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Spot: Pipeline, HI
Pipeline is a wave in the middle of the North Shore of Oahu, where open ocean swells come from out of deep water and hit a reef of hardest limestone, spiked with lava caves. Dr. Ricky Grigg has been surfing Hawaii for 50 years and is one of the world’s leading experts in coral reefs, and he says the limestone base at Pipeline makes it one of the hardest reefs in the world. On top of that are coral and lava formations that look like tank traps, and it is what surfers see, just below the surface, as they are dropping into waves that move fast as a gunfighter drawing and firing.
Banzai Pipeline is the full and proper name for the spot, which is also known as Pipe, the Pipeline and Pipeline, while the wave breaking to the right is called Backdoor. In December of 1961 Bruce Brown was checking the North Shore with California surfers Phil Edwards and Mike Diffenderfer when they stopped at Banzai Beach, in front of a surf spot without a name. There was a pipeline construction project nearby and Mike Diffenderfer suggested they name the break Pipeline. Brown called the spot Banzai Pipeline in his movie Surfing Hollow Days.
On April 1, 2005 Mark Cunningham retired after 29 years as lifeguard for the City and County of Honolulu. Eighteen of those years were at Pipeline. He still reigns as one of the best bodysurfers at the spot, and is seen as a mentor by Kelly Slater and Rob Machado and a lot of the now great surfers who came up under his watchful eye: “The ‘birth’ of Pipeline is one of the earliest hypes on record of the Southern California Surf Industrial Media complex,” Cunningham ranted a bit in an email. “You really believe that a bunch of unknown Hawaiian wave sliders didn't give it a go, pre-Cook? Come on now. At the very least some local cruisers who lived in the area without the need or the resources to ‘document’ such a ‘historical’ first. You don't think some Waikiki beachboy had a session out there goofing off with his buddies or whilst trying to impress some tourist girl during a Circle Island Tour? How 'bout some crazy ass Navy Seal from Pearl proving to his pals it was really no big a deal? The possibilities are endless. Hope your not going to perpetuate this California Centric view of the Hawaiian surfing w/out at least a footnote or remark. Didn't mean to rant...”
Cunningham’s footnote/remark/rant noted, it was that sequence in Surfing Hollow Days that gave the Banzai Pipeline its name.
The Good
In his biography Pipe Dreams, Kelly Slater called Pipeline: “…the greatest ten seconds on Earth It is the yardstick by which all other breaks are measured.” And who’s gonna argue with that?
The beach is beautiful, the sky is beautiful, the water is beautiful, the rainbows are beautiful, the clouds are beautiful, the view off toward Kaena Point is beautiful, and Pipeline is the beautiful beast unloading all that raw open ocean power into a perfect cylinder - shockingly close to shore over an incredibly shallow reef.
Pipeline is a wave that drives men and women crazy with desire. Just as Muslims do not feel they are complete until they have journeyed to Mecca and stood before the Kabbah, many surfers do not consider themselves surfers until they have had a go at the Pipeline.
Which is nice, but also creates problems (see below). If you aren’t up to the Pipeline challenge or just don’t want to add to the crowd, Pipeline is also just good spectating. Stand at the edge of the beach and you will be less than 100 yards from the falling lip.
If you trust your ocean skills more than your swimming skills, get a good pair of fins and swim out there, dodge the sets and watch from the shoulder.
And if you are going on holidays and have two open weeks, consider going during the Pipeline Masters waiting period. The North Shore is packed then, it’s hard to get accommodation and parking and a reservation at Lei Lei’s, but a great Pipe Masters is as great a sporting spectacle as anything in the world.
Come to Hawaii for the two-week waiting period – even if you have to stay in Town. Get in the swing of things, live or die by Bernie and Randy’s calls, find a nice spot on the beach and watch the world’s best surfers have at it in the next best thing to a gladiator pit.
Greatest show on earth, no kidding.
The Bad
In the 2006 waxploitation movie Blue Crush, Kate Bosworth plays Anne Marie Chadwick, a talented surfer whose fear of Pipeline goes back to a bad wipeout, when she cracked her soft head on that rock hard reef. Anne Marie struggles to overcome her fears and make it to the final of a professional Pipeline event for women.
And in 1987, Pipeline was also the star of the movie North Shore, in which Matt Adler played Rick Kane, a surfer from Arizona who wins a wildcard into the Pipe Masters, and has to face his fears.
These fears are not overstated. Pipeline is a Triple Black Diamond wave that has been injuring and killing surfers for more than 40 years.
During the winter of 2006/2007, Shaun Tomson was surfing a Legends heat with Dane Kealoha, Cody Graham, Michael and Derek Ho and Tony Moniz. During the 70s and into the 80s, Tomson was one of the outsiders who “busted down the door” of high performance surfing. In 1975, Tomson was the first surfer to win the Pipe Masters riding with his back to the wave, and he was the surfer who lead the aggressive attach on Backdoor – going right and getting deeper in the tube over a reef that is even shallower than Pipeline.
During the Legends heat Tomson took off on a Backdoor wave, pulled into a barrel, broke his board out from underneath him and broke his nose – the first time he had suffered that injury while surfing. He watched the famous final between Kelly Slater and Andy Irons from the Media area, with a bandage on his nose, smiling quietly to himself, because the Pipeline had finally got him after all those years.
While the bigger days at Pipeline look more dangerous, it’s the smaller days that break on the inner reef that have the most potential to kill or maim. On December 2, 2005 25-year-old Tahitian surfer Malik Joyeux was surfing Pipeline with about 60 others on a six to eight foot day. Joyeux was a respected Tahitian surfer who had won the 2004 Billabong XXL Monster Tube Award by driving through a giant tube at Teahupoo. He was respected and experienced and well liked.
At around 10:30, Joyeux dropped in on the first wave of a three-wave set, and went down on what appeared to be a standard wipeout on a Pipeline wave. He dropped into a thick peak, lost his balance, fell backwards at the bottom and took the full impact of the lip. This happens all day long at Pipeline and everyone watching, from Marc Cunningham to tourists from Iowa to Kelly Slater, wonder how more people aren’t hurt or killed.
This time, tragedy struck. Joyeux’ board popped up, but the surfer didn’t. While Pipeline is perhaps the most competitive wave on earth, surfers do keep an eye on each other and when a board came up but no surfer, people on the beach and on both sides of the wave whistled and shouted that something was wrong.
Twenty surfers risked their own necks, paddling into the impact zone to look for Joyeux, who could have been floating unconscious, or stuck in a cave: “There were about twenty of us that paddled in right away and tried to find him,” Greg Long was quoted in Surfer Magazine. “But we couldn’t. Eventually half that pack went in and about a dozen guys came running down with swim fins searching for his body. When we found him he was up by Pupukea [approximately 250 yards north of the Pipeline peak]. We put him on a longboard and were just scratching and kicking to get him in. But by that time it had been about fifteen minutes. The lifeguards tried to do some compressions, but it wasn’t working. Then they put him in an ambulance and that was the last I saw him.”
An autopsy report found that Joyeux had been knocked unconscious, most likely when his head hit his surfboard.
The wave that breaks right at Pipeline is called Backdoor and some surfers claim that Backdoor is even shallower and more dangerous than Pipeline. Where Pipeline breaks in a sandy channel, Backdoor breaks over an increasingly shallow rock reef that sometimes exposes itself dry to surfers as they flash past.
That danger came true on Wednesday, February 9, 2005 when 33-year-old North Shore photographer Jon Mozo disappeared while taking photographs from the water at Backdoor. A friend alerted lifeguards that Mozo had disappeared, and Mozo was found on the bottom with massive head injuries. He was pronounced dead at Kahuku Hospital, leaving behind a wife and four kids.
Pipeline is dangerous, Backdoor is dangerous but the crowd at Pipeline magnifies the danger by a factor of x, where x = skull and crossbones.
Pipeline has been the world’s most famous wave since the 1960s and it is still a place where surfers can make or break their reputations. With several webcams pointed at Pipeline 24/7, and hundreds of camera lenses pointed at the break during prime time, the extra attention puts a double or triple layer of surfers and bodyboarders on the peak, on top of the local surfers who are just there to get barreled.
The crowd forces less experienced surfers to take waves that no one should go anywhere near, and to have that many surfers in a dangerous area inevitably leads to collisions and injuries. In November of 2005, Pipeline local Tamayo Perry was badly injured by the discarded board of another surfer while surfing a big day at Pipeline: “I got scalped, brah,” Perry said to Chris Cote of Trans World Surf. “It was from someone else’s stupidity, too. His rail just split my melon wide open, it’s the gnarliest gash ever. I knew something hit me but I didn’t know how bad it was. Then Kalani Robb paddled up to me and I could tell by the look on his face that I was in trouble. I was that close to getting medi-vac’d by helicopter outta there and having metal plates in my head.”
In January of 2007, Japanese surfer Moto Watanbe became a victim of this pressure when crowd pressure forced him into taking a wave that killed him. According to Scott Basham who wrote an account for www.surfermag.com, Watanabe stayed out in the water at Pipeline as a good 8-12 foot swell from the day before deteriorated with a northerly change in direction and a treacherous bump appeared on the wave faces. Watanabe was an outsider on the fringe of the Pipeline pecking order, so he boldly/foolishly paddled into waves where angels fear to tread. According to East Coast ripper and self-described Pipe “scrapper” Jesse Hines, who had been chatting with Watanabe just seconds before the fateful eight-footer loomed: “The wave looked good at first, but just transformed into a monster. Even a boogie-boarder couldn't have made that drop.” Watanabe grabbed his rail and tried to power his way backside into the left, but the wave hurled itself outward, the lip seemingly thicker than the wave was tall. He was wiped out in the lip by a bump and was driven head-first into his board in only three feet of water. Ironically, this was the first season at Pipe that he had chosen not to wear a helmet.
Watanabe was brought to shore alive, then passed into a coma on the ambulance ride to the hospital. After 11 days on life support, Watanabe’s parents, who had flown from Japan, made the decision to remove the life support.
The list of injuries goes on and on, back in time, some of the surfers well known, most of them anonymous guys who left the beach missing chunks of skin or teeth. Going back to the 1960s, there is a shot of Greg Noll mugging for the camera with a black eye and a swollen cheek, the result of a collision with the reef at The Pipeline. During the 70s, Pipeline great Rory Russell and Gerry Lopez were both shown walking up the beach at Pipeline bleeding, wiggling teeth in their mouths to see if they were still there, or poking at holes in their behinds, huge bleeding gashes from collisions in the reef. In December of 1983, Floridian surfer Steve ‘Beaver’ Massefeller was nearly killed when he split his head on the bottom after a wipeout during a Pipeline Masters heat.
And Pipeline has even claimed innocents just walking down the beach, like the two girls who were swept off the beach by a giant surge in the 1970s, and drowned on the reef.
The Strange
Jack Johnson’s mother is still shocked by the outrageous, ongoing success of her multi-talented, multi-platinum son. “I thought he wanted to be a pro surfer!?” mom will say to friends and strangers. And she is right. Jack Johnson was on the road to every Hawaiian kid’s dream – the traveling life of a professional surfer – but a collision with the reef at Pipeline rearranged Jack’s face, some of his teeth, but also his path. .
Jack Johnson was born in 1975 and grew up on the beach at Pipeline. Just out his backdoor there was a T Rex that Johnson was eventually going to have to deal with, and he first surfed Pipeline at 10 years old. In 1992, Johnson was 17 years old when he made the local trials of the Pipeline Masters – a major accomplishment for a Hawaiian kid. Johnson was in the four-man final with Pipeline great Liam McNamara, Johnny Boy Gomes and Michael Ho, but he did not advance to the main event. Two weeks later, Johnson wiped out at Pipeline, hit the reef and came up missing teeth and needing 150 stitches in his head. During his two month recovery, Johnson worked on his music, taking the time to hone guitar chops he had been working on since he was 14: “I grew up always wanting to be a pro surfer,” Johnson said to Jack Spillberg for Trans World Surf Magazine. “That was my dream but then I just sort of fell out of the dream when I graduated high school. I always sort of thought that I was going to get into doing surf films. I guess what I’m getting at is that the music thing caught me so off that I had no expectations.”
Johnson graduated from UCSB with a film degree in 1997. In 1998 he produced the surf movie Thicker Than Water with the Malloys – surfing brothers from Ventura who had also taken their lumps at Pipeline, especially Chris, who is still famous for a head-first over the falls pile driver that appeared in Surfing Magazine. While working on Thicker Than Water, Johnson recorded a song with G Love for the soundtrack. In 2002, Johnson and Kelly Slater produced the surf movie September Sessions and that same year, Johnson was encourage by Ben Harper and his producer JP Plunier to record Brushfire Fairytales. The album went platinum, and that was followed by On and On in 2003, which sold over a million copies.
It is unlikely any of that would have happened if Johnson hadn’t nearly wiped his face on the reef at Pipeline in 1992.
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