Before he retired Thursday after 40 years with the Ocean Safety Division of the Honolulu Emergency Services Department, Captain Paul Merino, 66, who oversaw District 1 stretching from Pearl Harbor to Maunalua Bay, returned to the beach at Waikiki.
“It’s almost the original site of the old wooden tower that I first worked in,” Merino said Wednesday morning from Tower 2-A in front of the Moana Surfrider Hotel, where he always cleaned and raked the beach before his lifeguard shift.
Merino said he loved lifeguarding, but it hadn’t been his first choice of a career.
“I wanted to be a free-spirited beachboy like my older brother, Freddie Merino,” he said, “but thank god he pushed me to become a lifeguard, because we have pensions and medical when we retire.”
Asked how Waikiki had changed since his boyhood, “It’s a different era now,” Merino said.
“The beachboys of the past took care of the rich and famous, teaching them to canoe and surf, and those tourists took care of them with money and gifts,” he said.
With the advent of mass tourism in the 1970s, he said, beachboy services became more like a regular job.
He was grateful to have been raised in the old tradition, he said. “The beachboys taught me where the surf is, where the reef is, where the dangerous holes are. They taught me the ocean.”
The old-timers also treated everyone on the beach as family, said retired Ocean Safety Captain Brian Keaulana, who was a lifeguard recruit with Merino and whose father is Buffalo Keaulana, the revered Makaha waterman and lifeguard who also worked as a beachboy in Waikiki .
“People today see a commercialized Waikiki,” Brian Keaulana said, but back in the day “it was all about having fun, and living off the ocean — when you caught fish you fed everybody.”
It would be hard to fill Merino’s shoes because “it’s one thing to have all the safety knowledge and skill sets you need to be a water safety officer, but another thing to understand the area, the history, the people,” Keaulana said.
Merino said his inspiration was Duke Kahanamoku, “our leader, our father of surfing, who treated everyone with love, aloha and respect, and I would imagine when taking care of patients, how would Duke handle this?”
Sometimes aloha meant persisting even though you knew things were hopeless, said Merino, who started out when there was only one lifeguard per tower and he was responsible for the area between the Royal Hawaiian and Moana hotels, with “about 7,000 people on the beach and 500 in the water” at times.
As he was setting up his tower one morning, he got his first rescue call.
“A lady told me her husband didn’t come back to the hotel for breakfast,” he remembered. “One of the beachboys found the guy under the water about 50 yards offshore and signaled to me; I brought him in on my rescue surfboard, and although I could tell he was dead long before, I did CPR for about 40 minutes until the ambulance came and (the paramedics) pronounced him dead.”
The towers had no phones. “We had a radio, and when we saw someone was drowning, we radioed dispatch and said, ‘I’m going on a rescue.’”
A lifeguard in the next tower, 600 yards away, would watch, and if he saw an unresponsive body being brought in, he’d radio for an ambulance, which took about 30 minutes to arrive.
Meanwhile, the rescuer would single-handedly drag the patient up the sand and perform CPR.
Unlike today, lifeguards had no oxygen units, backboards or neck collars for spinal injuries, or personal protective equipment. “All we had was mouth-to-mouth and hand-on-chest.”
Nowadays, in addition to state-of-the-art equipment and two guards manning Fiberglas towers with protection from the elements, Ocean Safety employs two personal watercraft operators and a lieutenant with a truck for District 1, Merino said.
People still sometimes drowned, including “kids who’d be surfing, get caught in a hole.”
But in the end, haunting losses were outweighed by the “literally thousands” of rescues he performed.
The first time he saved a person’s life, “when I looked in their eyes, saw they were dead, (then) did CPR and they lived, I knew I’d found my calling,” Merino said.
Merino also witnessed nature’s revival after hotels and beaches closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was the most incredible thing I saw in my lifetime, Waikiki with absolutely nobody on the beach,” Merino said. “Fish started to come back in shoreline areas, and reefs and limu began to grow because the hundreds of thousands of (beachgoers) and all the suntan lotion were gone — the water was so clean and beautiful, the way it used to be.”
On the downside, he noted, people lost their jobs, including his wife, Lorry Merino, a Waikiki hotel employee who has since retired.
The Merinos, who met paddling for the Waikiki Beach Boys Canoe Club, have two sons — Asti, a Maui police officer, and Baba, a Waikiki lifeguard — and five grandchildren.
Before he retired, Merino talked story with new young lifeguards, sharing his experiences and knowledge.
Ocean Safety Lieutenant Ryan Moniz, who reported to Merino for years, said the captain was a hard worker who ran a tight ship.
“Paul was always there for the 64-some people under him,” Moniz said. “He was honest, a straight-up shooter — if something bothered him, he would let you know, and he would also tell you if he liked something you did.”
Merino was respected as a captain, “but you also loved him as a person,” Moniz said.
Regarding retirement, Merino said, “Now I can go in water any time my wife says I can.”
He looks forward to diving, paddling and surfing his 11-foot board at Publics and Old Mans in Waikiki as well as Makaha and the North Shore, “wherever the waves are.”
He can negotiate right- or left-handed waves equally because he can switch his stance, a rare skill the beachboys taught him.
On Wednesday, Keaulana said, friends threw a surprise, socially distanced farewell for Merino at Duke’s Waikiki, and nonagenarian Buffalo Keaulana, “who barely leaves Makaha,” insisted on attending.
“And when Paul saw Daddy he cried,” Brian Keaulana said.
