Iremember a time in high school when a bunch of us went to the North Shore and the surf was huge. It wasn't huge huge, like the North Shore was last week, but it was huge enough to keep our scrawny butts on the beach. Turning the tide
on big wave follyWe went to Waimea Bay to watch the big-wave surfers. We played around in the shore-break white water until the lifeguards ordered us out.
One friend, an acerbic, mischievous little guy, challenged the lifeguard sarcastically, "Can we at least play in the sand?"
The thing was, we knew our limitations. We knew better than to throw ourselves into large waves that might haul us into the famous "Toilet Bowl" section of Waimea. We had actually watched, on many occasions, clueless idiots get into trouble in the surf and have to be rescued by lifeguards. We had seen tourists who knew absolutely nothing about surfing turn themselves into human pile drivers at Sandy Beach and Makapuu and have to be taken away by ambulance.
And, I think that on that day at Waimea Bay, the lifeguard probably knew we could handle the shore break, but he just didn't need the aggravation. It was a judgment call. And of all the employees in city government, I doubt that anyone other than North Shore lifeguards hold so much life and death responsibility in their hands. The amazing thing is that they really have no rule book for making their decisions. They use their gut instinct. They look at each person on the beach and have to decide whether that person is in over his head. They do this based on the conditions of the ocean, which can change in a heartbeat, and visual clues as to a person's swimming strength and ocean experience. What other city worker has this kind of responsibility?
SO, it was interesting that a big-wave surfer got into a tiff with the lifeguards last week because they wouldn't let him paddle out at Waimea Bay on the biggest wave day of the year. The waves were so big that organizers refused to hold the Eddie Aikau big-wave contest, putting an ironic twist on the well-known bumper stickers "Eddie Would Go." Last week, even Eddie wouldn't go.
The surfer, Greg Russ, is right in saying he has the right to risk his life in big waves. There are no lifeguards out at the cloud-break surf spots ordering surfers like Laird Hamilton out of the water. Hamilton and others have pioneered a type of extreme surfing where they are pulled by jet skis into incredibly large waves.
So Russ does have a right to surf big waves. He doesn't, however, have a right to paddle out from a public park. And, that's why the lifeguards prevented him from doing it.
Russ complained that the lifeguards were keeping him from winning $50,000, a prize offered by a sports equipment company to the surfer photographed on the largest wave this surf season.
First of all, that's a dumb thing for the company to do. Why don't they offer $50,000 to the first idiot who throws himself off the Empire State Building while clutching a beach umbrella? More importantly, the largest ridable waves are not found at Waimea anymore, but on those spooky outer reefs.
If Russ really wanted to surf Waimea that day, he could have rented a boat at the Ala Wai Boat Harbor and scooted around to the North Shore and surfed without having to launch from the park.
The lifeguards were right in this case. When you consider all the judgment calls they have to make every day and the liability faced by the city every time some idiot injures himself in the surf, it's surprising they let anyone in the ocean at all.