new surf dialogue

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January 25^th,2010. Waihi Beach.

Full speed ahead as we pull out of Auckland with the sunrise and patchy, sporadic rain clouds. The city quickly turns to farm land, the Southern Highway a blur buzz of cows and sheep, maize and turned up top soil. Up and around the hills and curves and rivers of the south Coromandel peninsula to Whangamata on the east coast, I figure out the gearing of our Mitsubishi camper, and hope the black smoke doesn’t pour out of the exhaust anymore while we trudge up the inclines that stress out the old diesel engine sitting under the co-pilots chair. At Whangamata, the famed harbour sandbar isn’t producing any peaks, but Crista and I stroll the beach, stretch our legs and poke at the jellies washed up along the white sand sea line. We continue to cruise, on the left hand side of the road, and trade big ohhs and ahhhs and toothy grins as we round the corners and feast on another eyeful of New Zealand landscape. Only hours into our four month road trip and we are impressed with the sights and smells and the people who aren’t afraid to smile and wave as we pass them by.

Further south, we park it at Waihi Beach. We camp out at the beach car park for free for two nights. The surf is small, but fun, and the locals friendly and helpful. The ocean is full of jellyfish, both big meaty ones that drift into shore with the tidal ebbs and flows, and millions of little jelly tubes and spirals that make the water a soupy, gelatinous concoction that I stir up with every paddle.

The roadside fruit stands are keeping our vitamin C intake up at peak levels. Although finding fresh fish to cook up on the beach is nearly impossible. When we asked at the bakery where a fresh fillet (pronounced ‘fill it’) could be found, the guy behind the counter answered, “I reckon down on the beach with a fishing pole.” So we had pasta for dinner, and dreamt of the squid tubes and kumara root we had the night before in Auckland.

After two days in Waihi, we took a hike toward Homunga Bay in search of better waves and new horizon view points. The trail stomp vistas were awesome, with dramatic cliff drops to the sea hundreds of feet below us, but the surf was hiding out. We hiked back out, packed up and put the Zorro Blanco back into gear.

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“White people have taken many things from many cultures, and surfing is one of them.” Thomas Campbell

Surfers travel. They have for centuries. Ancient Polynesian surfers explored and found perfect empty waves when they cruised up to the Hawaiian Islands and throughout the first half of the 20^th century, and pilgrimages to the Hawaiian Islands would become a rite of passage for the small groups of surfing enthusiasts from California by the mid 20^th century[1]. So what The Endless Summer did was simply continue a cultural paradigm that had long been established, but one that was fed by new Westernized models of looking at the ‘unknown’ and the natural environment. Static cultures die out, ones that adapt to the ever changing world thrive in motions of resiliency, for better or worse. When Jack London had his accounts of surfing published in the U.S. and Britian, and Henry Huntington employed Hawaiian/Irish surfer George Freeth[2] to give surfing demonstrations as a means to promote his new rail service north of Los Angeles in 1908 (which quickly sold out as thousands came to witness Freeth)[3], a new seed was planted that would marry the Hawaiian and southern California beach cultures, inspiring travel between the two destinations by the new surf communities. Duke Kahanamoku[4], a native Hawaiian and Waikiki beach boy, would follow in Freeth’s footsteps, and bring surfing to the east coast of the U.S., again to California and to Australia by 1920[5]. These events would go on to inspire the endless summer vision and a global contemporary surf culture, one that finds surfers from country A running into surfers from country B while tramping around lonely, dirt tracked roads in country C in ever increasing numbers. Besides the pilgrimages to Hawaii throughout the first half of the 20^th century, California surfers began cruising down to Baja, exploring the points and reefs years before The Endless Summer. However, as Kampion reiterates, “it was the epiphany of Cape St. Francis – that perfect, peeling wave waiting at the end of a long trek over the dunes in The Endless Summer – that ignited the explosion in surf travel that would shape the sport for the rest of the millennium.”

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[2] At the turn of the 20^th century, Freeth was regarded as the best surfer/waterman in the world.

[3] See Kampion, Ormond.

[4] Regarded as the “father of modern surfing”, Kahanamoku was an Olympic gold medalist and world record holding swimmer, incredible waterman and Hawaiian ambassador to the world.

[5] See Kampion