At age 1 year, 3 months, Steel Scott is already going surfing, balanced on a soft-top longboard between the muscular arms of his grandfather as they paddle out in Waikiki.

The toddler wears sunblock and a rash guard, but forget the water wings.

“He’s got me,” grandfather Keone Downing said.

For Downing this weekly play date is a wonderful break from running the Downing Hawaii surf shop in Kaimuki, serving on the state Board of Land and Natural Resources and volunteering, along with his father, big-wave pioneer George Downing, on behalf of Save Our Surf. The grass-roots organization, founded in 1964 by the late John Kelly, has helped save 140 Oahu surfing sites.

In a March 7 public hearing, Keone Downing and other members of Save Our Surf spoke out against the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ proposed replacement for the Royal Hawaiian groin, installed in 1927 to prevent sand drifting from the beach in front of the Waikiki hotel.

The replacement was recommended by Sea Engineering Inc. in a final environmental assessment published by the DLNR.

The engineers advised that the existing, fractured concrete wall, its scoliotic curves braced with sandbags, be replaced with a T-head groin consisting of a rock rubble mound with a footprint of 7,440 square feet.

At about 550 square feet the existing groin’s footprint is more than 13 times smaller.

“T-groins — they’re horrible,” Downing said when I called him at his surf shop. He sounded just like his father, with whom I spoke in 2008 when he opposed a bill proposing that T-head groins be added to Gray’s Beach by the Halekulani and Sheraton Waikiki.

At the time, George Downing said the groins would produce an opposite result to the beach widening that was sought.

“T-groins will only serve to interrupt the naturally replenishing cycle of sand migration, increase beach erosion, cause silting of reefs and changes in the bottom topography that shapes Waikiki’s classic waves.”

His fierce testimony, supported by records of how T-head groins had previously failed to hold sand at Waikiki, helped defeat that plan.

In this month’s hearing, Save Our Surf members made the same arguments against the new T-groin, adding that the crevices between the rocks would attract potentially dangerous eels.

“I said it more as a joke,” the younger Downing remarked, noting that the assessment said the T-groin would improve marine biota, which included crevice-sheltering eels as well as pretty hinalea and angelfish.

“It’s interesting, this whole fear thing,” he said. “For 17 years they’ve been making it sound like a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

He wants people to see the positive.

“That groin is still there after 88 years, and it’s still holding the sand in place. What else can we say has lasted 88 years in Hawaii?”

The Royal Hawaiian hotel has.

“The Royal’s cracking, but do we say it’s falling apart, we should tear it down? When you’re 88 your joints get stiff, your fillings fall out, but it can be fixed,” he said, noting that his father is 86 and not disposable.

Rather than characterize the venerable groin as failing, we need to study the reasoning of its engineers, Downing said.

“Why is there a slope to below water level? Why did they just make it straight, like a wall?”

After all, when he builds a surfboard, he incorporates what he’s learned from shapes past.

Yet in the assessment, rebuilding the original straight structure is not an option.

“What troubles me is their assumption that what’s there is not good,” Downing said.

Waikiki is a spiritual home to the Downing family. George learned to surf there as a teenager on a redwood plank, and Keone and his siblings, followed by their own children, were getting in its waters at Steel’s age.

“In 1927 the engineers tried their best to have Waikiki go forward to the future,” Keone Downing said.

Now it’s our turn.

“It’s for future generations,” he said, acknowledging that he feels this more deeply than ever when he paddles into the waves with his grandson.

“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.