Sometimes you just have to take a chance on adventure

As January sunlight glistered on the flat, glassy surface at Suis, the Captain looked around him at the nearly empty lineup. “They must all have gone to the country,” he said. “When I was younger, we used to go out there, and I tell ya, the waves are so much faster. And powerful! There’s no comparison.”

How true. I was introduced to North Shore waves at age 16, when Tomi Winkler and Donny Mailer took me to Laniakea, which means “wide sky.”

From the beach, I gazed with trepidation out past the shallow reef at long, chaotic ranks of dark-faced, white-tossed waves stacked up against the calm celestial blue.

“Whatever you do, Mindy, don’t lose your board,” Tomi warned me (these were the pre-leash days). “The current will take it to Kaena Point so fast we won’t be able to save it.”

To be fair, Tomi and Donny had benevolent reasons for selecting various life-threatening challenges for me.

They had chosen Lanis for my North Shore baptism, they said, because the waves peeled right. The ideal for three of us who surfed regular stance, with our left foot forward — although Tomi could switch and go goofy-foot as he pleased.

Lanis also had a channel for paddling out and an inside break where I could practice.

But this was far from Inside Tonggs or Baby Queens.

It was a shock. The water was colder than in town, and the speed with which my first wave broke left me breathless. The waves at Lanis were different from in town; they seemed alive, as impatient and malicious as wild horses determined to throw their rider.

Which they did.

I never got the hang of Lanis, but farther north I fell in love with the frothy, pale-blue waters of Ehukai, “sea spray,” the beach break across the channel from Pipeline.

As the late writer, comic and former lifeguard David Parrish once told me, bodysurfing is “like flying against the wind.”

When the winter sandbar covered the coral bottom, giving the waves perfect pitch, bodysurfing Ehukai was certainly the closest thing I’ve ever found to flight, planing along those thick, tubular, glass-paperweight walls.

But the riptide kept you swimming, and I learned that Ehukai’s prettiness was deceptive during a cleanup set on a rising swell when the older brother of a classmate saved me from drowning.

YEARS LATER I met and married a California writer and bodysurfer. Don and I had many glorious days at Ehukai.

It was the late 1970s, and Mark Cunningham manned the lifeguard chair in his inimical laid-back, ironic yet kindly style.

Mark was filmed bodysurfing 15-foot Pipeline in “Waves to Freedom,” a 16-millimeter documentary made by his high school classmates Albert Rosen, my brother Robert and David Parrish.

David shared Don’s and my love for Ehukai, and we also bodysurfed with him at Point Panics and Makapuu.

Lonely and divorced, he spun comic riffs about blind dates and other romantic misadventures. In the comedy clubs, one of his most popular improvs concerned a dive tour in the Ala Wai Canal.

Gradually, as parenting and jobs in New York kept us away for longer periods, Ehukai faded to an impossible dream.

It had always been elusive: Before the era of surf webcams, you had no choice but to call for a recorded surf report and then drive all the way out to check for yourself.

Most of the time, we’d find the waves had petered out or gotten blown out. Or it was too big. Or the sandbar hadn’t formed yet. Or it had and then got swept away.

Now that there are surf cams, I watch but seldom go. There was a mad fun about the gamble, the disappointment and then the laughter on the drives with David that continued around the island to check Pounders, then Makapuu.

The webcams have taken away the mystery and adventure.

David, meanwhile, had almost stopped bodysurfing. Aside from showing up for duty at his Magic Island lifeguard chair, he’d become a hermit.

He died in 2013. He was 58. I remembered that, more than 40 years before, he had saved my little brother John from drowning out at Rocky Point. I remembered the smile on our son Rory’s face when, for his 11th birthday, David gave him a long-sleeved, yellow-and-red official lifeguard shirt, faded and softened by wear.

Official or not, our best friends are our lifeguards, looking out for us.

THAT FIRST DAY at Laniakea, I lost my board. It occurred to me, as I struck out for the receding shore, that I could also lose my life.

Then I saw Tomi paddling out, fast, to meet me, towing my board with one of his long, prehensile feet.

He died three years later, alone, in his sleep.

Shortly before Christmas, when we were last in touch, Mark said Ehukai still needed a big west swell to kick it into shape.

Whatever, I’m heading out to the country with Rory and Don. It’s time to revisit the impossible dream and honor the friends who no longer can.

“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.