The North Shore Waits for Winter

For half the year the North Shore of Oahu is a sleepy plantation coast, seven miles of beaches where the water is calm enough for children and the shrimp trucks do the biggest business in town. Then, some week in November, the first winter swell arrives from storms in the north Pacific, and the same gentle beaches become the proving ground of world surfing, waves the height of buildings breaking over shallow reef, ridden by the few hundred people on earth who can. The show runs through February, and watching it costs nothing.

The names along the seven miles are a liturgy to anyone who has ever surfed, and the spectator learns them fast. The pipeline breaks close enough to the sand that the crowd on the beach can hear the riders inside the wave, the bay at Waimea holds the giant days, and when the largest swells of all arrive, the contest that only runs in the rarest years brings the whole island to a standstill. Between them, beach after beach offers the same theater at smaller scale, professionals and madmen trading waves a hundred yards from your towel.

Haleiwa, the plantation town at the western end, is the headquarters and keeps the day's rhythm, coffee and surf reports in the morning, shave ice and shrimp plates at midday, and the galleries and surf shops for the hours when the tide is wrong. The town has resisted the resort treatment almost completely, which means the visitor stays in beach houses and small rentals, eats from trucks and counters, and lives, for a few days, on surf time.

Come between November and February, check the surf forecast the way you would check a theater schedule, since the great days are announced ahead, and arrive at the famous breaks early, because the whole island comes when the waves are giant. Keep a respectful distance from water that arrives having crossed three thousand miles to get there. Then find a place on the sand and watch human beings do something that should not be possible, over and over, until the light goes. There is no better free show in American travel, and the ocean writes a new program every day.