Pipe Finally Bares Her Teeth.

And the boys are all over it.

I had this blog entry all written up at about midnight last night , then pressed a wrong key and apparently lost everything, so now I'm having another go after a nights sleep.

I was down the beach quite literally in the dark yesterday morning sitting on the rock wall with my coffee waiting for first light as I had heard the swell building overnight. As the dark slowly started to fade into day there it was......a good solid reasonably clean 8 to 10 foot Hawaiian swell had finally pushed in and the crew were already scratching around out there in the dark waiting to attack it. By the time I got back to the house and then back to the beach and set up it was game on.

It's not quite the 19 to 29 foot I was waiting for but it's still Pipeline/Backdoor in all her powerful glory, and quite capable of doing damage....fast and hungry for flesh, and she got her fair share over the course of the day .

As soon as I had set up down there this morning some poor casualty went staggering past towards the lifeguard tower clutching his head with blood running everywhere and two halves of a broken board under his arm, 10 minutes later he was getting helped off the beach with a heavily bandaged head presumably heading off to Waialua hospital to get sewn back together.

There was some truly monster sets creep in through the day catching a lot of the pack off guard and giving them a good old flogging and sending boards everywhere. That's just par for the course out here. There was also some really weird/odd shit going down out there that I can't explain .

One such incident that I caught through the lens a couple of times and thought I was seeing things was of Jamie O'Brien actually charging along the face of a bomb literally carrying another shortboard in his hands/ under his arm. I thought at first it must have just been one of those freekish things where a loose board had come at him as he was dropping down the face and somehow he had grabbed it to stop himself getting scalped, but no.........that didn't turn out to be the case.

It was a planned event and I saw it happen a few times through the day, there were water photogs shooting it all from out in the lineup. He was taking off while laying on the shorty on the longboard, making the drop down the face and setting up for the run through Backdoor........then, he would quite casually get up and hold the shortboard out with two hands towards the face of the wave, bail from the blue longboard and go charging into the pit on the shorty. Five minutes later I'd see him on the beach in front of me picking up the obviously unbreakable blue plastic longboard. This did happen a few times through the day and really was a piece of work to witness. Please don't ask me the reasoning behind it as I have no idea. If I get to catch up with him before I leave I'll let you know.

Anyway, the rest of the day consisted of whales breaching and playing out behind the break, a big yacht disappearing up and down into the swell troughs just behind the break also, choppers buzzing around over head and the usual array of strange sights on the beach....the beautiful right through to the downright wrong (shouldn't be out in public with so little clothing type wrong I mean) and just the plain odd sights. Bodysurfers in dickstickers out in the break taking on 10 foot pipe. Three of those guys plopped themselves right next to me later in the day and I ended up chatting to them. They were from San Diego, Calif and had been out here for an annual bodysurfing comp that had just run over the other side of the island....they thought they'd give Pipe a crack while they were here.

OK, I'll post a couple of pics and sign out for now and go and have a sniff around. The swell is down considerably today I do know that, but theres more on the way and they are setting up all the staging/scaffold, cabling, etc for the "Volcom Pipeline Pro" which will probably run in the next pulse of decent swell to hit........charge batteries, format CF cards and get ready to go again.

See ya and talk again soon.

Cheers,

Mal