Crouching Lion

SURF REPORT

CROUCHING LION

8 September 2009


You can best see the lion when you are four or five hundred yards offshore. Crouching Lion is a rocky hilltop above my sister’s house at Makaua, in Kaaawa, Oahu. If you line yourself dead-on with the lion so her little white house is right below it, you can stay on the best and most consistent peaks when the swell is running out of the northwest. There are five peaks on the lion, though the most northerly, which breaks weakly into Kahana Bay unless there is a big push, is not ridden much. I once paddled out at Crouching Lion with good Konas blowing and a lot of boys out, and ended up seeking the soul rights on Kahana: mo bettah. But a little sharky.

When I arrived in Honolulu my brother in law called from Kaaawa. He told me that Cameron said there was surf and that Cameron had even waxed up The Diff. This is undue deferential treatment, so upon arriving I made to paddle out to the reef even if just to look around for turtles. Cameron is the nephew-in-law. He thinks of me as a semi-icon I suppose, the game geezer. We ate fried spam sushi like holy communion, washed it down with vodka and guava juice on ice and hit the water.

“ I plan on surfing if we go all the way out there,” suggested the young Cameron, husband of Niece Number One.

“ Oh of course we will ride a few.” I didn’t want to kibosh the notion, surf unseen. And so we stroked out on our trek to the reef.

There were trades blowing and the reef was Maytagging around, so from the shore a hundred riders had slipped by on Kamehameha Highway thinking that the lion was not working. But there were no whitecaps on the sea, so the trades were meek. On we stroked, until we were on the reef dodging white water. I remembered that it is wise that whenever you find yourself on one of those tropical reefs with a lowered tide to paddle shallowly, with your little fingers barely wet, because the last thing you want to do is jam the ball of your hand into an urchin on the way out. No matter how good the waves are, your surfing pleasure will be diluted by the throbbing pain the poisonous spines induce.

With the trade windswells and Lord knows whatever else swinging in out of the deep blue, the reef crossing was arduous. Not the worst, but still a continual buffeting. The reef is broad, and no sooner did one wave break there was another behind it. Thus the entry was tiresome and eventually fraught with a few epithets. I thought that Cameron was right behind me, but discovered he had not passed the reef and was drawn down towards Kahana, where I saw him waving after I had ridden. After a few waves I realized he had still not crossed over and I could not see him so I took some whitewater back over to find him. I was drifting around wondering how big the shark was that had torn him in half when I turned to see him now on the far south end of the reef, surfing. He had paddled all the way down to the channel and gone out from the top, which is what I now entertained. I was so glad I did not have to explain to my sister how I had not kept better care of her son-in-law.

Once in the blue and surveying what’s really going down out there, the waves are really pretty good if you are in the right place when the groundswell comes in. The trade swell is playful but dissolves into mush. The groundswell is head high and is breaking on three distinct peaks. You want to get in and get down on those. The current takes us frequently into the netherzone, so we have to remind ourselves to keep moving up. The lefts were the best, or so I thought until I decided to go right and midway down the line observed myself making a long roundhouse cutback to flip back in, just like riding a bicycle.