Mindy Pennybacker: South Swell Surf shows we belong to the sea

Fireworks were banned on Oahu on July 4th, but the ocean put on an even better show when waves with 3-foot faces exploded on the reefs of Oahu’s South Shore.

The swell peaked on Monday, too big for me to paddle out; In Suis, my usually overcrowded homebreak near Diamond Head, hardly anyone defied the windswept lockdown conditions, except for a handful of flying groms and muscular veterans like my neighbor Fred, the one with a board under his arm in the dark with red eyes and an insane grin .

In nearby Tonggs, I watched a skinny girl in her early teens, clad in a frumpy two-piece suit my mom always put on me, dragged her board up the steps and said to her friends, “I’ve been surfing” big tonggs, but this time I was suddenly riding straight in the direction of the Natatorium – the currents were pulling me so far, so fast that I didn’t even know it! “

I continued to the Natatorium, half a mile away, where even bigger waves broke at Castles, in front of Kaimana Beach Park; they steamed down the coast and joined with the next pause, Publics, in a poignant memory of Duke Paoa Kahanamoku’s historic mile-long ride over Waikiki on a wave three times as high.

With the very first Olympic surfing competition scheduled from July 25th to August 8th. 1 at Tsurigasaki Surfing Beach, Japan, and Carissa Moore and John John Florence of Hawaii on the U.S. Olympic team, there’s a wave of local pride that connects these young Oahu locals with the legacy of Kahanamoku, who won three Olympic gold medals in swimming for the US has won and is celebrated worldwide as the father and ambassador of modern surfing.

But the Hawaii surfing circles were also roused by disappointment when the International Olympic Committee refused to let Hawaii have its own surf team or to let Florence and Moore represent the islands in jerseys with the Hawaiian flag instead of the US flag. She and fellow islanders Seth Moniz, Malia Manuel, Coco Ho and others always did this on the World Surf League Championship Tour, which Florence won twice and Moore won four times.

A native Hawaiian, Moore also remembers Kahanamoku in her humble, amiable demeanor and warm smile – as well as her urge to compete. She is viewed by many as his heir who perpetuates the Hawaiian roots, values ​​and supremacy of the developing sport.

Ultimately, flags and labels don’t matter when surfing: Moore and Florence can’t help but represent Hawaii – they were born here, they live here.

Hawaii, whose indigenous peoples created surfing and home to a disproportionate number of the world’s most challenging and famous breaks, can never lose this coat anywhere else.

And it will have additional visibility at the Olympics, where although each participating nation is limited to a four-person surf team of two women and two men, Hawaii will have a few more representatives, albeit under different flags.

Oahu-born Mahina Maeda will compete on Japan’s Olympic team, and Tatiana Weston-Webb, who grew up and still lives in Kauai, will be surfing for Brazil, where she happened to be born.

These two wild young chargers have signature Hawaiian chops and style.

There is something special about surfing on these small islands in the middle of the vast Pacific.

You feel like you are living in the sea.

“You haven’t been to Tonggs, you have been to ricebowls,” a friend told the surfer girl.

No wonder it was swept down the coast: Ricebowls, a deepwater break just outside Ewa and outside Tonggs, forms one of the fastest, steepest and heaviest waves on the South Shore when swell is big and headed in the right direction.

My little brother Ethan, 55, surfed ricebowls on Big Monday.

“I had two major lefts and one free fall-and-recovery right,” he wrote.

I have known those rights that jack up under you and fall out again, take you through the air to certain doom, and yet sometimes you miraculously land back in the wave and race through, turning hard, in front of the crashing one Curl.

There is a deep mystery behind all this power and beauty; In the shadow of such a wave, you know that you are in the realm of Kanaloa, the god of the sea who knows no boundaries.