It was a typical lackluster November morning on the South Shore, where ’tis not the season for surf.

But at least it was uncrowded, so I went out to Suis and caught a handful of knee-high, feathering waves, and as I paddled back to shore, feeling refreshed and awakened, I met Sammy paddling in from Sleepys, the next break toward Diamond Head.

I figured he’d be grumpy, due to the small, windy conditions, but he smiled.

“Only a surfer knows the feeling, yeah?” he said, and added, with a laugh, “Eh, we still here!”

True dat. This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to still be surfing and alive, despite my aging body and a pandemic.

I gazed up at the brown peak of Leahi Crater, looming above Makalei Beach Park, a green gem that social media has transformed into a mecca for yoginis, jugglers, tightrope walkers, hammock loungers and sunset watchers.

But these selfie-centric swarms can’t last, since soon we will be living, working and playing online in the metaverse, according to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO and owner of more than 1,300 acres on Kauai.

I wanted to rinse off, but had to avoid the park shower, commandeered as usual by a fully clothed man, vigorously washing and shaking his sudsy body and hair. Better to shower in the megaverse.

Meanwhile, ’tis the season for big waves on the North Shore. Starting tomorrow, the competition kicks off with the World Surf League Michelob Pure Gold Haleiwa Challenger through Dec. 7, followed Dec. 8-20 by the HIC Pipe Pro, the first qualifying series event including women at Pipeline since 2018.

Last season, due to the pandemic, competitive surfing and the Tokyo Summer Olympics pivoted to hold events without live audiences.

This year’s World Surf League big wave tour for men and women, which runs through March 31, will continue to be held without in-person spectators.

In other contests last year, such as the North Shore’s Vans Triple Crown of Surfing and Women’s Big Wave Red Bull Magnitude, athletes surfed and were videod alone, rather than competing in in-person heats; these events will again be virtual this year.

Regardless, it was a banner year for Hawaiian surfing, in which our reigning world champion, Carissa Kainani Moore, won the first-ever Olympic surfing gold medal, then claimed her fourth world title in a first-time, winner-take-all event in big, clean waves that looked custom made for her at Lower Trestles, Calif.

Yet her historic achievement didn’t fully sink in until months later, when I saw, in a glass display case at Bishop Museum, the surfboard on which Moore won her Olympic gold in raging storm surf at Japan’s Tsurigasaki Beach.

It was a thing of beauty, a Mona Lisa of surfboards, shaped by Matt Biolos in lightweight foam, delicate-looking as a leaf. It was 5 feet, 11 inches long, 18.38 inches wide and 2.2 inches thick, emblazoned with pink hibiscus and green palm fronds and a 2020 Olympics U.S. flag.

It looked pristine, except for a small, round depression, about an inch in diameter and a quarter inch deep, in its fiberglass deck.

It looked like a pressure dent, caused by a surfer’s fingers or toes, tangible proof of how hard Carissa had pushed through the big, battering, chaotic waves and up on her feet.

That dent made it real for me.

Nearby, leaning against the wall, stood a dark brown, skegless surfboard made of solid sapele wood, with “Duke” emblazoned across its nose. Measuring 9 feet, 8 inches long, 23 inches wide and 1.75 inches thick, it was a replica of a board surfed by Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, Hawaii’s first Olympian and greatest waterman.

The case also held Kahanamoku’s gold medal from the 1920 Olympics, soon to be joined by Moore’s gold medal from the 2020 Olympics.

Moore has been designated Hawaii’s new ambassador of surfing by Gov. David Ige and many others.

The young Native Hawaiian has said she feels humbled and honored to help carry forward the legacy of Kahanamoku, an idol to her and so many Hawaiians of all ages.

But although he was Hawaii’s first and greatest Olympic champion, winning two gold and three silver medals for swimming, introduced surfing to Australia and popularized it in California, Kahanamoku wasn’t the sport’s first ambassador.

In 1885, three Hawaiian princes: Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, David Kawananakoa and Edward Keliiahonui, surfed redwood boards at Santa Cruz, California. Also that year, Kalanianaole and Kawananakoa surfed the frigid waves of Bridlington in Yorkshire, England.

In 1892, their younger cousin Princess Kaiulani Cleghorn, studying in England, reportedly surfed the warmer waters of Brighton, on the English Channel, where, she wrote, she enjoyed “being on the water,” in a letter in the collection of the Museum of British Surfing.

After the illegal overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, her aunt, in 1893, Kaiulani became an unofficial ambassador to Washington, advocating for the restoration of Hawaii’s legitimate government.

The Bishop Museum has her surfboard in its collection.

“Attributing this particular board to Kaiulani is a combination of its provenance (an auction of objects from her family home), the fact that we know she loved the ocean, and the really noticeable thinness of the board,” museum historian DeSoto Brown said in an email.

“As this was the time well before lightweight surfboard materials existed, a small and slight person like Kaiulani could only have handled a wood board that was made to be as light as possible,” he said.

Brown enclosed a passage from the lectures of explorer Burton Holmes, regarding his Hawaii visit in 1898. Holmes describes a “foaming palisade, upon the face of which the canoe is held as by some mysterious attraction, (and) there before me is the Princess Kaiulani, her face aglow with excitement, shouting and paddling frantically, her eyes flashing with the wild pleasure of it all.”

Holmes adds this was “doubtless” the way “the eyes of her princely ancestors flashed in the days when surfing was exclusively a royal sport.”

But surfing was never exclusively a royal sport. As Hawaiian historian David Malo wrote in “Hawaiian Antiquities,” cited in John Clark’s “Hawaiian Surfing,” “Surfriding was one of the most exciting and noble sports known to the Hawaiians, practiced equally by king, chief, and commoners.”

And here on the South Shore, we makaainana will give thanks to Kanaloa for off-season swells, all the more enjoyable because nature can’t be controlled with a click.