Going Lala

Many millions of homo sapien have surfed throughout history but most did so against their will. Shipwrecked or beached on some primitive craft, they were swept ashore by the breakers, their terrified white fingers clutching jetsam or gunwale. There was no control—no thought that the force carting them toward rock and reef was anything other than a mysterious, implacable sea-god raging at their trespass. 

There was no performance in the surf. There could be no “brown Mercury” described in Jack London’s 1907 Hawaiian surfing account of a waverider “not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit.” No, the summit would have been many things to those poor souls in its clutches, but not “giddy.” Upon reaching the shore, no one paddled back out.

And that’s where surfing—and the beginning of performance on a surfboard—begins. When some unwitting surfrider would have said, “Hey, that was fun!” and returned for another wave. It would have been quite a revolution in the annals of seagoing. Through the ages, mankind had put to sea “to go,” as Kipling wrote, “with the old grey widow maker.” But until Surfer Zero went back out for another one, it was always for commerce or conquest—never sport.

Of course, surfing’s first “brown Mercury” would have been a seal or a dolphin. Just as mankind would not have considered, without the example of birds, moving through the air in machines, so too would the surf have remained a malevolent kraken-lair, had not seals and dolphins demonstrated that the waves could be benign conveyances, playgrounds even. 

Before men took to the air, the sea was the only fluid medium through which they could move. There, in the water, the natural world offered mostly round shapes—fish, seals, dolphins. And the materials—trees, reeds—offered little else. So the influences of these materials and surf-riding models found in the animal kingdom meant that, for a very long time, canoes and proto-surfcraft were governed by these limitations.

Like the first successful heavier-than-air aircraft demonstrated by the Wright Brothers, early surfboards were ridden prone. They were hard to control, couldn’t turn, and had a habit of nose-diving into the sand. On the crude, short, surfboards that would eventually be recognizable as paipo or alaia in Hawaii, the rider caught a wave and coasted straight off shoreward, mostly in the whitewater. Who knows how long this sort of surfing went on in the South Pacific and elsewhere—thousands of years? 

Think about it: surfing, which harnesses fractal subsets of the very energies that power the universe, upon the same oscillations emitted by curling storms and galaxies alike, was a sport that squandered its most potent driver—gravity—for ages. All those eons in which catching the wave and hanging on and riding straight off were performance, all the while waiting for the sport’s greatest all-time innovation to come along—angling, or lala in Hawaiian. 

Who can say when riding sideways on an unbroken wave face began? Material limitations and rudimentary design could never rule out fluke or trial-and-error forays into sliding at an angle. Even on shorter bellyboard-style surfboards, used at the base of the Polynesian Triangle, it seems unlikely that surfers wouldn’t have flirted with going lala. Certainly Polynesian proto-surfers, with their ingrained sailing knowledge, were aware of the differences of speed in sailing when running before the wind versus sailing at an angle to the eye of the wind, and would have applied that to their surfriding. One thing is certain: Surfing did not bloom into anything like the sport we know today until the Polynesian seafarers reached the Hawaiian Islands and became established there. 

Who knows how long this sort of surfing went on in the South Pacific and elsewhere—thousands of years?

Today’s surfer would vaguely imagine this to be due to the supreme quality of the surf in Hawaii, akin to interstellar colonists finding oxygen and low-hanging fruit upon reaching a distant planet. And yes, the surf conditions in Hawaii were a huge influence on surfing’s development, the Islands anchored perfectly as they are in the North Pacific, able to accept swell from all points of the compass, yet with nearshore waters groomed by the northeasterly trade winds. But it was the type of surf with which Hawaii was blessed that made all the difference. Here were sandy beaches and gently sloping reefs and protected bays, all close to shore and readily accessible, a far cry from the barrier reefs—well offshore and blocking most of the inshore swell—that girdled the South Pacific islands. Most accounts of southern Polynesia surfing prehistory mention that surfing was largely the pastime of children, and one can imagine that the weakened and crumbly waves of interior lagoons and the short, bodyboard-style surf-craft in use would
not have proved very attractive or challenging for adult islanders.

Yet, towering (literally) over these aforementioned factors were Hawaii’s trees. Finally, here at the apex of the 10,000-year-long Polynesian diaspora were trees big enough to sire surfboards (and canoes) of new sizes and shapes. In the Hawaiian forests grew koa, hau, and wiliwili woods, each with their own unique proportions and qualities. These new materials revolutionized canoe and surfboard design. And as these highly refined Hawaiian canoes and long, fast, surfboards evolved, surfing had its first significant expansion of the playing field. This was the Lewis and Clark moment, surfing’s first whiff of its manifest destiny, which would see the sport pushed out of the littoral and into the bigger and faster surf—the zero breaks and bluebirds once unsurfed and unsurfable.

To make use of this new territory, surfboards had to be controllable. As the Hawaiian evolution progressed, surfing crept beyond the old performance yardsticks of length of ride and not falling off. Much like the early aviation age, it pushed toward an ever-widening range of control at higher speeds and on higher waves. What’s fascinating about this centuries-long expansion is how sophisticated the Hawaiian surfboards became. Chipping and grinding enormous native hardwood logs with stone adzes and chunks of volcanic rock was a lot of work. Yet the kahuna craftsmen didn’t stop at “good enough” and settle for rudimentary shapes. Rather, they pursued complex, delicate foils that history wouldn’t see until the first airfoils sprouted as wings on airplanes hundreds of years hence. 

It is clear from even casual study of early Hawaiian canoe design (especially the shorter fishing canoes, which needed to be agile in the surf) that they understood rocker and how to balance its apex, as well as how to use convexity and tapered foil to create parabolic rocker on otherwise flat surfcraft. Tom Blake, a key bridge between the ancient and modern surfing eras, described in his book, Hawaiian Surfboard, the use of convexity in the ancient boards he studied in the Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. Recounting how he had built and tried to surf a 20-foot replica of an olo board—though with a flat bottom—he admitted he “could not hold it straight.” From this he deduced that “for this very reason the old Hawaiians made their boards convex on the bottom. This acted as a keel and kept the boards straight at the moment the wave picked it up and powerfully urged it forward. It also tended to keep the board straight all the way in. The top was rounded also, thus reducing the weight of the heavy koa board.” 

Here was an understanding of how drag could be balanced against efficiency to grant control. Now, finally, on these long, streamlined, intricately foiled surfboards, Hawaiian surfriders could match a wave’s speed and catch it before it broke. They could ride standing, “not struggling frantically in that wild movement.” They could glide for greater distances at surfing canoe speeds. They had directional control. Riding waves was no longer an act of simple play. It became sophisticated enough that it transformed into a blend of sport, dance, and cultural practice. Surfriders could now develop distinctive styles, star in legends and chants, court romantic partners. They could perform. Surfing had come of age. 

Surfriders could now develop distinctive styles, star in legends and chants, court romantic partners. They could perform. 

So surfing was a “sideways” endeavor for a lot longer than we are told, with Hawaiian surfriders going lala across the wave face on convex, long, and narrow boards. Most people tend to think of that happening in the 20th century with Hotcurl boards, or after the advent of fins. Yet, it is hard to imagine surfing technique remaining static in Hawaii for 1,000 years when surfboards had become so sophisticated. From personal observation, living and surfing for decades with Hawaiian surfers at Makaha on Oahu’s western shore—where exists an unbroken chain of surfing and ocean skills spanning 1,000 or more years—it became clear to me that this greatest of seafaring races wasn’t sitting around waiting for Gordon Clark to show up so they could hold an edge, or make the drop at Waimea. I saw things that contradicted everything the orthodox surfing histories have insinuated over the past 100 years.

So for me it is tantalizing to linger and daydream of “royal sport” on 18-foot surfboards during those unrecorded centuries, out in the bluebirds off Leahi (Diamond Head). But the era that bridged the ancient and the modern chapters in surfing performance is equally fascinating. Dive into the book about modern-day Waikiki in the early 20th century: Here, glimmering in a blaze of blue and white, lies the Cradle of Surfilization. From this Fertile Crescent, surfing would enjoy a rebirth and dizzying rapidity of innovation of equipment and technique during the ensuing century. 

The Waikiki beachboys in their role as seaborne safari guides were the world’s first professional surfers, and were indisputably the roots of the renaissance. All modern performance techniques would branch from them and be carried away by fanatic newcomers and grafted onto distant shores. All of it—from statuesque poses to hotdogging, from toes on the nose to “little men on wheels” and “rip, tear, and lacerate”—emanated in a distinct and documented lineage from Waikiki. In surfboard design, native woods gave way to imported woods like redwood or pine, then hollow plywood shells, and on to balsa and, finally, foam. Wasp-tailed, still finless Hotcurls cracked open the gate to big surf at Makaha on Oahu’s west shore. Soon after, skegs handed modern surfers the keys to even bigger and more challenging waves on the North Shore.

Before the 20th century ended, performance rushed headlong from linear to angular, circular to vertical, on to aerial and even mechanization. It would take only 50 years to go from dragging one foot in order to turn a 120-pound, solid-wood surfboard to punching vertically through the lip on a 10-pound “pocket rocket,” about the same amount of time aviation spent progressing from unwieldy deathtraps to supersonic flight. Assaying the key architects of surfing performance techniques, we can clearly see the handoff from Duke Kahanamoku and George Freeth to Rabbit Kekai, who in turn influenced mainland surfers like Matt Kivlin and Phil Edwards. Nat Young and Wayne Lynch picked up where they left off. They handed the baton to Michael Peterson and from there the linkages accelerate toward Larry Bertlemann and Mark Richards and the skateboarding school of “rubberman” surfing, in turn followed by Tom Curren and on to Kelly Slater and the present era. The period spanning these linkages, contextually placed in the immensity of the Hawaiian surfriding millennia, could be termed the Age of Hotdogging.

This Age of Hotdogging has been leveraged into supremacy by the benefit of a written and photographic record. Yet…if one sheers away from the technologically-fed hagiography of the modern surf bibles, and gazes thoughtfully over the preceding 1,000 years in the Hawaiian Islands, would it suffice to describe surfing “performance” as the sum of mere tracks on a wave face, a repertoire of tricks, stunts, poses, turns, and acrobatics? Or should performance on a surfboard be assessed more as an art form or dance, to be evaluated with artistic, even cultural, criterion? What about sophistication: Can “hotdogging” encompass that value? What if surfing performance dates further back, and is more sophisticated than we think?

Before men took to the air, the sea was the only fluid medium through which they could move.

Should read: “Not to detract from the pageantry of surfing’s last century—certainly it has been an exhilarating and headlong rush, similar to the equally exciting first 100 years of flight. (It is our time, our story, our heroes, and accomplishments.) But it is still just 100 years. Maybe we ought to spare a little imagination for our forbearers beyond the photographic record. As established earlier, we can guess at the earliest surfing adventures of Polynesian colonists as they settled into their new home in the Hawaiian Islands. And we know something of surfriding there at the close of the pre-contact epoch.

But…what of those thousand years in the middle?

Why, there were epic contests with stakes and intrigues surpassing any WSL title race, with property and even lives wagered in the surf. There was lele wa’a, or canoe leaping, the ancient Hawaiian form of tow-in surfing, in which surfers leapt onto a wave with their surfboard from the bow of a speeding outrigger canoe. There was even a Hawaiian version of the balsa revolution, with the discovery of wiliwili trees in the dry uplands. There were fantastic races between holua sliders (coasting down steep, grassy mountains on a wood sled) and surfriders waiting in the lineup for the bleat of a conch shell to initiate a rush toward an equidistant finish line. Think of the countless romances and epic feats and legendary swells and surfing superstars lionized in chants over 1,000 years of Hawaiian surfriding, the warrior sportsmen and royalty and “common” men and women alike in an epoch spanning nearly 200 times longer than our foam and fiberglass era.

There is a parallel here—and a challenge to we modern recipients of the Hawaiian gift of surfing. In 1975, a group that would later become the Polynesian Voyaging Society built a replica of a pre-contact double-hulled sailing canoe, Hokule’a, and set out to re-enact the epic voyages of old, navigating between Hawaii and far-flung Tahiti. The seemingly lost skill of way-finding—navigating by the stars, the angle of the sun, the wind, the set of the sea—was revived with the help of a Micronesian elder named Mau Pialug. He was the last man on Earth the Polynesian Voyaging Society could find who had retained the ancient navigation ways, and the modern voyagers on Hokule’a soon proved beyond any doubt that the Polynesians had navigated with great precision throughout the constellations of Pacific islands. 

Before Hokule’a, most Learned Beards scoffed at the Hawaiian’s belief in their heritage as expert navigators, asserting that the Polynesians had been dispersed almost by chance throughout the Pacific, as if they’d been little more than wind-borne spores blown hither and thither at the mercy of wind and sea. The voyages of Hokule’a, however, time and again sailing point to point with unerring accuracy, exploded these condescending Euro-centric dismissals of Polynesian competency, and established that when Britannia was just beginning to crawl out of frowsting hovels to rule the waves, Polynesians and Hawaiians were already midway through a millennia as masters of oceanic voyaging. Thus sparked by these and other voyages, the Hawaiian cultural renaissance began.

Our chasm-gapping understanding and crediting of “performance” in pre-contact Hawaiian surfriding stands awaiting its own Hokule’a. The revival of alaia surfboards in the Hawaiian Islands and internationally has cracked open the rusty-hinged gates to such re-appraisal. This challenge I present to the surfers of today: To recreate, like Blake and Kahanamoku, facsimiles of the olo boards of ancient Hawaii and paddle out to explore what was possible, what could have happened through all those many centuries in the Hawaiian surf. We can perhaps help fill in the blanks. 

What if surfing performance dates further back, and is more sophisticated, than we think?

History is bunk. I know this from living side by side with Hawaiians. So did Tom Blake, who was there on the shores of Waikiki at the side of the great Duke Kahanamoku to help bridge the modern and the ancient times. Likewise enchanted by daydreams of century after century of royal sport, he mused, “Let us assume it is a day 1,000 years ago. There is a high storm surf running, just what the young huskies have been waiting for—zero break. The waves are breaking at Kalahuewehe surf, far past the outer edge of the coral reef, maybe a half-mile offshore. Our hero is the young Chief Kealoha. He will not ask his sweetheart to ride today. It is too dangerous today.”

[Feature image: To make surfing a “sideways” sport, or going lala in the Hawaiian language, surfriders exploited gravity. Today, as surfing more and more becomes an aerial sport, surfers instead defy gravity to push performance ever higher. Eugene Kaupiko 1955. Craig Anderson 2016. Photo by Clarence Maki, Courtesy of SHACC.]