Surf accidents provide wake-up call

In January, the North Shore scene calms down a bit after the holiday-season tourists have departed and the Triple Crown of Surfing is pau.

Surfers weren’t feeling so calm, though, after Marjorie Mariano was badly bitten by a 10-foot tiger shark in the waves at Laniakea on New Year’s Eve, pro surfer Dusty Payne of Maui was hospitalized after hitting the reef head-first at Backdoor on Jan. 8, and a couple of hours later the same morning, veteran surfer Glen Jeans died in the waves of Rocky Point.

Payne’s vertiginous wipeout at Backdoor, which breaks in a right, or westerly, direction from the central Pipeline peak, was shocking to see on video, especially after the livestreamed Billabong Pipe Masters in Honor of Andy Irons went off in December at the same break without serious injury.

We were reminded that the ocean is a wild and unpredictable place.

“I mean, you never know. It could happen to you on the smallest town wave,” a surfer friend commented.

True. Last spring, on a small day, a friend got pitched face-first onto the reef at Black Point. Knocked unconscious like Payne, she awoke underwater and paddled to shore. She’s been in and out of surgery ever since.

In the 1970s, Backdoor was regarded as even hairier than Pipeline and rarely ridden. This winter, when both the 2017 world champion (John John Florence) and Pipe Masters victor (Jeremy Flores) were determined in the waves of Backdoor, I wondered when the rights began to steal the limelight from the lefts of lore.

It’s been at least a decade, said Jim Kempton, president of the California Surf Museum in Oceanside, Calif., and a former editor of Surfer Magazine.

“Eight of the last 10 Pipe Masters have been won at Backdoor, not at classic Pipe.”

Weather patterns have changed with the global climate, producing December swells that favor Backdoor. As a result, “There’s talk of moving the Masters to January to get that classic northwest swell and large left barrel at Pipe,” Kempton said.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when the lefts dominated, so did goofy-foot surfers like Pipe pioneers Jock Sutherland and Gerry Lopez, whose right-foot-forward stances had them facing the barrel while regular-foot surfers rode backside, perceived as a disadvantage on this fastest and most hollow of waves.

That changed in 1982, when regular-foot North Shore native Michael Ho won the Pipe Masters not only going backside, but with a broken wrist.

“Michael had to surf the finals with a cast on his right arm, but he had them cut it back a little to let his fingers out,” Kempton said. “He pushed up with one hand and grabbed his outside rail with the other, and hung on with that right arm to pull himself into the barrel.”

Boards ridden at Pipeline by Ho, Lopez, Andy and Bruce Irons, Kelly Slater, Joyce Hoffman, Rory Russell and 15 other greats are on display, along with photographs, at Turtle Bay Resort through Feb. 10 in “Salute to Pipeline,” an exhibit Kempton curated.

The 8-foot, single-fin Rennie Yater loaned by Sutherland, who competed in the inaugural Pipe Masters in 1971 and placed “fourth or fifth,” he said, isn’t one he rode there but is very similar in shape to the 7-foot-something he did ride and which no longer exists.

“The rails are low, not super hard, but enough to give you a lot of bite and acceleration, with a good curve,” he said. “What some would have called a minigun.”

Sutherland noted that Butch van Artsdalen and John Peck were the first to ride tubes at Pipeline, in ’63 and ’64, although “Often times it was unintentional, probably most of the time. You’d get barreled and you’d get eaten.”

Asked how Pipe riding has changed, he said today’s surfers are “probably twice as high performance as what we were doing in 1968-69, making later takeoffs, and their boards are much smaller, so they can fit in the tube easier and stay in for longer.”

A roofer by trade, Sutherland said steep roofs remind him of Pipeline: dangerous.

For more information on the “Salute to Pipeline” exhibit, visit turtlebayresort.com.

“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.