SMOOTH
Even though the waves were relatively small, they were the cleanest waves I have ever ridden at Jaws. Often, the wave faces at Jaws resemble a mogul run from the ski mountain, and the bottom turn is all about not bouncing. But that day, the clean faces meant that it was possible to do a powerful bottom turn. A good bottom turn is the gateway to everything off the lip, which meant that I was able to carve cutbacks in the pockets formed below the lip in the moments when it starts to hurtle forward. Thomas one-upped me and hit the breaking lip as if the waves were mast-high.
“Just one more set,” Thomas and I kept saying to each other. Soon, the sun had set and only Thomas, Cedric, and I were left. We planned to sail the 11 kms down to Ho’okipa and meet our girlfriends and the rest of the Tabou team on the beach. We each wanted the feeling of riding one more set wave – a feeling that we might not have again for another year or two, or ever.
We waited, and we waited. But the longer we waited, the more the wind lightened and the more the sky darkened. The point of a guaranteed safe sail back to Ho’okipa had passed by half an hour. The one more set wave never came. We three sailed downwind to Ho’okipa. The wind was so weak that we could not plane the last half of the journey. We arrived at Ho’okipa, which normally takes less than ten minutes, after over twenty minutes. The sun had set so long ago that we could barely see the lines of the unbroken waves and the wind was so light that we balanced on our boards with one foot in front of the mast track. Eventually, all three of us caught a wave and rode it in as far as possible. The wind had completely died close to shore, and we had to swim the last bit into the beach. The lights from the city of Kahului twinkled down the coast, and the first stars of the night were already shining brightly between the clouds. Full of that indescribable feeling only a windsurfer knows after a good session, we met the rest of the crew who had picked up ice cold Coronas. Aleksy, to my relief, was alive and uninjured. He managed – through luck or adrenaline-fueled awareness – to come ashore in the safest point of the whole Jaws coastline, a little alcove upwind of where we launched, and he hiked across the cliff base back to where we started. He was calmly perplexed by his luck.