CASTLES, CANOES AND A CODE RED SWELL
“If they can take off on a 20-foot wave at Waimea, then 12 feet is not that bad.”
whitewater and a lip that looked to crush the canoe, Austin never wiped out, emerging from both days of the swell with his boat in one piece. Not so for Alika Winters. The day before he went out, he checked his life and disability insurance to make sure they were up to date, and on Sunday morning, he began rigging his boat and calling paddlers. “The flake factor—I’ve never seen that many guys flake,” he says. “I went through my whole phone list and guys were saying ‘Oh I don’t know.’ ‘I can’t.’ ‘Oh, my wife said...’” So, he just brought his boat down to the beach. “Like they say, ‘if you build it, they will come.’” And they did. Within a few hours, he had assembled a crew. Paddling together for the first time, they caught two waves together: the first, a relatively clean, solid 8-footer, the boat arcing out the back as the wave threat- ened to close out. And then they dropped into a larger one before the whitewater rolled them, the impact ripping o the back of the ama. Men on jetskis helped pick up the pieces and shuttle everyone in. Winters remembered last winter seeing a video of Ikaika Kalama steering a canoe into a massive Waimea wave, and “the collective canoe surfing mind shifted. If they can take o on a 20-foot wave at Waimea, then 12 feet is not that bad.” Part of the allure of surfing Castles when it’s big is that it’s rarely big. You’re more likely to see big-wave canoe surfers on the North Shore or Mākaha, where there are canoe-surfing contests. “We’re always guests out in Mākaha or North Shore,” Winters says. But not this past July, when the historic swell gave the paddlers a chance to surf on home turf. Austin says, “Hopefully one of these days we can get a contest in town. And that’s the hope—let’s bring back canoe surfing because there aren’t a lot of people that do it.”
out on every wave. “I just looked down the face of the wave and you see it feathering, and I’m like no way,” Austin remembers. Twen- ty-seven years later, he did not jump out. He canoe surfed Saturday and returned Sunday, this time with an extra paddler, for the swell the next day was peaking, and Castles, already windy on an average day, showed o even fiercer gales. Water displaced by the hull while taking o and hurtling down the face enveloped the steersman—“you couldn’t see as you were dropping in on the waves, so it was like going by Braille,” Austin says. “And it’s like getting waterboarded because you can’t breathe very well.” He remembers dropping into a set wave and thinking he was at the bottom, only to drop another 10 feet. “I don’t think I've ever dropped this far down a wave. At the bottom, I finally got a glimpse of it and we were able to go down the line a little bit. And then finally it was going to close out all across Waikīkī. So, we had to get out of the way and as we got out, we flipped over and swam the canoe upside down through the next wave so that we didn’t lose it.” Wave after wave felt like pure exhilara- tion. Despite pushing the boat deeper, racing
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2022 | AMA 25
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