CASTLES, CANOES AND A CODE RED SWELL
This swell was mean,
Fred Hemmings says. Referring to the Code Red 2 swell that hit Tahiti on July 13, sending up burly
caverns of water at Teahupo‘o and lighting up surf- ers’ anticipation for the huge waves that would head toward O‘ahu’s south shores—the biggest in more than a decade. And for three canoe surfers, they hoped to make history at Castles. Jimmy Austin III, in Oregon for the Gorge Downwind Champs when he saw the waves in Tahiti, changed his flight to make it home in time for the swell. OCC Beach Services Supervisor Sam Clemens tried to stay calm: “There’s always a bit of nerves and butterflies knowing that it’s coming,” he says. And in the days leading up to the weekend, Alika Winters lined up a crew of paddlers and then a backup one. In the end, both of his crews would abandon him. “It’s safe to say that Outrigger pioneered riding Cas- tles on bigger waves in a canoe,” Hemmings says. “In the ’60s, we were the first ones to take a [six-man] fiberglass canoe out to Castles. The challenges were to make the wave—the boat’s so long, it tends to dig in. When we got the four-man canoe, it was a lot more maneuverable, like a race car compared to a sedan. So, we really started to ride big waves [as if on] surºoards. It’s developed into quite an art—very few guys can do it well.” He’s canoe-surfed Castles when it was “a solid 15 feet lining up all the way to the bay,” during the summer of ’98, but even on smaller waves, “I’ve gotten the wind knocked out of me. A 24-foot canoe and bodies don’t mix too well,” Hemmings adds. As the Code Red swell approached O‘ahu, the three steersmen hoped to canoe surf the biggest waves of their lives. And, of course, survive.
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING on July 16, surfers woke to the waves churning the south shore. The waves were inconsistent at first and the swell was still building. But every half hour or so, walls of whitewater would engulf Waikīkī’s breaks, and an energy in the ocean signaled that this was just the beginning. For two hours on Saturday morning, Clemens watched from the beach. He had sat out of earlier large swells in the summer “that didn’t look very inviting, based on the way they were sectioning and closing out.” But this day was dierent. “I mind- surfed the waves for a couple of hours before
20 AMA | SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2022
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