Five-time world surfing champion Carissa Moore was the only Hawaiian left standing on June 4, finals day at the Quiksilver/ROXY Pro G-Land in Banyuwangi, Indonesia, after the other four islanders — two-time world champ John John Florence, Seth Moniz, Barron Mamiya and Gabriela Bryan — remaining on the circuit after a mid-tour cut went down to defeat.
Moore, the world’s first Olympic women’s surfing gold medalist and the reigning WSL champion, took second place at G-Land, putting her back atop the rankings after having dropped to No. 2.
She was narrowly defeated by Frenchwoman Johanne DeFay, a fellow regular stance (right-handed) charger, in the fast, hollow, left-breaking waves that, Moore said in a WSL statement were “actually really similar to a wave at home on the South Shore of Oahu.”
Asked which Honolulu wave she meant, she texted back a one-word answer: “Bowls!”
Moore meant Ala Moana Bowls, the gritty, urban, left-hand break across the channel from Honolulu’s Magic Island that has launched many legendary surfers, including Gerry Lopez and late women’s surfing pioneer Joey Hamasaki.
Hamasaki, a Kaimuki resident, grew up across the street from Bowls and died May 6, age 74, of complications related to breast cancer.
In 1963, after winning the 1962 Hawaii State Junior Championship, she dropped out of McKinley High School at age 16 to follow Bowls stars and mentors Donald Takayama and brothers Raymond, Robert and Ronald Patterson to Southern California in hopes of a earning a living by surfing.
She became an early pro, travelling the mainland and the Pacific as a member of the prestigious Windandsea team, and her smooth, quick, Hawaiian-style waveriding won the lasting admiration and respect of teammate Mickey Munoz, who also worked with her at Hobie Surfboards.
Hamasaki was the first female surfboard glasser in the industry.
“Joey was strong,” Munoz told me in an interview for a profile of Hamasaki published in Surfers Journal in July. “At that time especially, when a woman went out in a pretty much male-dominated sport and could surf as good as anyone in the water, it put her in an elite category.”
In her brief but striking career, Hamasaki won the 1965 Western Regional Surfing Championship; the women’s division of the 1966 Malibu International — in which she petitioned to surf against the men but was denied — and the 1967 East Coast Surfing Championships at Virginia Beach, in which she defeated favorites Joyce Hoffman and Margo Godfrey (later Oberg, of Kauai). She never won a world title, placing second behind Hoffman in the 1966 championship event.
Hamasaki was the only woman pro surfer from Hawaii and of Asian descent until her friend, Hawaiian amateur champion Rell Sunn, got her feet wet on the world tour in the late ’60s.
In 1973, Hamasaki abruptly gave up her surfboard manufacturing job and competitive surfing career and moved home to Honolulu, where she worked as a janitor at Kaimuki High School.
Why? “It just happened one day,” she told me. “You have to have that urge or something inside you that drives you to compete. It went away, so I stopped.”
The fledgling pro world tour Hamasaki experienced back in the ’60s, with stops in Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tahiti and California, was tiny and Pacific-centric, compared with today’s truly global world championship tour.
It seems unthinkable now, but the ’60s world pro tour didn’t have a stop in Hawaii, although Hamasaki came home to Oahu every winter, courtesy of Windandsea, to see her family and participate in the annual Makaha International Surfing Championships founded by the Waikiki Surf Club.
So I was delighted to hear Moore compare the waves of G-Land, where a green jungle filled with birds, monkeys and big cats comes up to the edge of the undeveloped shore, with those of Bowls, a man-made, inner-city Honolulu break along an asphalt and cement shore. Because the Honolulu native grew up surfing Bowls, she was able to get a read on G-Land, where she’d never been before.
The WSL takes surfers all over the world to telegenic, so-called exotic locations, but Hawaii surfers can have it all without leaving home. It underscores why the islands were the birthplace and cradle of surfing, and will always be the epicenter of the sport.
Every April, the Hawaii Surfing Association holds its invitational state championship at Ala Moana Bowls; and June 17-24, for the first time since 2016, WSL will be holding a pro event at Bowls in the world qualifying series, where surfers compete for a berth on the championship tour.
It’s worth going to Magic Island during a contest or on any given day during a swell to look across the channel at the next generation of Joey Hamasakis and Carissa Moores taking off.
