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Spot: Sunset Beach, HI
Summary
The Hawaiians knew this area as “Paumalu” which means “taken secretly” and refers to a Hawaiian myth about a woman who was punished for stealing octopus off the reef. Sunset was surfed into the 19th Century by Hawaiian surfers, and was “rediscovered” in the early 20th Century by the second wave of coast haole: Lorrin Harrison, Tarzan Smith and John Kelly, who found their Hot Curl boards could handle the drops and the angles and the speed.
In 1943, Woody Brown and Dickie Cross were surfing Sunset on a rising swell when they got caught outside. Attempting to paddle down the coast to safety, they tried to paddle in at closing out Waimea Bay. Woody made it to the beach unconscious and naked. Dickie Cross was never seen again.
In the 50s, surfers began gravitating away from Makaha to the North Shore and as surfboards got better, surfers began mastering this difficult, shifty, treacherous spot. The first issue of Surfer Magazine showed Jose Angel charging backside down a Sunset peak.
Sunset was the site of the annual Duke Kahanamoku Invitational for many years, and when the pro circuit began to gel in the 1970s, Sunset was the center of that universe, with more events held at the spot than anywhere else.
The New School revolution of the 90s shifted media attention away from Sunset and down the beach to Pipeline and Backdoor, which was fine with the growing population of Sunset addicts who surf the spot religiously for half the year, and feel that less attention is more.
The Good
Ask a Sunset junkie what he loves about the spot and he’ll get a glazed, madman look on his face, and say something vague, like “I like the drop.” Way back in the 60s, Jock Sutherland said, “Its like hunting a Tyrannosaurus Rex for dinner” and he might have been referring to Pipeline but that goes for Sunset, too. Sunset is a big, beautiful, powerful wave that defies puny human power to hunt it down, scratch into all that power and wind, make the drop and the bottom turn. But even if you accomplish all that, Sunset is still defiant because, like snowflakes, no Sunset wave is the same as another. This spot has a mind of its own, and there are several generations of surfers out there, from Peter Cole to Darrick Doerner to Pancho Sullivan to keiki, who are completely addicted to the Sunset Thing.
The Bad
Go watch the movie 10,000 B.C, which is out right now. There is a scene where the hunters sneak up on a pack of wooly mammoths and then scatter them, running in between them and trying not to get trampled and crushed. That’s a pretty good illustration of surfing Sunset: “It’s underwater adventure mate,” Rabbit Bartholomew was quoted on a Billabong Pro contest poster in the 80s. “You just get punished.”
Be in the wrong place at the wrong time at Sunset and you will get blasted, pounded and drubbed to within an inch of your life. Sunset Beach has all the power of the north Pacific roaring up out of the deep and unloading on a reef complex that is not so much shallow as it is – complex.
The Strange
Sunset used to be the Spot. Go back to surf magazines of the 1960s, 70s and into the 80s, and you’ll see as many Sunset shots as Pipeline or Waimea photos. And you’ll see Sunset being ridden by the greats, BK, Jeff Hakman, Gary Elkerton, Tom Curren and on and on and on. But that isn’t really the case any more. When is that last time you saw Sunset Beach on the cover of Surfer Magazine? Part of this is because Sunset Beach is as hard a place to photograph as it is to surf. The status of the annual Sunset contest wavers between WQS and WCT. The status of the contest wavers, but the surfing there is as good as ever.
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