Apartheid comes to Makua Beach!

You’d be hard pressed to find a more inviting stretch of sand as Makua Beach over there on Oahu’s westside, the rainless leeward coast where Sunny Garcia was born and where Greg Noll famously rode his last-ever wave.

It ain’t an easy or an obvious find.

You gotta drive past Makaha, the road narrows, ain’t no shacks or development, and head towards Yokohama Bay. The sunsets are divine, you can camp there, and if you want to swim with happy marine creatures, turtles and dolphins abound. Tiger sharks, too, but use prudence when approaching.

The Makua Valley, beach to the mountains, holds a special place in the hearts of Hawaiians as the birthplace of man, Makua meaning parent. Also believed to be the kick-off point for souls travelling to the afterlife.

A recent race-based imbroglio has cast a long shadow over the peaceful Makua Beach sands, however, after police were called following what one woman, @_ladyshark, is calling a race-based attack, the woman recording the aftermath for her 10k followers’ enjoyment.

It’s all very entertaining, as these things usually are, and no one escapes the event with clean hands or with dignity intact.

Question: where do you stand on these matters, indigenous owners of land given a slice here and there where they can frolic without the stench of whiteness or is public land for all, including the distant descendants of the hated colonialists?

 

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Tears in Santa Monica.

Oh but certainly you’ve seen it, by now, and many multiple times. Jordan Anast’s stunning image of a longboarder mid-contest, at famed San Onofre, and that juvenile great white shark shooting skyward in the background. Snapped October 22, the photograph has taken on a life of its own, being featured in every major and minor media across the globe, most recently CNN.

Anast told the left-leaning service, “I didn’t know until I looked closely after, and saw the structures of the fins. Then I realized it was a great white shark.”

Wonderful and, officially, the most viral snap in surfing’s history.

The problem?

Well, the longboarding contest was not a sanctioned World Surf League event, rather a local San Onofre Surf Club shootout, thus leaving the “global home of surfing” far away from the glorious spotlight.

As you know, the World Surf League has been on a campaign to radically alter surfing’s past, present and future since its establishment in 2015 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California. Top officials quickly declared that it was actually founded 39 years earlier, in 1976, and dipped into various Wikipedias to burnish the narrative.

Kelly Slater’s first WSL championship, for example, came in 1992.

Sixteen years before the WSL came to be.

In any case, the most viral moment in non-Stalinist WSL history was when Mick Fanning became entangled with a great white shark during a contest in South Africa.

The moment was flashed on screens, globally, including CNN and World Surf League brass did their best to leverage into the stratospheric growth we are witnessing today.

Numbers to the moon.

Not, though, as high as this newest San Onofre sensation.

The question, I suppose, will the World Surf League absorb the San Onofre Longboard Club in order to lay claim or is Santa Monica’s hatred of longboarding more powerful?

Currently more questions than answers.

"I am on fire. I am dangerous, I am absolutely out of control.”

You’ll remember, of course, the death of surfing’s great gift to the world, the inventor Tom Morey, who died a couple of months after his eighty-sixth birthday, last October. 

Ol Tom exited blind and broke despite the outrageous success of the boogie board which had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. 

Morey invented the 4’6”, 23” wide foam boog in 1971; it was more than a toy for kids to hold onto in shorebreaks, he explained, this was a profound shift in waveriding. 

“For anybody to become a graduate of this planet,” Morey who would sell out of his Boogie biz four years later thereby missing the rivers of gold said, “it is essential that they learn to enjoy this activity.”

Now, an Australian surfboard shaper from the sweet little country town of Nambucca Heads, a few hours south of Byron, has put his tweak on the iconic lid and says miracles are afoot.

Keith Robinson, who is seventy-four, says he made his fibreglass“gut slider” so his sixty-seven-year-old buddy, Toni Jovancay, who was so tortured with hip pain he’d holstered his sticks, could get back into surfing. 

“As soon as I paddled out in North Valla, I immediately knew this was fantastic,” Jovancay told ABC. “If I didn’t have other things in life, I’d say it has changed my whole life.”

Two weeks on the GS and he says, “I am on fire. I am dangerous, I am absolutely out of control.” 

Robinson says he’s been making a couple of ‘em a week for surfers who’ve been hobbled by uncooperative ankles, knees, hips or for riding post-op.

Nambucca Heads photographer Chris Hewgill said, “I’ve seen a guy who hasn’t been able to [stand-up ride] for years. He got on one of these things and was like 15 again.”

I’m about three years away from one of these things, although better to be in the water than not at all, no?

Or better to quit and never return?