Some rejoice, others cautious about reopening of surf competitions in Hawaii

In-person surf competitions with live spectators will once again be allowed at Oahu beach parks, effective today, after having been shut down since January due to COVID-19, Gov. David Ige and Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi announced last week.

The announcement elicited varying responses from community members on the North Shore, where professional surf contests in big, dangerous, high-performance winter waves have historically drawn crowds and international media to such storied events as the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay and the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing at Haleiwa Beach Park, Banzai Pipeline and Sunset Beach.

“It’s great news,” said Roxana Jimenez, manager of the North Shore Chamber of Commerce in Haleiwa. “The reopening of the surf competitions means everything to the North Shore.”

The contests drew surf tourism and boosted the local economy, Jimenez said. “Businesses, our members, eagerly await the surf competitions because that’s when they generate the most revenue. When folks come out to spectate those tournaments, they all stop in to our food trucks, our restaurants, our shops — everyone experiences a boom, and it (means) their survival.”

Others, including longtime North Shore residents Larry McElheny, a member of several environmental and community organizations, and Randy Rarick, former pro surfer and veteran contest promoter, said they welcomed the return of keiki and amateur contests for local surfers but not the heavily publicized contests of the World Surf League’s international championship tour, on grounds the crowds of visitors created traffic jams and overuse of public beaches and surf spots, negatively affecting fragile natural resources and residents’ quality of life.

“If people are saying surf contests are good for the economy in encouraging more tourists to come, which is exactly what they do, I don’t think that’s a good thing,” McElheny said Sunday in a phone interview, adding, “For the last few days, the traffic has been horrible, and people are really, really upset, talking about how we’ve got to limit the tourists.”

Rarick said he experienced a change of heart about five years ago while gazing at thousands of spectators packing the beach for the Pipe Masters.

”I was a real advocate for using surfing to promote the North Shore and Hawaii. I thought pro surfing was good for the state. But then we reached kind of a tipping point, and it dawned on me, we’d exceeded our carrying capacity,” he said.

“The North Shore infrastructure is not there to handle the tourism — we don’t need to go 10 million tourists,” Rarick said, adding he had redirected his efforts to broadcasting contests on television and online in the hope that people would stay home to watch.

Actually, people should do both, attending in person and/or watching on-screen, said Betty Depolito, fellow North Shore resident and longtime surf instructor, contest organizer, promoter and videographer.

An advocate of equal opportunities for women in surfing, Depolito founded the Red Bull Queen of the Bay big-wave contest at Waimea Bay, which has never been held in person, due to lack of waves in its permitted holding period, but had a well-publicized virtual run last winter after she canceled the live event due to COVID.

“The reopening is awesome. We’re excited,” Depolito said. “We miss the camaraderie of the events, and these are opportunities for women, too, who want to be pro athletes. If there are no events, we lose sponsorships.”

The closure, she said, “was huge. Now hopefully things will pick back up and people will be excited about competitive surfing again.”

Although residents didn’t like the traffic, Depolito added, for her that misery was outweighed “by just the fun of it, the excitement, cheering on a hometown hero.”

Other North Shore business people emphasized the financial benefits.

“Last year was a whole wash, a write-off,” said Sean Wingate, advertising manager for Haleiwa Surf N Sea. “Just like with everybody, we were just getting by.”

Normally, events such as the Triple Crown bring “a huge influx of people, whether competitors, entourage, families, trainers, the (event) crew and all of the spectators — the economic impact of the Triple Crown is huge.”

On the other hand, although spring and summer were the off-season for North Shore waves and contests, “we’re looking at a huge influx of tourism right now. It’s definitely picking up, trending up all the time. People are so stoked to be able to travel and stuff,” Wingate said on the eve of Memorial Day weekend.

“What’s happening now is tourists coming back in droves, and the North Shore is already packed. Tourist season used to be just winter, but now it’s year-round,” said SharLyn Foo, owner of Backpackers, a vacation rental business.

“We get support staff and lots of spectators. They literally come for the surf contests, particularly at Pipeline, just to watch it and to see the big waves on the North Shore,” she said.

While some aspects of surf tourism declined as a result of the pandemic, it has also morphed from spectatorship to experiential, said Daniel Ito, a content marketing manager at Olu Kai, surf coach at his alma mater Kamehameha Schools, and a former editor of Free Surf magazine; he is also a member of a new, 15-member surf advisory committee at the Hawaii Tourism Authority, which is seeking to brand Hawaii as the birthplace of surfing, with the best waves on the planet, at the Tokyo Olympics, where Hawaii’s John John Florence and Carissa Moore will surf on the U.S. team.

The shutdowns, Ito said, have produced a different kind of surf industry boom — for expensive surfboards, custom-made by Hawaii craftsmen — as people have moved to the islands to work remotely and have time and money for aspirational leisure pursuits such as emulating pro surfers they see glamorized in the media.

While there were historically surf tourists who took lessons in Waikiki, during COVID “the surf tourism industry shifted from visitors staying at resorts to tech workers who have moved here because they can work remotely, and they want to surf, so the surf is more crowded than ever, with the remote workers and local people laid off from hotel and restaurant jobs, who have more time to surf,” he said.

Thus, “demand for custom surfboards is at an all-time high,” he added, “with a huge boom that came right after the first round of stimulus checks,” which helps support the local economy, he said.

However, “I’m not sure how much economic benefit was really coming to the community from having surf contests on the North Shore,” he added, because those visitors “don’t stay in the resort at Turtle Bay; they stay in rental houses.”

To make a positive turn for the economy through surf contests, Ito said, “you’ve gotta move it away from the North Shore, spread it out, do more interscholastic championships in Honolulu, at Bowls or Queens, keep the tourists in Waikiki and bring the athletes’ families and the conscious tourist who appreciates surf culture and Hawaiian history.”

Rarick agreed that promoting Hawaii surf competitions on the amateur level could be a way to “present surfing as what Hawaii’s gift to the world is, and make it sustainable” while supporting future generations of competitive pro surfers from the islands.