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Spot: Honolua Bay, HI
The Waves
Honolua Bay is a reef-point. It breaks on a hard reef but wraps around like a point into a bay lined with high cliffs. From top to bottom, the spots are Subs, Coconut, Middles, Caves and Keiki Bowls. On the right day, it is possible to take off at Coconut and riding that wailing wall all the way through to Caves, which is a bowl section custom made for getting barreled.
Best Swell, Size and Direction
Honolua Bay is dead flat in the summer: perfect for snorkeling and a safe anchorage for expensive yachts. Honolua starts to bubble when the North Pacific comes alive in late summer, early fall. Honolua Bay is open to swell from west to north. It will break as small as two to four feet, but the sky is the limit and it has been ridden up to 15-feet-plus.
And because of the way waves wrap around the point and into the cove, the regular tradewinds blow offshore here, so be happy for that.
Surrounding Spots
The island of Maui is ringed with surf spots: some that break once every five years, some that break every day. Immediately to the north of Honolua are Windmills, Honokahu and Sisters. Immediately to the south are Slaughterhouse, Stables, Flemming Beach Park and Shit Falls. Some of these spots are big-wave spots for the tow crowd, others are a little more accessible. Farther to the south are the spots of Kaanapali, Lahaina and Thousand Peaks. Farther to the north, as you go around the corner there are winter spots leading to Kahului and beyond that, to Hookipa and Peahi/Jaws.
Difficulty Level
Difficulty is directionally proportional to swell size. Honolua is a fun, easy wave up to four feet, it’s an intermediate wave from four feet to six feet and after that, this is serious business. The difficulty level also rises with the level of the crowd, which rises with the swell size.
Localism Factor
If you have ever had fantasies of what it would be like to be invisible, paddle out at Honolua on a great day, when the entire cast and crew are out and trying to get some.
You will live the fantasy, but it won’t be so fantastic.
Like any surf spot that has been famous for more than 40 years, Honolua Bay has a regular crew and a regular rotation and pecking order and rhythm that has been established and evolved and hammered out over seasons and years and generations. There are older guys who can remember when McTavish and Young showed up with their weird boards, and there are the children and even the grandchildren of those older guys who are surfing out there. You have legends like Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox and Dave Kalama popping by now and then and all in all there a lot of good surfers and also bodyboarders who all have laid claim to their piece of the pie.
What this means is, if you are a new face paddling out into the middle of this, you had best behave yourself. Don’t get in the way when you are paddling. Don’t drop in on people and don’t yell out when someone drops in on you. Be invisible, show respect, be humble and you might get a little taste of the energy without getting your fins punched out, or worse.
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