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JOHN SKYE: MAUI REPORT 

John Skye makes his first trip back to Maui in five years, and reflects on the changes that have taken place on the Hawaiian paradise.

WORDS – JOHN SKYE // PHOTOS – FISH BOWL DIARIES (ACTION) & John Carter / pwaworldtour.com (scenic).

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From the year 2000 to around 2017, Maui was like a second home to me. When I first started out as a professional windsurfer, it was the undisputed centre of the windsurfing world, for both development and promotion. It was almost essential to be seen there, whether it was the big bosses from the top brands, or the prying lenses of the world’s best photographers. In more recent times, South Africa has offered an alternative winter destination for Europeans, somewhat relegating Maui to the 2nd division of Windsurfing Mecca. Partly because of this, partly because of 2 kids and a wife, and largely due to the most annoying global pandemic, I hadn’t been back to the Valley Isle in over 5 years! So with no photo shoot duty for me this winter and my family sick of looking at me, it was easy to escape and head off to the other side of the world again. The world has changed drastically over the last 5 years, so how would Maui be post pandemic?

Different?

The answer was quite different to what I expected! Starting at the airport, everything was identical. A warm smile drew across my face as I disembarked into the same slightly tatty 1980´s styled arrival hall. The same “Aloha, welcome to Maui” sign greeted me as I descended into the baggage hall, and the same $5 luggage carts sat waiting. It all felt very familiar until I left the building and found a tram running in front of me and I had no idea how to get to the car park on the other side, which was a bit of a shock. I eventually managed to find my car before leaving the car park and getting completely lost. The whole road layout near the airport has been completely reworked and it took me a good 10 minutes driving before I eventually popped out somewhere I recognised.

Costs

First stop for me in Maui is always Safeway supermarket to buy a few essentials, but it had now gone, the old building boarded up like a derelict Detroit car production factory. I made a quick call to Robby Swift and he told me where it had been relocated. Next stop was the bank, and it was a similar story here, only rather than boarded up, it now sold coffee and sandwiches. I made another quick call to Swifty, who gave me directions to the newly located branch, which allowed me to get some cash in my hands. Unfortunately, as I was quickly going to find out, not enough cash!

Now I honestly don’t know if it was always this expensive, or if I have got too used to the relatively cheap living in the Canaries, but it shocked me how pricey everything had become. Grocery shopping in Maui is always crazy, but this time I literally bought a few basics for breakfast and some beers, and somehow it came to over $150. Some 18 years ago I wrote a piece for this magazine called ‘Maui on a shoestring’, which involved taking a John Carter challenge to go to Maui for 2 weeks with only £1000, including the flights. That was maybe pushing the limits of possibility a bit, but still this time I had blown around £3000 by day 2 and I still hadn´t paid for my car hire! Most likely there are still ways to keep it cheap, and back then I still had my student skrimp and save chip installed, but still the basic numbers now are crazy. Renting a 2-bedroom house is around $2-3000/month long term to give you an idea, and I imagine the average cost of property around the north shore is well over a million $. For sure the local salaries are high, but I couldn’t help but wonder how everyone can live and survive out there, but somehow they do.

Being out of the loop on everything Maui related I pretty much used Robby Swift as a travel agent! He runs northshoremauirentacar.com, so sorted me out a very nice pick-up truck at a good price. He also knew of a spare room in a rented house, so I moved straight into a beachside apartment at Camp One, one of the best spots to stay on the north shore (as long as you can handle a few planes taking off overhead). Normally this place would set you back $150/night, but as I was sharing it was half that. Still not cheap at $75/night, but rigging on the lawn and sailing from the front garden is pretty priceless. If you are thinking of coming to Maui, Robby did kindly say to feel free to contact him at robbyswift at mac.com regarding accommodation and he is happy to help with everything you might need for your trip.

Bargains

There are still a few good bargains around if you know where to look. I am not much of a shopper, but there are some good deals on clothes and some electronics are still cheaper in the US too. If you really are on the cheap trip program you could revert to my tactic from 20 years ago and live off fast food. All the fast food chains have some kind of dollar menu, so you can get a pretty decent meal (quantity wise at least) for under $5. Not sure what kind of health problems you will develop as a result, but the option is always there. A $1.29 Taco Bell bean burrito feels like possibly one of the healthier options, or my old favourite combo meal of a Wendy´s Jr Cheeseburger with a baked potato setting you back just over $3.

If you are willing to pay a little bit more for better quality food there are a few ‘favourites’ of the locals. Kuau Store, located just down the road from Ho’okipa, has been feeding the world’s best windsurfers for at least 30 years. Their chicken and rice plates are world-renowned and the Poke Bowls are gold. Other good lunch options are the sandwiches at Safeway (which are big enough to keep you going for a week) and at Whole Foods they have nice Burritos and Sushi at a reasonable price.

Howling

My memories of Maui were mainly using 5.0 sails, with 4.7 on the windier days, 5.3 on the lighter days, and so I packed according to that. This trip however was howling! Pretty much 2 weeks of solid 4.2 weather at Ho’okipa or windier if you went down the coast. Unfortunately that meant I spent 2 weeks sailing completely overpowered on a 4.7! Mostly it was just about ok, but there were a few moments mid-afternoon when it got a bit too much. A 4.5 and 4.2 would have been very welcome and a smaller board too, especially as I have a special high wind Ho’okipa custom board that spent the entire trip on the wall of my office back home in Gran Canaria! I also got pretty lucky with 2 nice late season swells. Normally May is the start of the summer, but with 2 swells over mast high I think conditions wise it was probably one of the best trips ever.

Uncrowded

One of the biggest things I noticed was the lack of crowds compared to the old days. My trip was quite late in the season, and I think there is still some Covid fear for people travelling, but it was actually a really nice surprise to feel like I was sailing Ho’okipa with just a few friends out. Despite being away for a while, the locals at Ho’okipa welcomed me with a smile, which again, going back 20 years would have been quite a shock. I guess they have been spoilt with so many empty days during Covid that they have had enough waves to last them a lifetime! Also thanks to the constant nuclear winds there were much less issues with surfers in the water. The rule at Ho’okipa is that if there are 10 surfers in the water, windsurfers can’t go out, but with 30 knots + of wind, most surfers had been blown away by 10 a.m.!

Moving down the coast to Kanaha and that used to be crazy when the big swells hit, with about 10 people on every wave and each one of them sailing in a different direction! Now its much more chilled, with less people and just a few wings thrown into the mix. There seemed to be much better mutual sharing with windsurfers and wingers compared to when kiting first hit the scene, but maybe this was just due to the reduced numbers.

Sprecks

The biggest shock however was Sprecks. This used to be the epicentre of Maui ‘Euro’ windsurfers, offering UK south coast style bump and jump, with at times nice riding added to the mix. Think back to the old Goya video of him doing huge jumps whilst being tracked by a heli! It was where we spent many of our first trips, and the car park was always packed with tourists. Now it is a deserted patch of sand, with nobody on the water. Kind of sad really, thinking back to how it used to be. I am not sure if the sand dunes changed to mess up the parking and that means nobody goes there anymore, or if nobody goes there anymore, so the sand dunes took over the parking! Either way, it was deserted most of the time. Our house was 500 metres downwind, so we sailed up a few times and found 1 or 2 in the water maximum, which was really odd thinking back to how it used to be.

Ho’okipa

What was of course great was just hanging at the beach at Ho’okipa and watching the show. Levi, Ricardo, Swifty, Kai Lenny and the odd appearance from the legend Robby Naish, plus lots of the newer faces ripping, especially Marc Paré looking good. Marcilio Browne however was the star for me, sailing at another level. For the last 5 years I have been watching his video edits and really believed I would rock up there and be doing massive hacks, air takas and all the rest of it. I quickly had a personal reality check, but what was really impressive was that he is a constant live show reel. Perfect doubles, combos of moves on the same wave, it really was like his Instagram clips, only live and at times you just had to watch!

Tuning

I had 2 main goals for myself during this trip. Firstly was to get all my gear tuned up for bigger waves and down-the-line conditions. In the Canaries we do get good down-the-line conditions, but they are few and far between and often it is really tricky to get in and out of the water. When you launch, you want to be sure that everything is set up perfectly. In the past I had everything so well set up, but after 5 years away and a completely new set of boards, it took some time to get it all tuned right.

Thankfully it didn’t take too long to get back into the swing of things at Ho’okipa. It took me a few runs to get my bearings on the rocks again, and I am sure they moved a few of them since I was last there, but the place is so good when it’s working that it was just pure joy to be out there. Not many places allow you to sail great conditions, plus nip into a sandy beach to change things and head out again easily. For board tuning Ho’okipa is second to none for me. After trying about 20 combinations of fins, I eventually came back to my old favourite quad fins, which always worked great at Ho’okipa. I did have quite a bit of sail testing to do, but due to the constant nuclear winds I did struggle to test anything bigger than a 4.7. My 5.3 proto returned dry and unused, but that just gave me an excuse to head to Fuerte’ on my return!

Jumping

My other big personal mission was to relearn to jump on starboard tack, but unfortunately this was where the trip took a turn for the worse. Starboard tack jumping used to be my forte. There have always been many great port tack jumpers on the PWA, but flick the switch to the other side and that number drops down considerably, and was always when I had my best results and could compete the strongest. Nowadays I get 1 or 2 days starboard tack jumping a year, so it’s incredibly frustrating to not be able to do anything I used to do. The last time I sailed on the south coast of the UK I felt like a beginner, and that used to be my stomping ground. So I really wanted to at least get back to what I could do 20 years ago.

So after the first 5 days of solid wave action at Ho’okipa, the swell dropped a bit and I headed to Sprecks for my relearn to jump mission. This was where 20 years ago I really refined my push loops, backies, planing forwards and even my first doubles. Heading back now however, things didn´t go quite so smoothly, probably because it was gusting 40 knots and I was trying to hold onto a 4.7. I thought it would be ok, but in hindsight I was being more rookie than when I was there 20 years ago as a real rookie. I started with a fast forward, something that has always been a bit of a specialty of mine. It went well, but either the whip of the rotation or the landing sent a shock through my slightly aging body. I carried on for a bit, but by the time I got back home, my neck was pretty sore and starting to stiffen up. A quick call to Swifty again for some physio recommendations, and I was booked in for a massage at North Shore Chiropractor in Paia.

Injured

A day of rest and my neck was feeling good again. So good in fact that I headed to Ho’okipa and decided to spin myself around some overpowered goiters until I messed it up even more. By the time I came off the water my upper back and neck had seized up completely, turning me into some sort of robot/human. Despite more therapy it wasn’t getting much better, and a quick 5-minute session in front of the house to ‘test’ it made it even worse and I spent the next 3 days barely able to get out of bed. A real classic 40+ type of injury with no real cause and a long and slow recovery. I did manage to get back out before the end of the trip, but avoided jumping and therefore rather than relearn my jump skills, I returned having done only literally 3 jumps!

Maui life

Despite the many changes, life on Maui hasn’t changed too much. Paia has the same vibe, even if many of my favourite cafe/restaurants have gone and been replaced with very pricey tourist art/crafts/clothes shops. The old windsurfer’s favourite, Paia Fish Market, is still there and has grown in size and space, but the Ahi burgers remain the same and the crêpes and wraps at Café Des Amis are still just as good. If before there was zero night life on Maui, it has now gone into negative, with the only bar on the north shore closing down during Covid, meaning that Maui midnight has moved from 10 p.m. to around 8 p.m.! I am sure there are still some places to go if you know, but it is quite strange, especially coming from the UK where there would be at least 5 pubs squeezed into the ½ mile strip.

However, there are still plenty of nice places to eat and if you head into Kahalui you have 2 cinemas and loads of shopping if that is your thing. What I did miss a bit were the windsurf shops. Again 20 years ago on our first trips I remember calling in at the windsurf shops and stroking the pros custom boards that lined the secondhand rack. Those were the times when you could fly to Maui, load a board bag with 100 kg of new gear, check it in for almost nothing and head home with new toys. Those days are long gone and the shops that remain are much more focused on rental. Sad to see from a nostalgic point of view, but the world has changed a lot over the last years, especially when it comes to long distance travelling.

Check-in

From a personal point of view, the check-in to fly home was actually very easy and smooth, not helped by the extra 60 kg of gear Ricardo Campello had dumped with me. Not a problem from Maui back to Barcelona, but there I had to drag it all through the terminal and recheck it in, which was not fun and made me realise there are parts of the ‘Pro Windsurf’ life that I don’t miss so much anymore! American Airlines offer a very reasonable $150 price for 2 x 32 kg bags, which for most windsurfers is plenty of gear. United Airlines I think is a bit more pricey, paying $200 per bag, so if you are booking flights, take care to see who you will be actually checking in with on the return leg.

Next Trip

So having had a break and having made it back to the Valley Isle of Maui, I don’t think it will be another 5 years until I return. For me the island is still the best windsurfing spot in the world, especially in spring and autumn. I don’t think you can beat it for quality of sailing, wave consistency, wind consistency and variety of spots. No matter what your level, pretty much from beginner to pro, it offers beautiful conditions, with lovely weather, warm water and a consistency that I think is unbeatable. I am already starting to save (a lot) for next year!