Sunset Beach is an exceeding difficult wave to surf when it’s big. It draws open-ocean energy into a huge and shifting lineup. Even the best in the world struggle navigating it — Kelly Slater famously dislikes the place. “Look, I don’t love Sunset,” he said in a post-heat interview. “I don’t like the wave. I don’t like the crowd out here. Everyone’s on a 10-foot board. I don’t respect the wave and it doesn’t respect me back. Unless I change, it’s not going to change.”
It’s a place where surfers hang on for dear life, gripping their wax with their toenails through stomach-lurching drops and bouncing their way through notoriously heavy sections. According to lore, Ian Cairns once told NSSA National Team groms “if you get held down, you’ll always come up. You might come up face up or face down, but you’ll always come up…”
The place works best when a powerful west-northwest swell marches towards it, generally peaking around January. Given its angle, it’s pretty wide open when it comes to the degree of the incoming swell. Ideally, you’re looking for something in the range of 300-340° for the better sections of the reef like the West Bowl and Sunset Point. The more west in the swell there is, the more likely it is that Kauai will get in the way.
The bathymetry of the place is created by two large channels on either side. It’s not just the Point and the Bowl, though. Val’s Reef, a bowly peak that works when the swell is a little smaller, can be exceedingly fun, and the Inside Bowl sits off the main break, just outside of Val’s. When it’s big, the Inside Bowl connects to the main section of the wave, and it’s a part of the break that should be taken on with an abundance of caution.
Due to its position on the North Shore, it’s also a place that can be offshore when the winds are blowing anywhere from east to a more southerly direction. The Sunset Rip, though, is a real doozy. Both Kammies Reef and Sunset Reef suck in swell, loading up the deep channel that sits between them with a whole lot of water, which then is shoved violently back out to sea. That makes the paddle out relatively easy, but it’s a blessing and a curse. When the waves get well-overhead, that rip can push directly into the Point’s impact zone, which is a spot you don’t want to be.
The video above, stitched together by Oahu Surf Films, is a compilation of some of the best maxed out days at the West Peak, from October of 2023 to January of 2024. John John Florence, Daniel Skaf (who makes the first hairy drop at the start of the clip), Noah Beschen, Jamie Sterling, Bettylou Sakura Johnson, Eli Hanneman, Billy Kemper, and more, show just how fun it can be… if you can handle the power.
