January 28th, 2010:
Past two days have been exploring the nooks and crannies of the coast. We left the Maketu/Te Puke area this afternoon after spending one night on some Maori land at a blown out rivermouth that is known to get good. A local guy back at Waihi Beach had told us about the area. The lowtide estuary that surrounds the grassy camp area is full of mussels and clams, but posted signs warn of paralytic shellfish poisoning.
The coast road winds its way around the bays and up over the hills and down the valleys in full technicolor display as we continued south toward the remote and unpopulated East Cape. Really beautiful sights and smells and friendly people. Christine and I are taking our time and not letting the lack of swell bum us out to much. We are in Waipiro Bay right now, having parked our home under a N.Z. evergreen across the quiet dirt track that outlines the cobblestoned south side of the bay. I think this place needs a good extra foot or two of swell to really start to take off and show some form and function for a solid dance routine between the surf starved and the lonely long legged wavestress that I observe rolling along the point, but not breaking, in a tortuous mother natured strip tease. “Wow, this place has so serious…,” and Christine chimes in and finishes my thought, having heard a few days of the same comment, “potential, right?”
I took the fish out last night after the tide had dropped and caught a few knee high dribblers breaking just inches above the boulders. Another couple joined us here at the bay, an English couple from Cornwall, Hugo and Rose. We had seen them the day before, as both of us were driving the same southerly path, pulling over at a couple of the same bends and viewpoints on the East Cape to look for swell. This spot was too much of a coincidence, as we are well off the main highway, and toward the end of a narrow, bumpy and secluded empty road well north of the Gisborne area. We all communed our food and cooked up a nice big pot of mae ployed pasta and silver beets – extra butter and sardines out of the tin. We passed the peace pipe and talked about our journeys so far, with Hugo and Rose having spent a month here already.
Before eating Hugo and I were standing along the heaps of driftwood and cobblestones, overlooking Wapiro. The rugged hillside is awash with evergreens, rough lipped shrubs, seaside grasses and rocky faced cliff drops facing the sea and wrapping this entire natural splendor around the bay, coming straight from the depths of the western Pacific and rising several hundred metres or more. North island kaka’s drift up and down with the shifting pockets of wind kissed air. Mozzies buzz and dive for any of our flesh they can find. The sun had set behind the hills, and small, too small to ride, sets of waves were breaking in uniformed regularity along the sweeping point. So much potential…
“Sometimes I feel so lucky to have this as the thing that I do…surfing…surf travel…having this as such an intrinsic part of my life,” Hugo mentioned as our bodies and eyes faced the northern landscape. The dusk was turning our view into a Wolfgang Bloch painting. The bay and landmass turning multiple shades of dark grey, with small brush strokes and scratches of brown and red visible amongst the darkening hillsides streaking across the most natural canvass, adding dramatic nuance, depth and complexity.
“Yeah man, to have this as what you do, surfing, travelling off to places like N.Z. in search of waves and all that is attached to that search; like this,” as I motion with my hands from right to left, to drive home the overwhelming grandeur of our immediate environment. “We are pretty fuckin’ lucky. And sometimes I think about other peoples passions; the things in their lives that keep them going, give them that fired up excitement, like NASCAR or college football, and I just don’t get it. I think they are fucked up and crazy. But I know that is a closed minded thought to have…self-righteous…judgemental…There are other ways to feel what we feel.”
That makes me think of travelling, and why we surf stoked do it. Where we come from, what inspirations have trickled down the generations; the articles, books, photos and stories – oral traditions. So many ways that the histories of surf culture have been passed down and inspired, of the thrill of the hunt, the adventure of search, the nucleus of contemporary surf travel inspiration, where the Endless Summer came from; I am drawn to finding the beginnings; the idea of the perfect empty wave. Campfires, surfshop sewing circles, surf spot parking lots and now the world wide surfnet are great places to find the stoke, but I look even deeper.
Those stoke stories really started coming around for a greater audience, a worldly audience during the 19th century, and really took off at the turn of the 20th. Mark Twain, Herman Melville, London and countless others all travelled to the Hawaiian islands and chronicled their observations of men and women on planks of wood, and witnessed the exuberance of the Native Hawaiians in full trim around the breaks of the South Pacific. These literary kingpins, especially London, really got the ball rolling, those toes curled up and over the nose as a new chapter of surfing came out of the Islands and into the lives of the many. Jack London flipped the paradigm that no one, as Twain put it, “but the natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.” Europeans, along with all their other baggage, had brought with them a horrendous fear of the ocean. The literatures and captain’s logs are ripe with tales of death and destruction for any who drifted out past the shoreline. But London brought to Hawaii a different attitude. A young American attitude that asserted and urged, “what that Kanaka can do you can do yourself… Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you; bit the sea’s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should,” after paddling out at Waikiki in 1907. The Woman’s Home Companion magazine that his documented first surf attempts appeared in would reach such a great audience, and as more and more people began flocking to the Islands for their piece of the tropical paradise experience, the modern day surfriding revival and the idea of the Endless Summer would begin fruition. Now most estimates are around the four million mark, so as high as 20 million. Four million surfers, nearly as many as there are people in this country of New Zealand.
Even though their accounts were full of white superiority mind frames, their literatures speak volumes to the resiliency of these peoples they encountered. Having survived wave after wave of disease and vicious attempts by missionaries to vanquish their non-western cultural customs, toward the end of the 19th century, a return of surfing to more public venues began to grow away from the hidden coves and remote areas that the Hawaiians had needed to use for several decades. With Hawaii on the map as a tropical paradise fit for colonization and Western tourism, white people began to paddle out themselves.
And now there are millions and millions. Now, people from the Great Northwest and England, end up at the end of remote, deserted fishing village road sides together, parked under Norfolk pines, on the east coast of New Zealand, waiting for swell and sharing expressions of disbelief for the power and importance of our chosen paths. Pretty cool.
new surf dialogue 
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