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Spot: Ala Moana, HI
Summary
Alimony, alimony Ala Moana. Here in the 21st Century we live in a world full of barreling, tropical, coral-bottomed left-hand reefs, from Macaronis to Saint Leu. But during the 50s and 60s, Ala Moana on the south shore of Oahu introduced that kind of wave to the world.
Ala Moana is a barreling, tropical, coral-bottomed, left-hand reef that breaks on the south shore of Oahu, straight out from the mouth of the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor. The dredging of the harbor channel in the late 1950s created Ala Moana the wave, and put some length and the bowl into a stretch of reef breaks.
A great place to get barreled: for the whole family!!!! According to the website www.aloha.com: “One of the finer, all around family parks on O`ahu, Ala Moana - which is Hawaiian for the Path to the Sea - consists of a beach and general recreation area of more than one hundred acres -- when combined with the adjacent "Magic Island" - Aina Moana's - thirty lovely acres.”
According to John Callahan, who grew up in Honolulu: “Magic Island is a landfill, and not really an island at all. It was originally conceived and built as a hotel development - purchased by the City and County of Honolulu as an extension of Ala Moana Park. The Magic Island development included a purpose - built swimming lagoon on the ocean end, enclosed by several rock barriers – the surf spot formerly known as Garbage Hole (also created by the dredging of the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor) lies under these rocks.
Ala Moana Beach Park is a place where you can take the whole family and they can swim safely within the safety of inner reef – watched over by City and County’s finest - while mommy and/or daddy go battle the crowd and get barreled on the outer reef.
This is how Johnny and Diana experienced Ala Moana in April of 2007.
The Good
Barrels, baby. You heard it here first. Ala Moana is where several generations of Hawaiian surfers have learned to ride the barrel, from Conrad Canha to Gerry Lopez to Derek Ho to Larry Rios. Ala Moana is very consistent and there is something rideable there 300 days out of the year.
The Bad
Extreme pollution, sharks, racially biased crowds, boat traffic in the channel, strong current on bigger swells, and other extreme bits of nastiness in the water, from time to time. Shark sightings are rare, but the Ala Wai channel is deep, and the paddle across to Magic Island can seem rather long.
But the crowd is omnipresent. After surfing an insanely crowded day at Malibu, Brock Little was asked if he had ever seen as chaotic a crowd: “Bowls,” he said.
As the best left in Town, where 80% of the surfers on O'ahu live, combined with easy free parking at either the Ala Wai or Magic Island lots, means major crowds. On bigger swells, Ala Moana is one of the few town spots that can hold eight feet of size, as many of the popular reef breaks of Ala Moana Park tend to close out. The popularity of longboards among locals means frequent conflict and drop-ins; as when the swell is big enough, the Bowls section is really a different wave to the long section off the top of the reef.
The Strange
The Ala Wai Canal runs behind Waikiki and drains straight into Ala Wai Harbor and that drains into the Pacific Ocean directly into the lineup at Ala Moana and that means you’ve got Trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Poo.
The Mantis shrimp and tilapia are thriving on the runoff into the Ala Wai, but the City and County has posted signs against eating anything that comes out of the Ala Wai Canal.
From March 24 – 29, 2006, a pressurized sewage line failed, spilling 48 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Ala Wai Canal.
The water quality has been bad to very bad for decades, but the massive sewage spill was horrible - million dollar yachts in their berths at the Ala Wai, floating in a soup of untreated human shit for weeks, and no one out at Ala Moana.
A man named Oliver Johnson was walking up late on a Friday night and was thrown into the Ala Wai Canal after being assaulted. John Fowler told the whole story for www.surfermag.com: “Unaware of the danger posed by his open wounds, he began to feel increasingly ill, rushing to the hospital only after giving the infection several days to invade his blood and organs. The three types of bacteria infecting Johnson: Vibrio vulnificus, Aeromonas, and Enterococci, are all deadly in their own right – and have posed a triple threat to this man’s health. With one leg amputated, septic shock, and three limbs not yet out of danger, Oliver Johnson clings to life in a hospital bed surrounded by friends and family.”
Johnson died from all the toxins in his system. The City and County of Honolulu installed a floating sewage system as a temporary measure while a permanent replacement is installed, but that still suggests the water flowing out of the Ala Wai and into the channel is less than pristine.
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