SURFERMAG.COM CURRENT ISSUE vol. 44 #3

1969 Bill Stonebreaker, Mike Turkington and Mike Hobak open the North Shore's second surf shop, Country Surfboards, located in the old 1935 M. Yoshida building on the west end of Haleiwa. While cultural scholars have difficulty pinpointing when the term "country" was first used to describe Oahu's north shore, Country Surfboards, with its trippy peace symbol/pot leaf/palm tree logo, was the first to institutionalize the term.

1984 Renowned North Shore shaper and entrepreneur Bill Barnfield cleans out the space under his shaping room near Log Cabins, including at least a score of forlorn, broken surfboards. Among this lot is the pink and gray, 7'10 Spider Murphy pintail on which Shaun Tomson led the backside charge at Pipeline during the epic winter of 1976-77. The super-rockered pin, one of the most influential boards in modern surfing history, and easily repairable, is hauled off to the nearby Haleiwa dump and buried under several meters of landfill.

1972 A super-clean west swell builds throughout the day at Pipeline, eventually capping on the Second Reef. In the lineup are the Pipe masters of the day, including Gerry Lopez, Rory Russell and Tom Stone. The real standouts on this day, however, seem to be a cadre of intrepid backsiders, including Sam Hawk, James Jones and Craig "Owl" Chapman, all of who ride with serious abandon in some of the heaviest Pipe ever surfed. The session is dubbed by SURFER as "Huge Monday" and provides the most memorable sequence of that year's major surf movie release, Five Summer Stories by McGillivray/Freeman.

1974Reno Abellira, Hawaii's most successful surfer/shaper/competitor, wins the Smirnoff Pro, held in giant Waimea Bay. Much has been made of the fact that when faced with closed-out Waimea, even many of the veteran Hawaiian competitors were reluctant to paddle out until shamed into doing so by contest organizer Fred Hemmings. Hemmings, faced with a big wave boycott, claimed that if the pros wouldn't, he'd go out and prove that the sets were rideable (a strategy that in a later autobiography he admitted was all bluff.) But more indicative of the challenges faced by those early pros, though, was the response Smirnoff victor Abellira received when, stopping by Kammie's Market on the way home from his epic win, he asked the proprietor Mr. Kammie, who in the course of his long career behind the counter knew virtually every surfer on the North Shore, for a celebratory bottle of champagne, gratis. Fat chance.

1998 The biggest swell since the winter of 1969 hits the Hawaiian Islands, except this time under blue skies, with light trade winds grooming the massive walls to perfection in what the still arch-conservative North Shore experts describe as "35-to 40 foot" surf. In some cases it is almost twice that, a point made clear by North Shore vet Ken Bradshaw who, during a monumental tow-in session at Outside Log Cabins, drops the rope on what looks like a 75 foot version of Queens Surf: a perfect, smooth peak that, if not for its extreme height and mass--and its possibility to kill you--looked almost fun. To the delight of the crowds of more mortal surfers who took to the roofs of their houses and the Pupukea Highlands to get a view beyond the horrendous shore break, Bradshaw rides the behemoth to perfection, the culmination of his long, vaulted big wave career. Other surfers aren't so lucky. Brock Little, who has been waiting for this sort of swell his entire life, is denied access when the State Harbors and Beaches Division shut down the harbors and beaches, including PWC launches. And at Waimea Bay, after the Eddie was cancelled because to too much surf, police for the first time in history declare the surf off-limits, a decision that infuriates more than a few danger-surfers, keen to vie for the $50,000 offered in the XXL Big Wave Award. North Shore resident Jason Magers slips past the police barricade and to the cheers of the crowd that lines the Bay, paddles out into the seriously closed-out lineup. After rolling under several waves that gapped the entire bay, Magers washes back to the beach where he is arrested by waiting police.