New Route, New Horizons

Eighteen months ago I started flying a new route, from DFW International Airport to Honolulu. The non-stop flight time is about 8 hours westbound, 7 hours eastbound. We arrive on the island in the late afternoon, spend one night in a swank hotel on Waikiki Beach, and depart the following afternoon. This puts us on the ground for about 24 hours.

The hotel is right across the street from one of the best summer surfing beaches in the world. Oahu's South Shore receives uninterrupted swell energy from faraway Southern Hemisphere storms from June to September. The constant trade winds help shape the 2- to 4-foot waves into perfect lefts and rights at dozens of nearby surf spots with names like Pops, Cliffs, Publics, Canoes, Queens, Bowls, and Kaisers.

A great view of Diamond Head from my hotel on Waikiki.

Honolulu has a population of 900,000 people, and two-thirds of them surf, so the waves at the most accessible spots are always crowded. I routinely paddle into a lineup with a hundred other surfers, including Japanese tourists sitting on a surfboard for the first time, pasty-white haole's from the mainland (like me), and hot-tempered locals who still seem to think they're surfing some secret spot from the pre-contact days.

On quiet mornings in the summer I surf a spot called Publics, just offshore from the War Memorial. It's a longer paddle across a tricky reef, so the first-timers pass it up. The crowd rarely exceeds a half dozen locals, and I'm actually on a first-name basis with one or two of them. Publics is a left-hand break, which favors "goofy foot" surfers like myself. On small mornings, it's a gentle 50-yard glide along the shallow reef. On big days, when the waves reach 6- to 8-feet, Publics is a harrowing takeoff followed by a high-speed race that can stretch 300 yards towards the beach. The first time I surfed Publics on a big day, I caught and rode three waves in succession that were better than the best waves I ever surfed in 15 years in Southern California. And that, in a nutshell, is surfing in Hawaii.