Winter wave contests help sustain Oahu’s businesses, services

The North Shore’s economy is riding as high as the big winter waves as a number of surfing competitions from the “Eddie” to the World Surf League’s opening championship tournaments bolster interest in the region, leading to residual opportunities for a financial boom.

Tourists and local spectators swelled more than usual for the 2023 Eddie Aikau Invitational Big Wave Contest at Waimea, which was held Jan. 22. They lined every available vantage spot to see Luke Shepardson, a 27-year-old North Shore lifeguard, win first place in the event, where participants battled waves which averaged 25 feet, with 50-foot faces.

Part of the reason for the Eddie’s economic boost is that it isn’t held often. The one-day surfing event, named for late North Shore lifeguard and indomitable big-wave surfer Eddie Aikau, goes back to 1985 but has only had 10 runnings. Prior to this year, the last Eddie was held in 2016 because it requires specific conditions, including surf heights that consistently reach 20 feet in Hawaii-style measurements (40-foot faces).

Crowds aren’t likely to be as mammoth for the opening of the World Surf League Championship Tour, which might kick off today with the Billabong Pro Pipeline. Still, the economic impacts are considerable, as is the media and creative content, which is long-lasting and shows pickup throughout the year, said WSL CEO Erik Logan.

Logan said the repetitive nature of the WSL’s championship tour in Hawaii, which includes the Billabong Pro Pipeline, which runs through Feb. 10, and the Hurley Pro Sunset Beach, which runs Feb. 12-23, actually affords visitors a better chance to time their trips to the action.

Both events are part of the WSL’s 2023 Championship Tour, which runs through September and includes 10 regular-season events in seven countries. The WSL Championship Tour rankings at the end of the 2023 season will determine 18 of the 48 spots at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (10 men and eight women).

Logan said WSL championships bring WSL athletes, their families and friends, and professional staff, who need lodging, food and other services, to Oahu. Running the events also requires hiring locals to provide serv­ices ranging from construction to production, vendors, judges, officials, food and beverages, and more, he said.

Rachael Runyan, who works at the Sunrise Shack near Shark’s Cove, said Tuesday that the coffee stand was pumping for the Eddie, which she expects will bring a residual boost to business.

“Any time there is a surfing competition, we expect a lot more people, and we bring in extra product and merchandise. It’s a very significant difference,” Runyan said. “There’s still a lot of chatter around the Eddie because it’s almost like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s got more people excited about the waves, and I think that’s going to make this wave season and all the other tournaments bigger.”

Runyan said Sunrise Surf Shack plans to scale up employees for the Billabong, the Hurley and other major surfing events.

The WSL and other surfing events bring many millions in investment to Hawaii during the winter surf season. The increasing popularity of broadcasts, social media outreach and even reality shows like “Make or Break,” made possible through a partnership between WSL and Apple TV+, add greater economic dimension.

Tank Reed, a Denver visitor, was at the Banzai Pipeline on Tuesday watching the waves as the WSL erected its contest podiums. A self-proclaimed “big surfing fan” and avid watcher of “Make or Break,” Reed said he is staying in Waikiki but will return to the North Shore for the WSL contests.

“I’ve traveled to San Cle­mente for the WSL, and I’ve been here before when Hawaii was part of WSL’s final tour,” Reed said. “Tourists will come just for these types of events.”

Locals will, too, said SharLyn Foo, owner of Backpackers, a plantation village and hostel on Oahu’s North Shore that was the brainchild of her brother, the late Mark Foo, a professional surfer known to favor big waves, who drowned in 1994 at Mavericks, Half Moon Bay, Calif., in 1994.

Foo said she normally gets visitors from all over the world who are coming to surf the North Shore during the winter.

“During the Eddie we completely filled with local people,” she said. “People were calling all day. Some were just asking to pay to park.”

Foo’s calendar shows that she is preparing for another occupancy boost surrounding the Billabong Pro Pipeline.

“The entire North Shore benefits from surfing,” she said. “Surfers tend to stay longer. In addition to their lodging, they are spending money on food and beverages, and they tend to buy equipment.”

Benny Haddad and Tyler Bartlett, sponsored surfers from Australia, were among Foo’s international guests during the Eddie.

“We made our stay for three weeks to get guaranteed big swells,” Bartlett said. “Being here for the Eddie was a bonus, but it was crazy. Overnight the whole area turned into a traffic jam. People were camping out everywhere.”

The surfers said they’ve tried to keep costs down during their first surfing trip to Hawaii, but estimate the expenses will be somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 between lodging, food and other costs like replacing their boards, which they broke on what they estimate was a 60-foot-face wave.

“It was so worth it. The biggest wave that we surfed before was 30-foot face before — this was about double,” said Haddad. “This was bucket-list stuff.”

Evan Parker, who owns Hawaii Surf and Kayak in Waimea, said he came back and forth for the Eddie twice, and expects he spent upward of $150 a day even with sharing a room in a hostile and renting cars from Turo, where people rent their personal cars.

“I’m also buying food from locals who have set up pop-up hot dog and coffee stands,” he said.

Excitement for this year’s WSL Championships already has been building. It’s been announced that 11-time world champion Kelly Slater will participate in the Billabong Pro Pipeline. He will be defending his Pro Pipeline title ahead of his 51st birthday after making history in 2022 and winning the contest for the eighth time, 30 years after his first Pipe Masters win.

Logan said, “We are seeing tremendous pickup in consumption for the Billabong Pipeline happening now from last year when Kelly Slater won. When we do an event here on the North Shore, it will have a long-lasting tail.”

In addition to the two Championship Tour events held in Hawaii, the WSL also will hold a big-wave event in Maui at Jaws, and three lower-tier regional surfing events, including one at Ala Moana Bowls with a June 12-19 holding period, one at Sunset from Oct. 28 to Nov. 6 and another at Haleiwa from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7.

Sen. Glenn Wakai (D, Kalihi-Salt Lake-Aliamanu) said that there is an obvious nexus between surfing and Hawaii’s economy, including tourism, which is now an Olympic sport, fulfilling a long-held dream of the late Duke Kahanamoku, who expressed hope that surfing would become an Olympic sport in 1912 after winning his first of three gold medals for swimming.

Wakai said Hawaii has renewed opportunities to capitalize on surfing from the 2024 Summer Olympics, which moves to Teahupo’o Beach, Tahiti, French Polynesia. He said he broached Hawaii to USA Surfing as a surfing training ground for the U.S. surfing team. He said he also has reached out to Haseko, developer of the Hoakalei Resort, to see whether its coming wave-pool attraction could be used for Olympic training much like Colorado Springs, Colo., where thousands of athletes train at the U.S. Olympic &Paralympic Training Center each year.

“We’ve had the opportunity for more than 100 years going back to Duke Kahana­moku saying that Hawaii should be the surfing capital of the world. We need to create a strategy to make it happen,” Wakai said. “The Olympics will be held in Los Angeles in 2028. We cannot let California capture this designation.”

Data from the third- quarter 2022 Visitor Satisfactions and Activity report prepared for the Hawaii Tourism Authority supports the potential tourism allure of surfing. The report showed that the top recreational tourist activities were sunbathing and spending time on the beach as well as swimming in the ocean, snorkeling, or running or walking, or hiking, or visiting a botanical garden. However, surfing was a more popular activity than golf in all major visitor markets except Japan.

According to the report, as many as 7.8% of U.S. West visitors surfed while in Hawaii, 8.4% of U.S. East visitors surfed, 5.3% of visitors from Japan surfed, 12.2% of visitors from Canada surfed, 10.5% of visitors from Oceania surfed and 17.3% of visitors from Korea surfed.

Kalani Ka‘ana‘ana, Hawaii Tourism Authority chief brand officer, said: “Surfing is not only one of the leading activities that attract visitors to Hawaii’s shores, but the contemporary sport of surfing was born out of a Native Hawaiian cultural practice and is therefore a deeply rooted facet of the Hawaiian Islands’ brand identity.

“Given this significance, we have a unique responsibility to educate our visitors about the values of surfing as understood by Hawaiians: the history and reverence regarding what was once a practice reserved solely for royalty; ocean safety practices; respect for our natural resources and marine life; as well as surfing’s protocols and etiquette.”