The good doctor has done fantastic work in the name of surfing including his book, and non-profit, Waves of Health.
I first met Dr. Clay Everline outside Amaury Scognamillo’s ding repair shop, standing on a dirt road behind the sugar mill in Waialua. Clay was there to pick up one of his boards from repair. He’d shaped the board himself, and instead of bragging about it, he was laughing about leaving it up in the hot rafters.
One thing I picked up about Clay was that he rarely talks about himself, and not for lack of material to share. When he does speak, it’s with a relaxed, comfortable nature you find in surfers and medical professionals.
As it turns out, Dr. Clay is not only both of those, but also an author of the popular surf book Surf Survival as well as a co-founder of Waves of Health. He was kind enough to let me interview him on the front porch of the monastery he is the treasurer of, looking out over the many breaks of the North Shore.
So, tell me a little bit about yourself.
I’m a 45-year-old surfing doctor and landowner on the North Shore of Oahu. I’ve been attending the Benedictine monastery of Hawai’i since 2012, when Darrick Doerner showed me the way up here.
And I’m a father, husband, physician, son, surfer, stand-up paddler, rock climber… I try to be all things at all times, and it’s pretty exhausting.
Well, it seems like you’re very respected in the community, between the surfers and around the monastery. So, can you talk a little bit about your presence here?
I actually wish I had more presence. Most of my career on Oahu, I’ve been commuting into clinics in the more populous areas like Honolulu. I used to do the drive from Waialua to downtown Honolulu. That was brutal.
I would wake up at three in the morning, and I get down to Kewalos or Queens at dark. But there’d still be surfers paddling out, and I’d surf. I did that for a couple of years, and then I just drew the line. I was given the opportunity to buy into a clinic that serviced the underserved. So, given my non-profit history with the Waves of Health, I decided to keep doing that.
But my presence on the North Shore really started with volunteering at the Triple Crown of Surfing in 2009 and all the way up until last year, and doing some conferences for health professionals who are interested in unique surfing injuries. I did that through the Waves of Health, a nonprofit up at Turtle Bay, especially in 2011, 2013 and ‘14. Before that, we had run it out of smaller venues. One time it was Torrey Meister’s dad’s house, or another time it was at Dr. Leland Dao’s house, at Leftovers.
Dr. Everline gets out there, too.
Can you tell me a little bit more about Waves of Health? There’s a lot of Waves non-profits, right?
It was one of the first Waves non-profits. You’ll see that there were a whole bunch of different Waves non-profits that came after Waves of Health: there’s Waves of Optimism and Waves for Water, which was John Rose. John Rose was a Quicksilver sponsored surfer in the ’90s and the non-profiteer of Waves for Water. I like to think that Waves for Water was inspired by Waves of Health, because we had made that initial operative mission down to the Dominican Republic and Haiti and discovered at the highest impact intervention that we could do is give clean water.
Do you feel like you’ve had a lot of success with that? Or is it still an ongoing work in progress?
It’s an ongoing work in progress. I mean, I’ve gotten to travel all over the world, carrying this banner, I’m sure that there are folks that are still doing the core mission in Dominican Republic and Haiti that probably think I’m posing. But I basically live my whole career out of helping the underserved while being able to surf. That’s the emotional contract I made with myself. And I mean, I’ve seen some horrific shit. I’ve seen leprosy. I’ve seen limbs rotting off, you know? I’ve seen people die.
Thankfully, I’ve made a lot of changes. One change I’ve made in the last couple of years is probably the most difficult I’ve ever set upon, and it’s trying to reverse the trend of the opioid epidemic as it occurs with injured workers. There’s been a lot of challenges in my career, but it’s always the charity that’s been the big push for me to keep going. It’s like, sometimes you’re caught inside, you want to give up, right?
Yeah. It’s interesting, because a lot of people who surf feel like their life is very hedonistic, but it seems like you’re almost living a surfing life that’s aimed at helping other people.
If I didn’t get in the water, I’d be done for. It’s just something that has to happen. For me, when I get in the water, I also pray. So, I have this metronome of how I paddle and how I surf in a session. I just prayed every time I went surfing, and it’s so rooted now, it’s like breathing. I was never really a morning person, but, when the nine-to-five life came about, I just realized that I have to get up at dawn if I want to get some waves.
A photo from Chile’s Punto de Lobos, one of Dr. Everline’s favorite adventures.
Surfers are very notorious for not settling down and not falling into those “respectable” paths. Are you happier that you did, or do you sometimes have days where you wish that you just surfed and did nothing else?
I’ve gotten my share of traveling. Let’s just start with Dominican Republic, Haiti, in ‘07. And then Puerto Rico, Chile, going into the Marshall Islands, Bali, Java, the Mentawais. These are all surf related travel.
Ireland, France, Italy, Kiribati, I mean, Christmas Island, like, that certainly is crazy. Fiji, New Zealand, like… everywhere. But at least half of those I was either speaking at a conference or doing a medical mission. It was related to my career. If I didn’t carve out this stuff, I would just be kind of the end user/consumer. I’ve always found a way to put my nonprofit or speaking or writing the book’s reputation into the travel.
Speaking of your book, Surf Survival, what was the process of making that?
I conceptualized it. What happened is that in 2008, I had just finished my sports medicine fellowship, and we had to take the board certification examination for sports medicine. So, the best way I could think of to encapsulate everything was to put it in the context of something I love. I love surfing. So, I’ll just think of every injury there is and a mechanism of injury related to surfing.
And so, I had a big monograph. I passed my boards and I’m thinking, “well, shoot, I should publish this.” But the medical literary community didn’t have a lot of research, or hard literature, in ocean sports medicine, let alone surfing medicine.
I knew of the Surfers’ Medical Association from residency because we had the internet at the time. So, I got involved with the Surfers Medical Association, but I basically just cold called guys.
I reached out to Mark Renneker, who was nice enough to write back, and I wrote Andrew Nathanson, my other co-author. He was a very well published emergency physician at Brown University. And he was also in the Wilderness Medical Society.
I actually booked a conference on Maui just to get in front of him, like, physically face to face in front of them say, “hey, look, I got this idea for a book.”
Both of them said, “okay, yeah, well, why don’t you call me when you have a publishing contract?”
I was a strength coach during my residency, and I knew some strength coach buddies, through various organizations such as Surf Flex. The author of Surf Flex was Paul Frediani, and he knew a publisher and he helped me get a publishing contract.
So, I reached back out to Mark Renneker and Andrew Nathanson and I say, “Hey, guys, I got the contract now.” And then they set to work out on their writing, and I set to work on mine.
Mine was mostly orthopedic, fitness training, and nutrition. Mark is a big guy on skin and surfer’s ear. He loves to get into the esoteric, like he knows that Chilean mummies near the coast had more surfer’s exostosis than Chilean mummies who live up in the mountains, away from the coast. Even though they’re both exposed to cold, the Chilean mummies that were by the coast were getting in the water and getting the bony growth that comes with cold water exposure.
He’s a super cool guy. He charges; he surfs triple overhead Ocean Beach. Like, that should scare my board shorts off, because at least I know if I get pounded, I can find a channel. But Ocean Beach is just sandbars. It’s like Ehukai at triple and quadruple overhead.
If people haven’t read your book yet, what’s like one takeaway that would maybe convince someone to want to read more?
There are guys that cut themselves on the reef at five minutes into their heat and they want to go back out and finish their heat, and it’s just tying surgeon knots with their hair, basically. It will tell you when a gash is so bad it needs to go to ER to get sutured or when you can just wash it out and duct tape it.
Is this if you’re stuck out at, like, Deserts (Indonesia) or something?
Yeah. And in all those tents, all the camp docs have a copy of that book. It’s not like we invented surf medicine, but we catalogued it, and it’s got a waterproof cover. It doesn’t need internet service.
Do you wear a helmet at shallow reef breaks?
Yeah, you saw in the shootout I was wearing a helmet.
So, you think helmets are better or worse than, like, not wearing one?
It’s better to wear a helmet. For many reasons. First of all, eardrum rupture is very common if you fall at just the wrong angle and the slap of the water creates air pressure which blows out your eardrum inwards. And then you’re underwater, and you don’t know which way is up, because you have vertigo. Helmets also protect your ears from the wind.
Plus, if you take a really heavy wipeout and you don’t have one of these fancy impact vests, your helmet stays on. If your chin strap is strong, there’s this tiny little bubble of air that is between the helmet and your scalp. And even if you get knocked out underwater, it’ll float you.
There were times I’ve just been absolutely detonated out there, and I just don’t know anything to do but go limp and just not fight at all. And I won’t even start moving until I feel that helmet air bubble kind of start pulling. It’s not a marketed feature of the helmet, but it’s something I’ve learned through observation and experience.
Gnarliest place you’ve surfed?
Chile. I was out there on what was supposed to be a medical conference, but I ended up driving out to Punta De Lobos.
A longtime friend let me borrow some of his boards. I got to use a 10-foot gun when it would have cost a thousand dollars to transport one. I used his gun on a couple of 10–12-foot days.
That was some of the most challenging surf I’ve had, outside of Hawai’i. It was unfamiliar, cold, and the paddle out was scary as fuck, because you have to downclimb the two seamounts and then time it, because it jacks up to about a 30-foot face which breaks right on the seamount. You have to run between sets and you could die if you time it wrong.
I’ve never been good at timing sets. I tend to take off at the worst time. When I do contests at Pipe, I go out when the other guys go out. Otherwise, I’d look like an idiot.
You’ve made a career around surfing, though. Do you find that it’s freer that way?
You asked me if I get jealous of guys who are surf bums, who live hand-to-mouth, who don’t have to take care of their wives and kids. Sometimes I get up and see guys driving to the surf break and I’m on my way to work and I’m like, “screw this.”
But then again, I couldn’t live that way. I’m happy with my wife and kids and dad. I’m happy to take care of my patients. I wouldn’t feel the reward as much if I didn’t have to work for it.
