good evening. what another great day of surfing. yesterday was the best day of the year at backdoor and pipe. even bigger and better than yesterday. the waves were solid 10′ hawaiian scale. that’s over 20′ faces. i paddled out around 7:30am and gosh, it was pumping!!! ended up surfing for 2 hours and wanted to go in so i sat in the inside and waited for a medium one. i was in the middle of 60 surfers when a freak 2nd reef 12′ started to break on the outside. everybody paddled out as fast as they could to try to get under it. me? i knew i had no chance so i just sat there on my board, and was ready to take my lickings… i seen 10 or so surfboards flying around me and that’s when i started to think “freedive”… took a breath, went to the bottom and held on to the reef, came up, did the same thing, came up, and did the same thing again. by then, i got pushed in almost to shore. ever got a 2nd reef pipe set on the head before? let me tell you, it ain’t too fun…. went back to the house, grabbed my camera, and took some pretty amazing photos of pipeline as good as it gets.. check um out…
this is randall paulson. randall’s one of the few guys that can paddle out to the peak, and catch the biggest and best waves of the day. this was his first one of many…
jeff hubbard sits in the middle of the pack and takes the big double up sets that nobody want’s anything of. a world champion bodyboarder…
ika’ika is probably the best big wave stand up paddler in the world. he makes it look so dam easy… and it ain’t that easy paddling into a 10′ set and pulling into the barrel….
and last, wakita is by far the best and most respected japanese surfer out at pipe. you want to know why? it’s because he’s out there on every big pipe day charging. everybody likes him, everybody respects him. and that’s one of the main reasons he got invited to the big wave eddie aikau waimea bay contest. when i was on the beach taking this photo, i could hear everybody saying “that’s wakita”. aussies, californians, brazilians, and everybody knows wakita….
*more photos coming tomorrow… and more galleries on the way too….
