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Arts & Culture
JAWS
To the east of Pauwela Point, about one-and-a-half miles east, winter surf can bring enormous waves. It is world-famous now as one of the premier spots for the latest development in big-wave riding – tow-in surfing.
The surfers (and the whole world) call it “Jaws.” The spot was even featured on the cover of the November, 1998 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine. One person says the name came from the experience of being in the middle of that surf when it changed abruptly from smaller waves that were fun to ride to huge, dangerous, wind-blown walls of water that pounded on you as you slipped and slid among the huge slippery boulders along the shore, trying to get out of the water. According to surfer John Roberson, it was like being in the middle of a shark attack – totally unpredictable, deadly.
Another pinpoints the birth of the name to a nationally published photograph of windsurfer Josh Angulo and his 15-foot sail looking very small on a huge wave. It looked like he was caught in the jaws of a gigantic monster, making a run for it before the jaws closed on him.
That picture of Angulo was taken during one of the earliest windsurfing expeditions to Jaws. By the early 1990’s local windsurfers from Ho’okipa were surfing the spot regularly.
Before the spot acquired its formidable name, it was known as “Domes” because a geodesic, dome-shaped house marks the turnoff to the spot. The surfers watched the waves from the cliffs and drooled at their majestic beauty and their awesome power. Some even dragged their big boards down the precarious cliff trail to the rock beach where the true size of the waves could be seen, the impact of the huge mass of water felt in the rocks underfoot. Most of them turned around and went back up the trail.
Before there was a dome house, the surf spot was called “Atom Blaster” because “it broke like an atomic bomb.” Up until the early 1970’s, it seems, everybody drooled, but nobody surfed the spot – not when the monster waves started rolling in. It was too hard to paddle into the big water, too hard to get up enough speed to slide onto the wave, too hard to come back in after being battered by the power of all that water crashing over you.
The windsurfers and their sail boards were better able to catch the waves than the paddle-in surfers, and the good ones were more likely to survive the experience (more or less) intact.
Then, in 1993, surfing icons Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox moved to Maui. Together with Darrick Doerner, they had been developing a way of using motorized personal watercraft to get into position to surf the big waves of Oahu’s North Shore. With the hardcore crew of adventurous windsurfers on Maui, Hamilton and Kerbox, with help from a number of master board shapers, developed the equipment they needed to ride the mountains of water at Jaws. They practiced and developed their skills and worked out maneuvers with jet-skis and tow-lines that helped to keep them from getting thrashed and killed by the big waves off the point.
And from the vantage point of the cliffs at Pauwela Point, photographers have continued to record the thrilling rides of these masters of wave-sliding while crowds of awestruck onlookers watch, mesmerized by the power of the big and beautiful waves and the glorious riders who dance with them.
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