BELOVED BREAKS
For Marc Haine, it’s the time he was pinned to the reef and the force of the wave blew his shorts up, exploding the middle seam, rendering shorts to skirt. For Amy Woodward, it’s stumbling slightly on the takeoff but still “getting pocketed on the best wave I’ve ever caught in my life.” For Tai Sunnland, it’s a rare late season swell, light winds, watching pro surfer Randall Paulson catch a wave from the outside and pull into a barrel on the reform. The setting November sun backlit the wave, turning it into this “beautiful blue light, and I’m sitting on the inside a little bit just screaming my head off how beautiful it was,” Sunnland remembers. “I consider it my home spot, it’s just that home’s not Everyone has a Rice Bowls story.
ians) on the outside. Two spots in particular feel, for many Outrigger surfers, like their home in the water—Rice Bowls and Old Man’s. They also couldn’t be more different. “The first rule of Rice Bowls is there’s no inside,” Woodward recalls being told the first time she paddled out there, when she was 12 years old. The wave needs at least a three-foot (Hawaiian size) swell to break and consists of a short, punchy right and a long, hollow left that can barrel for 50 yards. “It’s always had a mystical quality about it because it was the one wave close to home that was like a differ- ent breed,” Woodward says. Its thick heavy lip has the kind of force to drag surfers along the bottom reef, to throw them and push them straight through their boards. And it’s also a tight peak, one that these days can attract upwards of 50 surf- ers, all jostling to fulfill their barrel dreams. Good luck getting a wave out there if it’s your first time. Even regulars are sometimes con- tested on waves. Bruce Black has had to yell at people to not go when he’s in the barrel, and then they drop in anyway. Black is a Rice
always there.” Growing up on the Gold Coast and at the Outrigger, Rice Bowls has long been his go-to surf break. That is, when it’s break- ing. The wave is one of the South Shore’s most fickle—and arguably its best. “I’m a die-hard Rice Bowls surfer,” Sunnland says. “So I’ll put in the time out there, my two hours for that one wave.” The variety and proximity of surf breaks to the Club is one of its big- gest perks. From Tonggs, or Kalua- hole, its Native Hawaiian name, to No Places by the Natatorium, there are about half a dozen breaks. And then there are the breaks within a break, like Launchpads, outside of Rice Bowls, and Sandbar and Eight Balls at Old Man’s (or Kapua, its Hawaiian name), and Castles (known as Kalehuawehe to Hawai-
16 AMA | MAY / JUNE 2023
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