There are no smaller sets.

 

  This is not video from my adventure, but it does give an idea of what 10 - 15 foot waves are like.

Hawaii Lesson #219
In which I am schooled in the ways of the wave the morning after a magnitude 8 earthquake hits the shore on the opposite side of the ocean.

I was at Kehana Wednesday morning. I took my run and could see from the road that the waves were big, but the ocean in general wasn't as rough as I've seen it there. So I went on down to the shore, walked past and said hi to several of the naked wizards stretching everything and their wands into the sunlight, and changed into my swim trunks. There were a couple of women at the water's edge. I joined them and we all stood there and watched the waves roll in. They looked even bigger now, some getting up to 15 feet trough to tip. It looked challenging, but doable, and fun.

So I went in.

It took a couple of run ups to get the timing right. The break here is super short, so you have to time your entry just right. If you go too soon, you get out just far enough to get crashed by the breaking wave. If you go too late, the water has already started to recede and there’s not enough of it to swim into. You have to run up just as the wave has crested, and then dive through it to get into the deep water on the other side.

It took a few minutes for a less crazy set to come in. Finally, I ran up, hesitated a bit as it wasn’t clear I had timed it right, thought 'screw it', and dove in just as it broke above me.

I was through.

It was amazing being in waves that big. I swam out a bit. The short break meant that I only had to go about a swimming pool length out into the water to get to the big swells. This made me happy. I’ve discovered that if I have to go much further into the open ocean I get agoraphobic and/or thalassophobic; I like my swimming spots small, with visible shore on all sides.

But the waves...they were peaking so high I was swimming up to the crest and flying off the other side. Hell of a ride. One of the women came in after I did, and we talked about how these were the biggest waves we'd ever been in. They were towering over us; looking up them was like being on the ground floor of a two story building, right at the door, and staring up at the roof as it leaned over and fell on top of you. We bobbed and paddled and flew around and generally behaved like drunken seals for about fifteen minutes.

And then we tried getting back to the beach.

Now, the last time I was truly afraid in the water was also in Hawaii, off the coast of Kauai in 1998. Then, though, I was far from shore and got caught in a current running parallel to the beach and pushing me towards a nasty rocky spur. The fear came then because I became nearly exhausted from trying to battle across that current into the shore. Luckily, the current faded before I reached the rocks, and I was eventually able to swim back in.

Back in the present, I'm starting to get reminded of Kauai. I recognize this is not a good sign.

At Kehana Beach, the deadly problem is a mean rip current. There's always a rip current there, but Wednesday it was magnified several fold. Now, the usual way to escape a strong rip current is to swim to the left or right parallel to the shore, get outside of it and head back to the beach in less vigorous water. The problem at Kehana is that the rip current corridor is hemmed in by a set of low rock cliffs on the west side and a ton of large underwater boulders on the east side; getting tumbled by surf this big into either one would gift you with—at least—lacerations and broken bones.

So, there's really no room to swim up or down beach to get out of the corridor. And so there’s no room to escape the rip current. I realize this, belatedly. I begin to understand another big difference between then and now--the roughness of the water. In Kauai, it had been very calm with small waves, which is a big part of the reason I got lulled into going out so far. But here the sea was anything but smooth; it was choppy with countless little pulses and mini-swells in between the monsters. I was starting to have trouble getting a clear breath. I was tired, though not terribly tired, but the extra effort it was taking for me to keep my mouth far enough out of the choppy water was starting to take it's toll, and I was often gulping in liquid along with air.

This has never happened to me before.

My swimming companion wasn't doing much better, and says to me, "I don't know how I'm going to get out of this onto the beach". I say, "We have to wait for a smaller set." She looks behind me (I was looking towards her towards shore) and she says, "There are no smaller sets".

The short break at Kehana causes a problem getting out, as well, particularly in these large waves. Again, it’s a timing issue. Heading back in, the difficulty is that you have a very narrow zone in which to wait for the right incoming wave. If you’re out too far, the rip current stops your forward momentum in its tracks and it's insanely tiring to try swimming against it. If you’re in too close, and you get pushed over the rip current by a wave and that wave then breaks over or just behind you, you’ll get tumbled, hard—in these waves, broken-bones-and-concussion hard. Or knocked unconscious.

You have to swim in right on the back of the wave, lifting you up over the rip current, sort of step-push through it as it breaks, and hope that your feet touch sand. Too soon, and you get tumbled. Too late, you get sucked back out. And, in order to time it right, you have to tread water in a narrow zone out of reach of the rip tide but in far enough to catch the backside of the wave.

Wednesday, that zone seemed to be only about one body-length wide.

I’m thinking about all this—though nowhere near as linearly as described—as I turn around to watch for a smaller, saner set. My comrade is right; there are none. We see several that look relatively mild, but then the swells close to within twenty feet from us and they transform as if God Himself hit the zoom button—thicker, higher, steeper, up up up, and it’s like, nope, nope, nope.

This goes on for another ten minutes, and I realize that, now, I am getting tired, and I’m definitely taking in too much water. I decide I’d rather risk an almost certain bad tumble due to bad timing than an almost certain drowning due to staying out much longer. I yell at my comrade, “We gotta go in on the next set.” She shakes her head OK. We watch.

One wave; na-ah. Two waves; out of your mind. On the third wave, I turn again to her and say, “We have to go.”  She looks past me and says, “I can’t; it’s too big.” I can feel the ocean starting to lift behind me. I yell, “We MUST go now!” and start swimming.

I get lucky. I time it well, pass through the crest and ride the back of a big-but-not-monstrous wave in, and then somehow find enough energy to push myself forward through the crashing surf. The next thing I am clearly conscious of is the feeling of pebbles and hard sand as stretch my toes out to find a bottom.

Rarely have I felt so relieved.

The next clear thought is ‘I hope to God that there isn’t a monster wave right behind that one, because if there is I’m going to get crushed and/or sucked back out.” And I knew, and I mean I knew, I was doomed if that happened. I pushed against the backwash running down from the beach; it was like walking through freshly poured cement.

Again, lucky: no wave came for a few moments and I managed to get to where the out-rushing water was just around my ankles.

I looked back for my comrade, thinking that if she was still out there I needed to yell for help from the people on the shore, several clusters of whom had been watching all of this for the last fifteen minutes or so. She must’ve come in on the same wave, though, as she was about ten feet behind me. We made eye contact and she yelled, “I can’t make it in”; she was still up to her hips in water, and the out-rush was pushing hard against her. I, with my eye on the next set building up behind her already, yelled back “You have to!” and started towards her to see if I could grab her hand. I was sure that I myself was going to get pushed back into the water.

Luck came calling a third time, this time in the form of a small pulse that came in ahead of that next wave, pushing her forward into shin-high water. She stepped a few times, quickly, and was mostly out of the surf next to me. We ran six or so steps up the beach, turned around to make sure we were clear, looked at each other, eyes wide, gave each other a high five, said “We’re alive!”, and both promptly collapsed.

After a few minutes, one of the naked wizards came up to me and said “Man, we were drawing straws up here to see who was going to try saving you two. Nobody wanted to get into this water. Thanks for keeping us dry.”

You are welcome, Gandalf, you are welcome.