Is Tow-In Surfing Legit? There's Only One Way to Find Out: Strap In and Ride
By Sam George
Being pulled along at 25 mph behind a 650cc Yamaha Wave Runner, headed straight for the impact zone of a grinding Hawaiian reef break -- it's probably not the best time to start questioning the merits of tow-in surfing.
Blazing in from the channel, I lean back against the pull of the tow-rope, legs straight, taking the strain with my shoulder and back muscles. As I work my feet into the two footstraps atop the skinny little surfboard, my back leg works overtime to absorb the chop. Fifty feet ahead, the Wave Runner surges over the swells, plunging and re-gathering speed like a steeplechaser; from this angle, the guy at the helm looks relaxed -- shoulders loose, head swiveling as he scans the lineup.
A shadow appears outside. This far out, the wave has yet to rear up into one of those looming walls that blots out the horizon. It's more a subtle shift in color, as if the blue Hawaiian water simply got a little bluer. The throttle roars; this is my wave. The pilot heads out to sea, directly at it, then turns slightly, so that he's running almost parallel to the steepening trough. I have no choice but to follow. Eyes fixed on the wall, I shake my head to clear vision and try to focus on the lineup that's blurring past.
It's no coincidence that Waterworld's Kevin Costner recruited his stuntmen from Maui -- they do this kind of thing for fun. Paul Miller backsides his way through a typical Peahi action sequence.
When you paddle into a wave, all you notice is the feathering bowl. But now, standing long before takeoff, it seems that I can see the whole wave: a band of swell stretching up the coast like a blue ridge line. As my speed increases, it's hard to think of the approaching energy as a wave at all. More like terrain, watery terrain that requires negotiation ...
Then, boom, that's my last thoughtful moment, because the driver is looking back over his shoulder and is circling his right hand over his head. This one? I glance once more at the wall that's standing up in my path and raise my right hand, pointing urgently three times in quick succession. Yes, this one. The driver throttles up, carves a fishhook turn and reverses his direction in a shower of spray. I lean back against the tightening rope, carve out away from the wake, and prepare for "The Whip". Whatever's going to happen, I think, it's going to happen now and real fast.
But is it surfing? Is it valid? Is it fun?
If you want to know about the tow-in surfing revolution/phenomenon -- call it what you like -- there's only one place to go and that's Maui, an island of back country crossroads that seems an unlikely setting for so dynamic a movement. As I sat in Charley's Cafe in Paia, waiting for the Strapped crew to show up for breakfast, I got a familiar vibe -- one I'd felt before in places like Big Sur, Mendocino and Margaret River in West Oz. A mellow, small-town-meets-the-New-Age sort of thing.
The feeling quickly changed, however, as the team showed up, one by one: Dave Kalama, Brett Lickle, Pete Cabrinha, Mike Waltze, Mark Angulo and Rush Randle. Then the Prince of Rush himself, Laird Hamilton. As they took seats around the big table, the Maui morning was suddenly filled with a sense of purpose and mission.
"Everything changed last week," Kalama told me. A world-class sailboarder, Kalama is one of the most soft-spoken of the bunch, and so his simple declaration screamed volumes. "Over the last two sessions, everything got taken to a new level."
Kalama was talking about two days of big surf earlier in the week. Two days of epic conditions in which the tow-in teams pushed themselves to new limits -- and that still had them buzzing. This time the Maui boys had company. There was Darrick Doerner --"Double Dee," as they call him --as well as three other blue-water men over from Oahu: Brock Little, Mike Stewart and Brian Keaulana. The visitors helped to steepen the performance curve.
"Darrick started it," said Kalama. "I was driving for Laird and we were headed back out when we saw Dee go on this really big one. But instead of running up into the lip for speed, like we usually do, Dee kinda fades and does this big, slow turn in the middle of the face. And we thought, 'What's he doing, he's gonna get killed!' Then we see that he's setting up for this giant tube, and we can't believe it. He just pulls into the biggest tube any of us have ever seen, and gets spit out. And you should've seen Laird -- the look on his face. He just yelled, 'Get me over there! Deep!' So we hooked up with a big one and Laird pulled into the tube. And it just took off from there."
To put this all in perspective: Kalama is talking about a wave as big as Waimea, except hollower and with a longer wall.
"I just couldn't believe it," Brian Keaulana had told me back on Oahu. "They were the biggest, most perfect waves I've ever seen in my life." This from one of Hawaii's top watermen and lifeguards. "And Laird and those guys, what they're doing is, like it's almost unreal. They have it so down -- the whole program -- and it was so funny to go over there and feel like...feel like...well, feel like a kook again, because what they're doing is on such another level."
When I relate Keaulana's comments to the boys on Maui, a murmur of approval ripples around the breakfast table. "We were stoked that those guys came over to see what was really going on," says Cabrinha. "It was great that Brian came." "We actually felt a lot safer with him out there," adds Waltze.
"It was funny," says Kalama, a slight edge coming into his voice for the first time. "Brock did great out there, considering. But I remember reading where Brock said that any kook could ride big waves if they towed in. Well, during this session, Brock was that kook."
I talked to Brock later, and he could only agree. "It was like a dream," Little said. "The way this group of guys have it so set up, the way they look after each other. My first impression was one of awe. Awed by the waves themselves and awed by the mechanics of the whole thing, how wired those guys have it."
At Jaws (the boys actually call the spot Peahi, after the valley that funnels offshores straight into the peak; nobody calls it "Jaws"), having it wired means never wiping out, as Little learned the hard way.
"I pulled into this huge frickin' barrel," Little said. "I thought, 'This is unreal', but then it started to clip me in the head. I got out of my straps and slipped off the back and thentumble, tumble, tumble. I got sucked over the falls and then just sucked in. It wouldn't let me up. When I finally came up, I was a good 30 yards further in than where the guys were looking for me. It's heavy out there."
"The thing you have to remember," says Hamilton. "is that we've only been doing this for about three years. When it comes to pulling into the tube, we worked up to it. Everybody makes such a big deal out of towing in, but that's just how we get into the waves. It's what we do on the wave that counts."
Those advancements are never more evident than when looking at the Strapped crew's equipment. After breakfast, they take me to "The Barn" on Hamilton's homestead in Haiku: a two-story, open-deck structure that is part Jet-Ski workshop, part surfboard factory. On the upper deck, a scruffy-looking Doerner is living under a mosquito net while he works on his new board. Buzzy Kerbox is fiddling with some sort of fin box. Other models sit on stands -- by Timpone, Brewer, Lopez -- while various camo-painted skis perch on trailers. In front, a fishing boat lists to one side, it's hull getting a new layer of glass.
Today, the big discussion is about how much lead they should start adding to their boards. They look like conventional surfboards -- until you pick one up. For big-wave boards, they're incredibly short -- 7'4'' seems to be a popular length for 20 feet and over these days-and extremely narrow -- 15 inches in some cases. Totally concaved, they feature a set of super-flexible, low-area twin-fins right on the tail. And they're heavy.
"We haven't topped out as far as weight is concerned," explains Lickle, whose own board has a couple of lead weights bolted onto the deck. "The heavier the better, as far as we can tell." But a lively discussion arises about the hazards of lead accumulation in the blood stream -- an issue, no doubt, that has never before arisen in the context of surfboard design.
Later, Kalama and I drop by the shaping room of Jeff Timpone, who makes all of Dave's boards. Timpone, a former shaper for Russell Surfboards in Newport Beach, now finds himself on an entirely different wavelength.
"This whole thing has made us reevaluate just what a surfboard is," says Timpone, showing me Kalama's new all-solid balsa model. "The speeds these guys are attaining and the way they're riding big waves would be impossible on a conventional board. The performance level alone validates the designs. And they're fun to work on. I can shape a longboard in my sleep, but these things are a real challenge."
"Challenge makes men," it's been said. The lives of these men on Maui have been defined by the challenge of changing big wave surfing as we know it. By most standards, they've already done so. During that two-day swell at Peahi, they rode bigger waves, carved harder turns and pulled into bigger tubes than any surfers before them. When it comes to performance in big waves, nothing -- not at Sunset, Pipeline or Waimea and certainly not at Todos Santos or Maverick's -- comes close. But as with everything radical, acceptance comes slowly.
"This is what we're doing," Laird explained to me, just before I flew back to Oahu. "We don't care if people accept it or not. It's not like we're a bunch of guys who got together to prove something. We got together because we felt that big waves could be ridden better than they've been ridden. We dreamed of what we wanted to do, then figured out a way to do it. All it is is surfing, but in a new way. If you can't understand that, well..."
By now I wanted to understand, so when I got to Oahu I went straight to Keaulana. Thoroughly hooked, Brian had been towing in on some of the outer West Side reefs with Archie Kalepa, a fellow lifeguard from Maui. Keaulana let me borrow one of Kalama's Timpone boards. The waves, though only medium-size by Hawaiian standards, would've been huge back home in California. And anyway, as the ever safety-conscious Keaulana lectured, "We wouldn't have even let you go out at Jaws."
I had some initial anxiety about whether I'd even be able to get up on the 7' 10" sliver. I thought about a water start -- most of the tow-in guys are expert sailboarders -- but scrapped that plan when I found out that the leaded board, although a real sinker, was more buoyant than a water ski. Instead, I just lay on the deck, grabbed the rope, waited until the board began planing, moved my front foot into the strap, and stood.
It was easier riding directly behind the ski, its wake knocking some of the chop down. A stiff back leg helped, too, as Archie made repeated circular runs at the right-breaking reef break we had chosen. My first attempt was pretty lame: I naturally followed the path of the ski, losing rope tension and slowing down too much to stay with the swell. On my second effort, I didn't really get the whip, but let myself be towed through a slow turn and tugged reluctantly into the wave. Again, no speed, and after the board sank underneath me -- these things thrive on velocity -- I had to paddle it through the rest of the set. At least it was easy to duck-dive.
Finally, Archie told me to wait for a set, turn away from the ski as it makes its turn, crank a 180 degree turn, then drop the rope and fling up into the curl line. And to wait for a set wave; I was cutting loose into every wave I came near. Three circuits later, the right wave reared up. I was determined to whip into it properly, so I put my left hand out for balance and, one-handed like a slalom skier, carved out away from the wake and onto the swell. The rope stayed taut as I leaned through the turn; coming out of it I was already going faster than I've ever gone on any wave.
By this time Archie had motored into the upper part of the shoulder, so I dropped the rope and shot like an arrow up the wave behind him, tracking higher -- and earlier -- than I'd thought possible. Leverage felt weird -- the board was set up for Keaulana -- and pumping rail-to-rail while strapped-in was awkward, at first. It felt strange being on a wave this size on a board this size. But probably the most pervasive sensation was the one they kept talking about over on Maui. They had discovered it in three-story waves, the way I did on a 10-footer. Towing-in might be easier, faster -- and newer -- but Laird was right: once you drop the rope, it's all just surfing.
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