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Rell Kapolioka‘ehukai Sunn, the late pioneer surfer and “Queen of Makaha” who would have turned 72 on Sunday, was a tireless advocate of equal opportunity for women in surfing and for giving Hawaii’s children the chance to dream big and realize their dreams.
Only 22 years old and the mother of a young daughter in 1972, when Title IX became law, she was a sister spirit to Hawaii Congresswoman Patsy Mink, who co-authored the amendment to the U.S.Civil Rights Act of 1964, stating that no one can, on the basis of sex, be excluded from or discriminated against in educational programs receiving federal assistance.
“Aunty Rell made every kid feel like they were the most special child in the world,” said Jennifer Lee Van Gieson, an early participant in Sunn’s Menehune Surf Contest for children, which launched in 1975 on Oahu’s North Shore and West Side. “I felt we had a unique relationship, particularly because I was a girl,” she added, noting that females were underrepresented in surfing.
Sunn, who had grown up watching the annual Makaha International Surfing Contest and seeing it open doors for local surfers beyond Hawaii’s shores, founded her contest to provide a competitive, but fun and inclusive, activity for the children of her remote, rural community, which is historically underserved in education, youth recreation, employment, health and other resources.
“She wanted to teach kids about the ocean, give them a healthy, safe place to be, and the way she made it, it was like everybody was a winner,” said her friend Kathy Terada.
While surfing wasn’t then, and still is not, a public school sport in Hawaii outside Maui County, Sunn extended Title IX’s principles of gender equity, along with the Civil Rights Act’s goal of ending discrimination against racial minorities, beyond schools and into real life.
Following Hawaiian tradition, Sunn provided the largely Native Hawaiian children of Makaha with hands-on learning through ocean sports and other indigenous cultural activities a decade before experiential learning was adopted by schools.
Sunn actively recruited and mentored girls, Van Gieson said, noting that, although she lived in town, Sunn would call her with surf reports and invite her to spend the weekends with her family in Makaha. Van Gieson remembered that she and Melanie Bartels, later a well-known competitive surfer, were the only two girls among the group of Menehune surfers Sunn took to the Biarritz surf festival in 1995.
Other female pro surfers who got their start in the Menehune contest include Megan Abubo, Rochelle Ballard and Carissa Moore, who wore a Rell Sunn jersey while competing on International Women’s Day, March 4, in the Portugal world championship event.
“For us Hawaii kids at the time, to go to France was not even on the radar, we were just stoked to go to another island,” Van Gieson said. “It broadened my horizons for sure. Back then, we weren’t really taught about the big world out there.”
She gained the confidence to travel the world as a SUP surfer, “all because Aunty Rell welcomed me to Makaha at such a young age.”
Meanwhile, Sunn was also pursuing equity for older women surfers at a time when male surfers enjoyed far more contest, sponsorship and media opportunities, and prize money than women, who often got nothing at all.
She and her friends, including Brooke Holt-Pennell, Claudia Woo, Tinky Leach, Haze Pave, Dalani Tanahy, Pua Mokuau and Terada, founded a group called the West Side Wahines.
“I don’t remember we talked about or were really aware of Title IX,” said Terada, a Makaha resident and a nurse-practitioner at the Waianae Comprehensive Health Care Clinic for 45 years, but the Wahines definitely shared purpose with the feminist movement of the 1970s. They held women’s-only surf contests, and also stood up for surfing women of color, wearing black surf shorts made by Da Hui, the surf club on Oahu’s North Shore whose mission included preserving Hawaiian culture and access to waves.
“I remember before our first contest, the men complained about not being able to participate, so we said they could compete but they had to wear bikinis,” Terada said; the event remained all-female.
As a youngster, Sunn, whose middle name means “heart of the sea,” was an early trailblazer for Hawaii women’s surfing; she won the 1965 junior women’s state championship at Ala Moana Bowls, and competed in the 1966 world championships at Huntington Beach, Calif., on a team of island teens chaperoned by Duke Kahanamoku.
She continually looked for ways to hold women’s pro contests in Hawaii, so that local surfers wouldn’t always have to travel to compete. At the time, women surfers “traveled all over the world, spending their own money to make $200 (in prize money),” recalled Oahu native Laola Lake Aea, who surfed competitively for a time after graduating from Punahou School in 1970.
In 1975, Sunn, Lake-Aea, Jeannie Chesser, Patti Paniccia and other Hawaii surfers gathered in Linda McCreary’s Oahu North Shore beach cottage to found the nonprofit Hawaii Women’s Surfing Hui, “to get our own sponsors, our own contests,” Lake-Aea said. “In 1976 we put on the first all-women’s pro surf contest at Haleiwa.”
Also in the mid-1970s, along with her close friend Jericho Poppler, a Californian surfing champion, Sunn was active in the newly founded Women’s International Surfing Association (WISA), which organized the first women’s world tour. Although prize purses and media attention were minimal compared with what men received, Sunn competed in California, Brazil, Australia, South Africa and France.
In 1979, she, along with Jericho Poppler, Lynne Boyer, Margo Oberg, Cherie Gross, Linda Davoli, Debbie Beacham, Becky Benson and Brenda Scott, formed Women’s Pro Surfing (WPS) . In 1982, Sunn was ranked No. 1 in the world in longboard surfing, and in 1983, she was among the first five women inducted into the International Surfing Museum’s Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, Calif. By then she had also learned she had breast cancer, a disease she battled, while continuing to surf, swim, paddle, dive, hold the Menehune contests and help establish a counselling program for Makaha women with breast cancer, until her death in January, 1998.
Among her many pioneering achievements, Sunn also served as the first female lifeguard at Makaha Beach in the 1970s, sharing the tower with Richard “Buffalo” Keaulana, the renowned waterman and former Waikiki beachboy. He taught her to dive and spear fish, an activity that, with surfing, gave her joy and sustenance until the end of her life.
Initially, Keaulana said, he was hired as the beach park keeper, but because he kept rescuing people from drowning, he was appointed the first City and County Lifeguard at Makaha Beach. “But I cannot spell,” he said. “I would save people but I could not write about what I did. They got Rell, and she would write (the daily reports) and a lot of stories,” he said. “I’d tell Rell, I was happy to have somebody to write something.”
He began teaching Sunn to dive for fish from her longboard, but at first she wasn’t successful, Keaulana said. “I tell her, ‘Why you never spear the fish?’ And Rell said ‘oh, I’m getting him,’ but everytime she go to poke a fish, it move and she miss ’um.”
Like all great teachers, Keaulana was part psychologist: he observed his student and tailored her lessons according to her capabilities: Because Sunn had trouble spearing rapidly swimming fish, Keaulana told her to focus on stick fish because “they’re the easiest fish to shoot — they don’t move, they’re 3-4 feet long, and they have a lotta meat.”
True, he added, stick fish change color to match their environment, “so you cannot see them.” But he taught her how to pick them out in shade or sun, against reef or sand bottom, and “she was so happy,” he said.
Kathy Terada remembers stick fish feasts at Sunn’s house. “They were her favorite fish. Stickfish and uhu. She was so spontaneous, whatever she caught when diving she’d call everybody in the neighborhood and say, “come on over, you’re not cooking tonight!’”
A fishing story Sunn wrote appears on the website of the Rell Sunn Education Fund, the nonprofit founded by her daughter, Jann Sunn-Carreira, and other family to perpetuate the Menehune contests and other charitable community work.
She recounts speardiving off Ka‘ena Point on a beautiful day, when “within an hour the 9-foot, 6-inch longboard was awash under the weight of 65 pounds of octopus, giant uhus (parrotfish), a couple of seven-pound kumus (highly prized goatfish)…red, good, delicious.”
But she could not resist the ultimate prize, a 45-lb ulua, which, after she poked it, fled beneath a ledge in the reef, where it tried to scrape off the two Hawaiian sling spears she had planted in it. Sunn followed, diving deep and engaging in an epic battle, gouging its eyes and nearly running out of breath before she finally hauled it up and atop her board.
Then she noticed a 14-foot-long tiger shark approaching from beneath, and sacrificed the bleeding ulua over the side.
As she drove back to Makaha, “late as always” for hula practice, she thought about the sea and how “out there, under the deceptively placid surface, was a world blind to gender. Though I was taught (to dive) by men, I was formed by and subjected to the rigid laws of a seemingly lawless realm that treated me and every grazing ulua or marauding shark with the same utter equanimity.”
That she lived a life filled with joy in her beloved community and ocean, diving, dancing and surfing through bouts of pain and sickness as she faced down a recurring cancer, attests to Sunn’s incomparable courage and the comfort she found in the implacable, natural world.
Her story and legacy have inspired and educated oceangoers and seekers of justice throughout the world, especially children, and will uplift generations to come.
Rell Kapolioka‘ehukai Sunn
Known as “the Queen of Makaha,” where she was born Jan. 31 1950, she died of breast cancer Jan. 2, 1998.
>> Her Hawaiian middle name means “heart of the sea.”
Accomplishments
>> 1964, entered first surf contest
>> 1965, won junior women’s state championship at Ala Moana Bowls
>> 1966, competed in the 1966 world championships at Huntington Beach, Calif., on a team of island teens chaperoned by Duke Kahanamoku.
>> 1975, co-founded the nonprofit Hawaii Women’s Surfing Hui and joined newly formed, California-based Women’s International Surfing Association, which organized the first women’s world tour.
>> 1976, founded annual Rell Sunn’s Menehune Surf Contest for children.
>> Hawaii Women’s Surfing Hui held first all-women’s, pro surf contest at Haleiwa
>> 1977, appointed first female lifeguard at Makaha Beach
>> 1979, cofounded Women’s Pro Surfing.
>> 1982, ranked world No. 1 in longboard surfing. Throughout her career she was ranked third in the word twice and finished seven times among the top 8 surfers in the world. She also received her breast cancer diagnosis that year.
>> 1983, was one of the first five women inducted into the International Surfing Museum’s Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, Calif.
>> 1986, introduced surfing to China on trip organized by Surfer Magazine
June 23, 2022, marked the 50th anniversary of Title IX. To commemorate this watershed event, the Star-Advertiser will publish a series of stories celebrating the achievements of female pioneers and leaders with Hawaii ties.
Click here to view the Title IX series.
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