Poipu

SURF REPORT

14 September 2009


We are going down to Poipu, but its hard to get Hanalei out of my head. But Poipu is on the rise and the north shore is going down. First we needed to attend the time share orientation in Waipouli we agreed upon in order to get a $165.00 reduction on our Na Pali Coast dive tour tomorrow. We checked the tour prices before and after: they did not run it up to set it back down to what people normally pay. Bruce the kiosk salesman said it would take ninety minutes. That was not the only lie we heard, but it was the only one that affected us.

We got a quick qualification run through from our personal salesgirl Kanae, a runner-up to some Miss Hawaii pageant a modest number of years ago, then we were ushered into a conference room for a power point lead by mainland-transplant saleswiz Jerry before a captive crowd of 44. The pitch was so deplorable that it is not required to provide much detail, other than that the script ended with Jerry’s last personal anecdote about his father dying of cancer before he could come to Hawaii. Hanky-time on the Hookilau. Someone should have been ready to shell out $27,000 at that point to honor Jerry’s dad. Maybe it would be one of the shill’s in the audience who already were members of Shell Vacations International. Time is slipping away, slipping away from all of us! ( I am not kidding, they named their shell game Shell!)

Jerry turned us loose and Kanae tried to close. She smiled massively and drew wondrous interlocking circles and made it all blatantly clear that they were giving us money. We tried to explain how we were not a good fit for their program. Wait! They even had rustic options! If they could only see the Lemke’s fish shack at Anahola, then they would see what we mean by rustic. Later we learn that the same time-share program is on the resale market for $9K, a swift reduction of eighteen thousand dollars. Denise, the ultimate blonde closer, knew before hand that she was dealing with a dirtbag. It said so on my questionnaire. Imagine I am sitting in front of the actress Kathleen Turner in her prime.

“ How was the presentation? Not too hard-sell?” (You mean, did we gag on the cancer story?)

“ Not really. I am in retail. I sell vegetables, and they rot a lot faster than condos.”

I thought maybe the thought crossed Denise’s mind to quip something like “ not so sure about that.” But she let the moment pass. There was a definite eyebrow raise and then an umpire’s look-off.

“ Do you grow the vegetables?”

“ Yeah.”

She knew then she was up against a guy who hangs onto his quarters. But she tried the money-back-guarantee gambit anyway. ( Nein, fraulein) Her final glance was sharp, but not spiteful. The down payment on her program was exactly the amount we had saved on our Na Pali tour. Whaddayaknow?

Poipu was calmer than two days earlier. Much less wind, but nothing like the glass on the windward side. We elected to go down there because the snorkeling was superior to Hanalei. Surf was running a little over head and pretty consistent. I paddled out at a boil called Left-Lefts that gave way to a fast wall. Two Hawaiian local girls were sitting on it like a bus stop. Every time the sets came through each one got a thick slab boulder-roil take-off and then one of the four haole onlookers could scramble for the left overs. Three sets of this and I paddled over to Waichai, which was mostly a left but occasionally broke both ways. I’ll call it Retirement Reef. No one out under forty. Such a ghostly gang of geezers you ever did see, all painted up with zinky sunscreen and cruising their logs. The good thing was that of the 11 people out only five were really riding. It was not big but the southern power coming out of deep water was way tumbly if you found yourself captive in the white water, and wondering about that coral inside. My abiding impression over the past few days had been to commit early in my mind to these things, and this tactic no doubt saved me from much grief. To one of the bigger walls I just said; “What the hell.” Did I mention yet how fast these waves are?

“