Spirit of Aloha | Features | January/February 2005

Window on Waialua
By: JOHN WYTHE WHITE

A place to live when you are reconciled To beauty and unafraid of time. (They languish, abstract, when no more opposed.) A place to earn in more chastising climates Which teach us that our destinies are mild Rather than fierce as we had once supposed, And how to recognize the peril of calm, Menaced only by surf and flowers and palms. —From “An Account of a Visit to Hawai‘i,” by William Meredith (1953.)

It’s a large frame, about 6 feet high and 25 feet across—impressive, but that’s not the best part of it. The best part is that the picture inside the frame is always changing. Light changes it. Wind changes it. Clouds change it. The tide’s ebb and flow change it. The seasons change it. People change it.

The picture is a panorama of Waialua Bay, as seen through our living room’s north wall, a massive sliding glass door that grants me and my wife frequent viewership of the docudrama projected onto it, a spectacle featuring nature and humanity, the former mightily awesome, the latter scantily clad.

We’ve been looking at this picture for four years now, ever since we moved into our rebuilt fixer-upper down the beach from the Hale‘iwa surf break, and it never fails to mesmerize. (During construction we learned a valuable rule: When speaking to a surfer-carpenter, position him with his back to the ocean, otherwise he won’t retain a word you say.)

We’re up at daybreak, when the sun rises over Pupukea, the air crisp and fresh, the ocean’s surface mirror-smooth, reflecting the orange clouds of dawn. Turnstones and sanderlings scurry along the beach, beak-probing the wet sand for food, always managing to outrace the surge of the shorebreak.


Soon, the first beachgoers appear, walking their dogs, exercising, combing for precious sunrise shells washed in from Kaua‘i, paddling out on surfboards and kayaks, swimming and snorkeling and shorefishing. We scan the horizon for whales or dolphins. We see turtles floating a few yards offshore.

Later in the morning, when the trades pick up, the ocean becomes an undulating carpet of glittering diamonds. Families arrive with beach umbrellas and body boards and plastic coolers. Kites appear in the sky, joining the noddies, boobies and frigate birds. The wind stirs up whitecaps and blows the tops off of waves. In the winter, when the high surf breaks, the air is saturated with a brine-soaked mist that looks like fog and deposits everywhere a sticky, salty dew.

In the evening, the wind calms and the sunset-watchers arrive. The white water of breaking waves turns red with the setting sun. Sounds are muffled. Clouds darken to purple and slate-gray. Later on, in the dark, the night fishermen’s flashlights glow eerily from beneath the surface of the shallows offshore.

Then it’s dawn, and the cycle begins again.

Busy Bay

Waimea might be the most famous bay on the North Shore, but Waialua is the most popular. While Waimea is primarily for big-wave surfers, the waters of Waialua are more eclectic, inhabited not only by surfers but snorkelers, scuba divers, spearfishers, kite surfers, kayakers, jet skiers, outrigger canoes and fishing boats.

If you drive from Wahiawa through Hale‘iwa Town on Kamehameha Highway, the body of water you’re looking directly at as you pass Matsumoto’s Shave Ice is Waialua Bay. From tip to tip, Pua‘ena Point, on the northeast, to Kaiaka Point, on the southwest, the bay is only about a mile across. Its high usage is explained by the wealth of public amenities along its shoreline: two city and county beach parks (Hale‘iwa and Hale‘iwa Ali‘i), a state recreation area (Kaiaka) and the well-used Hale‘iwa Small Boat Harbor.

In winter, surfers paddle out to no less than half-a-dozen surf spots inside the bay. In summer, snorkelers and scuba divers explore a vast and complex reef system. Bayfront diners watch the sunset from two restaurants, Hale‘iwa Joe’s and Jameson’s. If you want to dress up for dinner, all you need to do is iron your favorite T-shirt.

No Translation

“No one seems to know exactly what Waialua means. Pukui, Elbert and Mo‘okini include no translation in Place Names of Hawai‘i. Budnick and Wise, in Hawaiian Street Names, write “definition not known.” Only one writer ventures a guess: In Hawai‘i Place Names: Shores, Beaches and Surf Sites, John R.K. Clark says it means, “perhaps, literally, two waters.”.

Split Personality

The surf spot at Hale‘iwa Ali‘i Beach Park is one of the three venues for the famous Triple Crown of Surfing competition, the other two being at Pipeline and Sunset. It is also the site of the annual Menehune Contest, a more locally oriented event in which youngsters get a chance to compete, even 2-year-olds showing their stuff in the keiki division, parents assisting them up on tanker-size longboards, pushing them into tiny shorebreak waves. These two very different events illustrate the schizophrenic nature of the surf at Hale‘iwa.

“Gentle surf when small,” writes Bank Wright in his book Surfing Hawai‘i. “Dangerous currents during large surf.” “On a west swell, it’s a dream,” pro surfer Taylor Knox is quoted as saying in a recent Triple Crown program guide. “On a north swell, it’s a nightmare.

“Hale‘iwa frequently dons a delectable disguise that makes the waves appear alluring, at least when you are warm and dry on the sand,” writes Greg Ambrose in A Surfer’s Guide to Hawai‘i. “But once you paddle out for a closer glimpse and the waves have you in their clutches, Hale‘iwa drops its disguise and delivers a drubbing that will make you rue the day you caught your first wave.”

One problem is paddling out. Waves break upon, and currents pull across, a shallow slab of reef known as the Toilet Bowl. If your timing is bad, you can spend far too much time desperately struggling to get out of the impact zone and into the lineup.

But Hale‘iwa, like Pipeline, is popular with residents and tourists, because the waves break close to shore, providing ongoing entertainment for spectators on the beach—and ego-gratification for the surfers who know they’re being watched.

The Willies at Walls

On a sunny weekday morning in May, a late-season swell brought three-foot waves to Walls, a Waialua Bay surf spot about a 15-minute paddle from shore.


Many will not surf Walls for three reasons: it’s too far from the beach, too close to the Hale‘iwa Small Boat Harbor’s traffic of potential shark-attracting fishing vessels and scarily at the edge of infinity—the end of a reef, open to the deep sea and its unknown denizens beyond.

I was there with four others, waiting out a lull, when no more than six feet in front of us a large shark popped out of the water—not head-first, but its entire bulk appearing all at once—launching into the air in the style of a spinner dolphin. From snout to tail, its body was contorted into a rigid curve, like an archer’s drawn bow. It splashed back into the water and disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

We looked at one another for a moment in shock and astonishment. Then, without a word of coordination, we all caught the next wave out of there.

On the beach, talking together, we agreed that it was a tiger shark, at least eight feet long. We decided that we must have surprised it as much as it surprised us. It might have been chasing a barracuda. Of one thing we were certain: It hadn’t been after us, or at least one of us wouldn’t be on the beach discussing the incident.

Liquid Snow


Avalanche: Terrifying lefts. One mile out. Ten to 25 feet. Hazardous reef. Strong currents. Rarely (if ever) ridden. Winter horror.”

—Wright, ibid

“Second-reef, big-wave surf site. A small group of local surfers from Hale‘iwa named this site in 1954 while watching it from shore on a big day. Its huge, powerful waves, spilling massive amounts of whitewater, reminded them of an avalanche.”

—Clark, ibid

From our länai I can see the waves at Avalanche. They are no longer “rarely (if ever) ridden.” Ever since the late Tommy Holmes and a companion caught two waves there on an outrigger canoe, captured on camera from a nearby motorboat, Avalanche has presented a new challenge to modern-day surfers. The problem of paddling to catch the giant, thick, broad-based wave has been solved with the advent of tow-in jet skis. Today, Avalanche is anybody’s game.

Nature’s Lap Pool

When the waves on the outside reefs reach 10 feet or higher, a hefty current runs along a portion of the beach in Waialua Bay, sucking the nearshore waters east toward Hale‘iwa Ali‘i Beach Park. If you venture into the water here, you will be drawn quickly and inexorably down the beach. It’s no problem, not a riptide that will take you far out to sea. You just have to swim in and walk back to your towel in the sand.

Alternatively, if you want some exercise, you can swim against the current, parallel to the shore. If you stroke hard enough, you can negate the current’s force and remain in the same spot, as if you were in a swim-in-place lap pool.

As if to counterbalance this current, a quarter-mile from shore, at Walls, an opposite phenomenon occurs: a perpendicular cross-swell travels west, toward Kaiaka Point, sending a kinetic hiccup that rolls along the incoming waves, often sneaking up behind left-bound surfers and hurling them off their boards.

Surf Dog

A few yards in front of our house is a small reef that’s ideal for snorkeling. When a swell is running, it forms a small, but shapely wave with a curl that progresses from the reef into the deeper water at its edge. It’s a short-but-fun ride, surfable on kayak, longboard, shortboard or bodyboard.

One surfer who frequents this spot is a bodyboarder who always brings her black Labrador retriever, who truly enjoys the ocean and/or loves his owner so much he can’t bear to part with her. He follows her into the water and swims by her side out to the lineup.


Whenever she catches a wave, the dog swims in after her, hampered not a little by waves breaking on his head. As she paddles back out, the in-swimming dog finds her, and the process is repeated, often for an hour or longer. Once in a while, tuckered out from incessant dog-paddling in the surf, the woman’s best friend takes a break and sits on the beach, attention rigidly fixed on his still-surfing owner, until he’s rested enough to rejoin her.

Beach Cat

Once, years ago in another land (California), I took my cat to the beach and set him down on the sand. He cringed and hissed, arched and growled. There was no place to hide, nothing to crawl under or jump up on. I had cruelly transported him without warning to a vast, flat emptiness, a Sahara Desert of a cat box. He wanted out, immediately. I never took him back.

So I was astonished to meet the beachgoing cat, a resident of the Army Beach section of Waialua Bay. First, a nuclear family appeared, a couple with a young child. They were quickly joined by a small, furry black dog. Finally, slowly, regally, a large Siamese ambled out onto the beach and sat in the sand, alert yet calm and relaxed, about 15 feet from the shelter of the yard from which it had just strolled. It sat there for a full 20 minutes, watching the dog and human trio frolic, until it grew bored and strolled back home.

This episode, with variations, was repeated regularly until the cat’s family moved away.

Living Textiles

One day, from our länai, we watched two dark, undulating shapes float along, a few feet out from the shore. At first we thought they were bath towels or pillowcases, possibly tossed or blown from a pleasure boat and drifted in on the wind. Then, we realized that they were alive—two large manta rays, aquatically winging their way … where? What were they doing so close to shore? What were they looking for? We watched them for some minutes until they languidly flapped away.

This episode had a single screening. It has never been repeated.

Shadowy Sea

Viewed on a map, the road into 53-acre Kaiaka State Recreation Area looks like a guppy. The tail curves in from Hale‘iwa Road and its body is a loop around the park, which is shaped like a big thumb that sticks out into the ocean on three sides. Standing on the tip of Kaiaka Point, you have a 270-degree view of water

I ride my bike around the loop, which takes a little less than two minutes per lap, keeping my heart pumping while listening to audiobooks on a shock- and water-resistant cassette player.

Surfers park their cars at Kaiaka. Bicyclers start their weekend rides from here. Picnickers are drawn to the expansive green lawns and barbecue grills. Fishermen cast out from the rocks where the surf crashes, shooting up walls of white spray.

Kaiaka, which means “shadowy sea,” also hosts an unusual rock, set like a pedestal on a larger limestone base. Known as Pöhaku o Läna‘i, the rock is said to have floated there from Tahiti.

Candles on the Tide

Last year, my wife and I walked down to the Hale‘iwa Jodo Mission, an unassuming gray building on the west end of Hale‘iwa Ali‘i Beach Park, to join a group of volunteers assembling 1,000 lanterns to be set adrift during the mission’s annual bon dance and Toro Nagashi (“floating lanterns set out to sea”) ceremony. Inscribed with the names of departed ancestors, the lanterns ride the outgoing tide to greet visiting spirits.

The date of the event changes every year. It can happen any Saturday night in June, July or August, based on annual tide charts. What’s needed is a nighttime ebb tide that will carry the lanterns out to sea, rather than redeposit them onshore.

The ceremonial launching and the dance that precedes it are well-attended events. A makeshift parking lot on the lawn of Hale‘iwa Ali‘i Beach Park is quickly filled, and Hale‘iwa Road is lined with cars for a mile in each direction. In election years, politicians never miss this opportunity to schmooze with voters up close.

Each lantern is a 10-inch-tall topless hexagon with a wooden base and sides of cardboard and rice paper. The candle, set into the base, is lighted from above.

The lanterns, a thousand points of light, initially float en masse out to sea. Eventually, some separate from the pack. But most of the group remain integrated, drifting together either toward Waimea Bay or Ka‘ena Point. Whenever the lanterns drift back to shore, mission volunteers show up early the next morning to clean up the beach.

Lots of events take place every year on Waialua Bay: surf contests, fishing competitions, craft fairs, music concerts, church services and Sunset on the Beach movies. But for sheer beauty, reverence, joy and human camaraderie, nothing beats the Toro Nagashi.

Free-lance writer JOHN WYTHE WHITE lives in Hale‘iwa and is the author of Short-Timers in Paradise, a collection of fiction and essays about life in Hawai‘i, published by ‘Ano‘ai Press.

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