In my own mind, riding a longboard at Waikiki has a timeless quality. Influenced equally by Matt Warshaw’s History of Surfing and Jack London’s Cruise of the Snark, I find myself romanticizing about the days that Waikiki was the center of the surf world – Waikiki’s crystal blue waters an open invitation for visitors to connect to an ancient Hawaiian tradition. Of course, surfing no longer lives in that time. And when I ask friends that live in Honolulu their impression of Waikiki they go on about the giant hotels, the crowds of wannabe surfers colliding with one another. “It’s chaos,” they say, “absolute chaos.” And the romantic picture begins to fade.
Whether the film above is an accurate depiction of traditional longboarding at Waikiki or not is irrelevant. It harkens back to a time when the place was the crucible of modern surfing.
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