holds up a wall with a bit of size (but no steepness of vertical aspect at all) to it, even out into the deeper water of the channel
Here's one more look at it to include as much color-corrected area of the entire original as could be kept within a crop which also levels the horizon, and this one links to a pretty large file that weighs in at over 30 megabytes, and which is 8131 pixels wide, so if you've got a slow internet connection, then the linked image is gonna take a while to load. That shoulder out there is sloping off at a pretty steep angle. What's the deal with that thing?
Waimea is in no sense a peak by any stretch of the definition, and instead gains all of its makable shape by virtue of the steep depth differential between the center of the bay, and the margin over by the point where the take-off area is.
Incoming walls... it's always a wall, and if it's not a wall, then it's not being ridden, because enough disorganization to disrupt a sensible wall entering the mouth of the bay (which is surprisingly small, quite the little vest-pocket of a miniature embayment in the layout of the generalized coastline), constitutes way more than enough disruption to cause anything of that nature to become completely unrideable.
And my guess is that the occasional strong shouldering-off it evidences is a kind of side effect of how the wave even manages to enter the bay at all, with any size at all, in the first place.
Most people think of Waimea as a big wave, and yes, it's certainly big enough, but in the overall scheme of things, when it's breaking, it's the smallest place around.
Waimea Canyon is a significant geographical feature on this side of the Koolau shield volcano, and it extends seaward beneath the surface of the water for quite a distance, and the large swells required to get the place to break rideably are feeling the bottom, and feeling it substantially, quite a long distance offshore, out in very deep water where they're still just low rollers, inbound.
And as they approach the coastline, the noticeably shallower water (it's still deep, but it's just not as deep, and big swells feel the bottom and respond noticeably to what they feel in surprisingly deep water) on either side of the drowned valley offshore is pulling the wave apart in the center, trying to draw the energy of the wave to either side away from the center, weakening and attenuating the part that remains, which is aimed at the takeoff point over there on the north side of the mouth of the bay.
And what happens, as you sit back a little ways, with maybe a somewhat higher vantage point to see all of this going down in real-time, is that you can see the main energy of the sets, the groups of largest waves as they approach the mouth of the bay, tending to get pulled to the side, one side or the other, not a lot, but enough, drawn in by that somewhat-shallower water offshore on either side, leaving what's there in the center with noticeably less size and power than what's booming shoreward on either side of the bay.
And it's almost funny sometimes how you can be sitting there watching it coming, seeing substantial energy arriving inbound, out there in the deep-blue water, anticipating what it's going to be doing when it gets to where everybody is waiting for their next ride, and the damn things, at pretty much the last second, will find a way to completely miss the place where everybody is located, and even though it's going off like an atomic bomb over there across the bay on the Haleiwa side, or even right next to where they're all parked in a bunch sitting on their rhino-chasers, just behind them towards the Three Tables side, there turns out to be greatly-reduced, or insufficient, energy at the exact point of take-off.
And it can be surprisingly frustrating to be standing there watching, as substantial set after substantial set somehow finds a way, at the last second, to miss, and fail to produce a substantial wave, or sometimes even a wave that's catchable at all, right there at the take-off point.
No, it does not do this on every swell, every time, but it does it a lot. More often than not, certainly. Swell size, period, and purity can, and do, alter the particulars of things significantly, but the tendency is always there.
And so, on to the bit about occasional waves "shouldering off." Even though we're dealing with waves that start out as truly massive walls of water, literal miles in length, if a set of walls happens to already be tending toward one side of the bay or the other (happens all the time), sometimes the tendency gets magnified, and what results is a condition where the part of things arriving at the take-off zone just barely makes it that far over, and just the weenciest bit farther over, in the center of the bay, winds up being extraordinarily sapped of energy, resulting in a surprisingly steep shoulder, on a wave that started out in deep water with no shoulder of any kind, to any degree.
So like I said earlier, Waimea's kind of a funny wave (but certainly not any kind of "ha ha" funny), and it's funny in more than one way.
Ok, let's go look at the next picture, taken on the same day (all three of them were taken on the same day), and this one won't be showing any kind of shouldering-off, making it a more "normal" wave, or at least as normal as sensibly-ridable waves at Waimea Bay can ever get.
Return to 16streets.comHawaii Stories - Table of ContentsContact Email Link |