PAIPO Boarding 1963, Val Ching Paipo Boards, Body Surfing & Music ~ Hawai'i ~ in the 60's & 70' s Our new PREZ Obama Bodysurfing! Paipo Days: Paipoboarding, Bodysurfing, and Brotherhood Or Learning to Love Beauty in All its Trappings By Malcolm Orrall    My love of wooden paipoboarding began like it did for many other kids in Hawaii, as a wave-riding sport you could engage in for little or no money.  Surfboards were so expensive, and all you needed to paipo was a piece of exterior plywood, a borrowed jigsaw, and maybe a resin finish coat or some glass if you were patient enough to wait for it to dry.  It is the perfect wave riding sport for the masses.  And since it is one of the best kept secrets about surfing, there is a kind of mystique about it to me, and a connection with the real old style Hawaiian wave riding that you don’t see represented in surfing culture in general.  Frank described it beautifully in his poem below about the sensual aspects of growing up in Hawaii.  You can scroll down to the bottom of this page to see it in the verse about the old Hawaiian paipo rider we used to see waiting alone outside for the big sets.  It was our friend’s dad, floating quietly, holding his big orange paipo with the scoop deck, watching the horizon for 45 minutes or more without catching a wave.   All of a sudden one would come in, and everyone would get out of the way and let him through.  He was probably the wisest waterman we knew, and shared a lot of his knowledge with us. Once when a friend was stung by an eagle ray while diving the back side of Rabbit Island, I went to visit him at Castle Hospital.  Just as I walked into the room, this old paipo rider was playfully admonishing him, saying, “If you want to grab an eagle ray, you never grab with both hands from the front!  You put one hand on the front and one at the base of the tail so he can’t swing around and sting you.”   Despite the laugh we all had over the advice that was mostly meant to cheer him up, even this can be lethal.  My friend looked down and had a quiet moment to himself.  It had been a close one and we all knew it.  Sometimes, our need for a board when the surf was up was so urgent we left our paipos unfinished.  Hurriedly cut from a scrap of old plywood to beat the crowds on an early morning swell.  When word got out, it literally came down to the minute, how many waves you would get before it got too crowded.  At other times, we lovingly attended every detail, as in the case of my red paipo pictured here. I based this design on one used by a family of paipoboarders who lived in Kuliou’ou at the time, or someplace closer to town.  One of the brothers was my friend and classmate, and he and his three brothers and his father used to come out to Portlock Point every day at around five o’clock in a gray Datsun pickup, probably because they had to wait until their dad got off work.  We could see them pull up at the top of the cliff and all pile out of the back at once.  Although it was an instant crowd when they showed up, I thought it was cool that they all surfed together, and I was almost always happy to see them.  Sometimes if it was already really crowded, a groan would go up from everybody out because there were so many of them, but they were always respected.  Their dad was a lean, wiry, fit man of about 45, with tough weatherworn skin, clearly a man who had spent his whole life in the water.  I have this image of him out fishing with a lamp and a spear on the reefs at night, or throwing net like the old days. They had this design of a V-tail, and the whole family including their dad could rip on these boards, so I decided to make my own version of it, which was a little bit longer than theirs, and I added a skeg. At the same time, Greg Noll had come out with a surfboard design called ”Da Bug,” which was a flat bottom square tail, and flat-bottoms were in, so I decided to make a flat bottom V-tail paipo with a finely planed nose.   Flat on top at the nose, and flat on the bottom at the tail.  I wanted the transition from flat-top to flat-bottom along the rails to be perfect, so even though I knew it probably wouldn't have any noticeable hydrodynamic function, it was a matter of pride in perfection that I had to have a perfect line along the side transitioning from nose to tail.   In the pictures you can see the transition. Basically, I set out to make the perfect wooden paipo, and to do so I pulled out all the stops.  Rasps, files, putty, sandpaper, Jimi Hendrix, finish sandpaper, sealer coat, more sanding, Creedence Clearwater Revival, another coat of resin, Gabby Pahinui, sand some more and then put the skeg on, adding some styrene to the mix for the final glossy finish coat.  The skeg job on that paipo was the best one I ever did, and I’d made a number of other surfboards and paipos before that, including a knock-off of “Da Bug” which I’d made a little too thick, and I’d repaired countless others, but this one meant more to me than any other.   When the red paipo was done, it was beautiful to behold.  I made it with translucent red pigment so you could still see the wood grains, but it would be easy to find if it ever got ripped out of my hands, which was rare, because a paipo has very little buoyancy and you can sink it with you to the bottom during pull-outs, and avoid the most brutal wipeouts the same way you do bodysurfing, by using your momentum from dropping in or going over the falls or into a free-fall or whatever, to drive to the bottom or into the belly of the wave until you feel good water you can dig into, and then arch your body to break through the back of the wave to make a clean getaway.  This is one of the huge advantages a wooden paipo has over a pop-out foam board, it can go wherever you go, and one that only wooden paipo riders really understand.  For me, nothing is worse than being tied to a bobbing cork foam board when you’re stuck inside and can’t get to the bottom to avoid the turbulence.  At one point, while trying to hide on the bottom from a giant breaking wave, I accidentally discovered what to me is the coolest defensive move ever on a wooden paipo, going under a wave and pressing the board firmly against the bottom in order to create suction that can hold you in place while the surging mass of whitewater passes overhead.   At a place like Pipeline, this can save your ass because it is so shallow, there’s no place to hide from the turbulence if you’re caught inside.  Like King Kong, it will literally pick you up off the bottom, suck you completely over the falls and slam you right back down, no matter how hard you fight it.  As any surfer knows, this is a humbling experience.  But the suction created by pressing the paipo against the flat bottom at Pipeline or any other shallow water break, will buy you just enough time to get through it unscathed.  I used this technique time and time again, and it is amazing how well it works.  Again, this is something you simply can’t do when you’re tethered to a bobbing cork foam board, and I think if more people realized this, paipoing would start to make a comeback. My new board quickly became known as “The Red Paipo” around the neighborhood, and was legendary to the point that once it was even stolen, but I got it back the same day because of it’s notoriety.  Everyone knew it was mine, and I think they knew how much effort I put into it and it seemed to matter.  Word got out pretty quick and I went looking for the guy who took it, but it was returned to my garage before I even found him, but with a broken skeg and the biggest scratches on the bottom, which as you can see from the picture, I never got around to fixing.  I think he was inexperienced and laid on it because he didn’t want to walk reef inside at Point where all the sea urchins are, which I can understand, but it is what you have to do to get out of the water there unless you swim way outside around Main Point and wait for the right sized wave to toss you up onto the rocks and spin around just right for a perfect landing.  Laying on it is the only way he could have broken the skeg, and with the slow, deep scratches, yeah, that’s what happened.  Nonetheless, it was good to get it back.  I love that red paipo.  The other nicks and scratches are mostly from hitting the lava rock face of the cliffs out at Portlock Point during the few times it was ripped from my hands. But for me, this whole amazing adventure really started with bodysurfing.  I had met this guy named Bobo at my school, who was the best body surfer I have ever known, and the first Hawaiian friend I made, and he liked this haole girl who was a friend of mine.  Her parents didn’t approve, so he would ask me to go to her house and knock on the door so they could see each other.  My life changed after I met Bobo.  He was a great guy, who helped me make the sometimes difficult transition from the mainland where I was born, to my new life in Hawaii, along with two brothers from Waimanalo, one of whom later became an honored lifeguard, who got me into board surfing by letting me use their board which they kept in our backyard because they wanted to surf near our house.  I would see Bobo out at Sandy Beach and he taught me his technique.  It was the most fluid style I’d ever seen.  He said his ability was nothing compared to a guy named “Boots” who lived in town, who had taught Bobo.  Boots was this mythical guy that we hardly ever saw.  Bobo always said, “Oh, you just missed him, he was right over there a minute ago.  Try again tomorrow.”  Finally we got to see him.  He was so much better than anyone I’d ever seen, and I saw what Bobo meant about him, but in a way I liked Bobo’s style better, because although it was derivative of Boots’ style, which was almost like he was made of water and part of the wave, Bobo’s style had the same fluid quality, but his moves were just really beautiful, and besides, he was my friend.  Boots was a mystic in the way he moved.  He could do bottom turns and go up the face, and then stick one leg out and sideslip down the wave, stretching and contracting, darting back and forth across the face, spreading out almost like an amoeba in moves no one else had even conceived of.  There was even a legend he could do a flat-spin 360, and from what I did see of him, I believe it.  Bobo would caress the wave almost like he was making love to it, with his hands feathering over the surface, water running through his fingers.  Hydroplaning, doing reverse take-offs and spinners, single scissor-kick take-offs, but he also darted back and forth across the face, doing his own version of some of Boots’ moves.  That was the style I wanted to emulate, so I learned from him and developed my own unique style, which is the way I taught Frank, who again made the style his own.  In his poem about Hawaii that you will find at the bottom of this page if you scroll down, Frank makes the analogy of bodysurfers like seals, bobbing in the shorebreak at Sandy Beach.  He was out there like a seal pup among the best and biggest Sandy had to offer.  Frank, as the littlest version of a ripping bodysurfer that I have in my mind, was unmatched for others his age.  He picked up every move I had, and quickly developed his own interpretation of it, very fluid.  Other bodysurfers would frequently say things to me like, “Eh, is that your bruddah?  Whoa, man, he can rip!” But to really appreciate what I’m saying about Frank and the water, like everything else it is tied in to who he is as a person.  All his life, every time he has applied himself to something, the result has been extraordinary, illuminating, and inspiring to those around him.  Once again here on this site even in these pages, he is shining a light on something beautiful or amazing or hidden about the world, as he continues to do through his art.  He has a way of sticking his thumb right into the “pomegranate” of life and cracking it wide open to reveal its nourishment and its beauty, to “devour and divide” it, and to illuminate also, the tragedy of its inevitable destruction, necessary so that we may go on living and loving and writing and dreaming and paipo boarding or bodysurfing, as the case may be. When he asked me to write this piece about the paipo days, and when I saw the web page in all its beauty while he was building it, I was struck once again by all the times Frank has amazed me.  Escaping from playpens at an early age, the skateboard and bicycle ramps, building and flying his own hang-glider like Leonardo Da Vinci at twelve years old, if only off a sand dune in Kahuku for 15 or 20 feet; the flow of his Kung-Fu moves, the photography, the art, the poetry, the music, the insight.  He mentions at the top of the page how he remembers me teaching him to bodysurf at Sandy Beach, Makapu’u, and Waimea.  What perhaps he didn’t see back in those days was how I marveled at his tenacity, and the things he taught me about taking risks and being an artist.  All these qualities informed who he was in the water, too.  You wouldn’t believe the surf he could handle when he was probably in sixth or seventh grade.  He desperately wanted to keep up with me though I was six years older than him, and there were many times I was fearful for his safety, but ultimately I think we found a good balance, the same balance I try to keep with my son when we’re in the water now.    Once when Frank was about 12 years old, we were out at Makapu’u in about 6-8 foot shore break breaking about 100 feet from shore.  Makapu’u has a shifting sand bottom, and sometimes the sand shelf moves outside, especially on big days, so even though it was breaking 100 feet offshore, it broke like typical gaping-maw sand-shelf shore break.  Also, there are shifting peaks of larger surf out where the currents are near the mouth of the bay, that reconsolidate into the shore break formation at the inner shelf where we were that day.  Frank got caught inside and was getting pounded mercilessly by the powerful churning foam.  I was watching, and had caught the very next wave to go in to hang with him until he got through it.   I knew he would be all right, I just wanted to be nearby.  The lifeguard at the same time was rushing out to tell him to get out of the water, that he was too young to be out on a red flag day.  I got to Frank at the same time, and told the lifeguard that it was OK; I knew he could handle it.  He looked at us for a moment, sizing us up, and finally said that it was all right as long as I was with him.  Frank remembers that incident as a deep validation of him as a young man; that I believed in him.  He was right, I did believe in him.  But I remember it more as, ”Man is my brother one tough little kid!” On one particularly magnificent day, Frank had come with me to the North Shore to look for surf, and we pulled up at Ehukai Beach, Pipeline.  Unexpected moments in the ocean can be beautiful, too, and on this day, Pipeline surprised us with absolute perfection.  And when it is a perfect day at Pipeline, there are two things that you can always count on.  Cameras, and at least back in those days, Gerry Lopez.  His form on a wave is unmistakable.  As we arrived at the top of the berm overlooking the waves, he was just dropping in, and it was just like all the images of Gerry Lopez we had seen in the classic surfing film, ”Five Summer Stories.”    It was so beautiful how at ease he was, and how he melded with the waves.  As Frank says in his poem below about Lopez, with the violence of tons of water hurling around him, it is amazing that he can “be that Zen-like calm above a bone crushing reef.”    (If you haven’t seen Gerry Lopez surfing Pipeline, check out the link below to footage of him from “Five Summer Stories” that Frank has provided, at the end of this article.) I have very few true heroes in my life, but like many, I am unabashedly in awe of Gerry Lopez and I’m not ashamed to say it.  I couldn’t believe I was going to get to surf with him.  It was by far the biggest day I’d ever been out at Pipeline, and the idea of my brother going out in such surf was simply unimaginable, as he was still probably only 12-13 years old.  Of course Frank wanted to paipo with Gerry Lopez too, and he was pestering me to no end to go out, but the only responsible thing to do it seemed was to flatly refuse him.  Of course this is my brother Frank we’re talking about, so anything could happen.    In Hawaii, size is measured from the back, and it was a solid 8-12 feet, which meant from the front they were an easy 12 to 15 feet or more, with freak sets coming in solid walls of 15 to 20 feet in the front.  Beautiful, blue, glistening monsters, feathering perfectly in the light offshore wind.  And there was a 5-7 mph current surging down the beach like a giant moat of crocodiles you had to cross to get to the break.  I’d never seen anything like it, but I could read the water pretty well, and knew to get out I’d have to hike up the beach a ways and jump in and kick my way across the current with my paipo to get to the other side just as I came up on the inside of the left shoulder of the break.  The first time I tried, I missed the break, and had to try again, this time going a full 50 yards up the beach, which turned out to be perfect.  Surfers could paddle across the surge more quickly, but with a paipo you were more at the mercy of the current.    When I got outside, there was Gerry Lopez, calmly chatting with the other surfers, very friendly and gracious to all of them, but very clear that he was in charge and was taking any wave he wanted.  The lineup at Pipeline is very tight because of the narrow launch window, so the surfers are very close together.  Surfers can take off earlier than paipoboarders and bodysurfers, so they have an advantage getting the waves on a crowded day.  To get the later takeoffs necessary for the paipo, I was slightly inside of them.  I watched Lopez and the other guys for a few waves and got my bearings.  Since Lopez gets any wave he wants, and he wants every wave he can get, I didn’t feel so bad when I finally realized that if I wanted to get any waves on this perfect crowded day, I was going to have to drop in on somebody, so it might as well be Lopez.  Besides, I really wanted to have the memory for the rest of my life of riding on a wave with him.  The opportunity came when a wave about 15 feet at the face started lining up perfectly.  Lopez and one other guy were spinning their boards around and digging in to catch it.  I kicked my way into position on the shoulder side because I had the sense not to get caught behind him, but the other guy, for reasons I will never understand, decided to take off on the other side of him closer to the peak.  Pipeline is basically a one-person wave.  People sometimes try to take off behind or in front of one another, but usually by the end there will be only one person on it, and this time there were three of us.      Lopez called the wave, as he had done several times before, and being the generally courteous guy I am and being that he was Gerry Lopez, I would normally have let it go.  But this time I had decided he’d had enough waves to himself.  He kind of smiled at me, and then looked over his other shoulder at the other guy, and a wider playful grin came over his face, as though like, ”OK, so that’s how it’s going to be.”   All three of us were now fully on the wave, and I could tell Lopez had been in this situation before and was probably about to do what he had always done.  He watched the other guy over his right shoulder as he faded back towards him, getting ready for the drop and his famous bottom turn, forcing the other guy further and further back into the tube until he had no place to go but straight to the bottom.  His board pearled and the last I saw of him, he was still standing on it, although by now it was completely submerged and his hands were over his head in the air as he was smothered in mist and foam, the two-foot thick lip crashing down on top of him.  Clearly Lopez was playing for keeps.  He kind of smiled to himself as though to say, “One down, one to go.”     Now it was just Lopez and I.  I knew I was next, but I sure was having fun.  He was dropping beautifully into his signature bottom turn, and I dropped into the pocket to enjoy the moment and stay on the wave for as long as I could.  As he came off the bottom, he looked up, still smiling, seeming to know exactly what I was doing, as though thinking, “It’s cool, I get this man-crush stuff all the time, people wanting to ride waves with me, but now I’m going to finish this wave without you.”  Still maintaining eye contact, he came up off the bottom to within a foot of me in one smooth move, banking off the lip in a cutback, flashing the bottom of his red and white Lightning Bolt surfboard at me in a kind of friendly warning as I used my momentum to make the aforementioned awesome paipo pullout: I arched my back, buried the nose of my paipo into the wall and pulled out through the back of the wave, kicking and digging and laughing out loud underwater with excitement.  But this was Pipeline, and there was always the danger of getting dragged behind the wave and eventually sucked over the falls and slammed onto the hard, flat bottom with that kind of pullout through the wall.  So even as I looked back from underwater to see him drop perfectly into the pocket, I was fighting and kicking even as I was being dragged part way in.  Then, my head broke the surface as I cleared the wave, and watched from the back as he pulled out just before the shore break.  (If you’ve never seen this underwater view of a wave breaking, it is one of the most beautiful things in nature.  There is a great shot of it in the first few scenes of the video link Frank has provided below.)  On the way back out, Lopez paddled past me once again, smiling like a mathematician who had just completed a brilliant proof, as though to say, ”QED,” that is how it is done.  One of the coolest moments of my life; all in a day’s surfing if you’re Gerry Lopez. I managed to get a number of other great waves, and then I happened to look in to see my little brother Frank standing on the beach watching and waving, looking very sad.   I’d about had enough, so I caught an in-between set wave that got me easily over the current and onto shore.  Frank came running up to me with his eyes hopeful, begging me to let him go in, and I literally felt that it was one of those moments in life where you really have to pay attention.  It was that important to him and I had to try to find a way.    Then I remembered the current.  It would be a little risky, but I would be right there if he needed me.  I knew Frank was so excited he didn’t even notice the current, so I made him a deal.  If he could get out, he could go out.  I’ll never forget the look of excitement on his face.  Without thinking it through, there was no way he would make it out, but I knew he had to try.  If I was the one who told him he couldn’t, some part of him would suffer a serious blow to his growth as a young man, and he might resent it for a really long time.  He had to find out for himself just how dangerous it was.  Of course if I had told him that he needed to go up the beach 50 yards, he was tough enough and smart enough and good enough that he probably would have made it out, and then I would have had to go back on our deal and call him back in, but for now everything was going as planned.      He grabbed his paipo and started into the water right in front of the break just as I had hoped, without even taking a moment to read the water conditions.  As far as he was concerned, he was going to surf Pipeline with Lopez when it was pumping, and that was all that mattered.  He powered through the churning foam like the toughest little guy I’d ever seen, making far more progress than I had initially anticipated and I began to worry.  Then the first really big wall of soup hit him, and it knocked him back toward the shore.  He turned around a bit shaken up but completely undeterred.  Now he was in the heart of the current and was surging down towards Rocky Point.  Another wall of soup hit him and knocked him around second time, but again his little seal pup head popped back up out of the water.  He glanced back at the shore and didn’t see me where he expected I would be because I was following him along the shoreline with my fins in hand, and at that moment I thought I saw the first signs of concern on his face.  Then he looked around for the Pipeline break, and saw he was well off course, and now fully realized he was in trouble.  He made one last half-hearted attempt, but then survival took over, and he made the right decision.  I could see he was sad for a moment, but that very quickly faded as he realized he was now going to have to battle to get back in.  The current mercilessly sucked him further down the beach while the foam kept pounding him.  By the time he got out he was right about by Rocky Point, and I was there to greet him, quite relieved, and again, flabbergasted at the tenacity of my younger brother.   As we walked up the beach, he too was exhausted, exhilarated, and relieved, as I was from my own experience that day, and I think it was one of the very best times we had together growing up.  He completely forgave me right then and there when I told him what I had done, and immediately understood why I had done it; and I knew that for him, at that moment, it was probably the right thing to do, though at times I still wake up worrying what might have happened, because no matter how good you might think your judgment is, the ocean can always find a way to humble you.  There were times when I know I was a bonehead of an older brother, maybe this was one of the times; but Frank tells me moments like that more than made up for it, and I’m glad.  I’m lucky to have him as my brother and that we had those years of paipoboarding and bodysurfing and free-diving together. Keeping an eye on Frank at that age was a huge responsibility, but I also recognized in him the need of all young men to test themselves and to join the world as a force to be reckoned with.   We had lost some very good friends to those silent moments that come out of nowhere, when the ocean does something entirely unexpected.  Those moments where there is no warning, no big musical score to tell you it is coming, only silence and the horror of inevitability when you realize you have run out of options.  I know of this because of many times I had nearly been overtaken by the sea, when my own survival had come down to whether or not I made the right choice of which direction to swim when I was caught in a current and my limbs were becoming stiff and unresponsive from exhaustion, or when my lungs were burning and my abdomen was convulsing for air while I clawed for the surface not knowing which way was up. The friends and neighbors and surfing buddies we lost were the very best of watermen, and there was the constant reminder almost monthly, of sirens going up to Hana’uma Bay or out to Sandy Beach or Makapu’u, because of a tourist who was overtaken by the silence.  The most difficult remembrance of a tourist overtaken by the silence, happened to a little boy near our house, just off the highway.  His grandparents had taken him for a day, and let him go for a swim at a little roadside stop at an opening to the sea by an estuary.  I don’t know why they picked that place.  It wasn’t even very inviting.  I was driving by and saw the elderly couple in anguish and stopped to help.  There were warning signs posted nearby, but the water looked so calm, blue and glistening that they couldn’t have imagined the quick drop-off and the silent deepwater current that flowed just off shore as the tide changed.  They were from the South, they didn’t even know how to swim, which seemed unimaginable to us back then.  Their clothes were dry.  They were frail.  I was about 18 or 19 and at the peak of my abilities in the water, and if Frank or I or any of our friends had been there just moments earlier it would have been nothing for us to pull him to safety.  Nothing.  We did that sort of thing all the time.  I was so angry.  The futility, the finality, and the irreversibility of it, was a most starkly cruel example of nature’s seeming indifference.  And yet it was a beautiful, beautiful day, as if to whisper a measure of comfort with the same lethal stroke, and gently ask any who would listen, that we continue to believe in the goodness of life even now, and not attach the wrong kind of meaning to such a loss.  I struggle less and less to reconcile these things now, the beads of saltwater on the little boy’s eyelashes, like tiny prisms in the unflinching sunlight, and parallel rays from over the back side of Diamond Head reflecting off the placid sea just a few feet behind him, joining together to forge their image as one, burning bright as ever these many years later as though newly cast.  An innocent boy who knew nothing of what he was taking on.  His grandparents who thought they were showing him something beautiful.  The hopeless abandonment of their wailing, standing what seemed miles apart, lost in grief so profound, unable to look at each other, or even to embrace or console each other out of the mutual shame of mistaken judgment for a choice they could not undo.  This stayed with me for a long time, and it reawakens every time I am at the beach with my friends or family.  I know it is just one of those things that you can’t control no matter how much you wish it, I just wish I could have driven by a few minutes earlier.  It’s too awful to contemplate what happened to that family, the parents probably off in Waikiki having a little quality time together, the grandparents, after that dream vacation to Hawaii for which they had likely saved their whole life.  I drove away as the paramedics did what they could, forever bound to their loss, people I will never know. But sometimes because we were there and knew the water and knew what to do, we were able to prevent similar tragedies for other families, tourists, honeymooners, or maybe the girlfriend of a guy we knew who didn’t know the water as well as we did (that was always fun), or combat veterans from Viet Nam who were lucky enough to draw two weeks of R & R in Hawaii.  We used to compete with each other to be the one to pull them from the water, and sometimes we’d take bets as to how long this or that tourist would last as they strolled naively into the surf with their brand new Waikiki drugstore swim fins, the kind that get ripped off your feet and lost after the first or second wave and leave you stranded in the high surf.   But the Viet Nam Vets were a different matter.  They were the original extreme sports guys, screaming emotionally-unhinged, trauma-fractured war cries as they plunged into overhead surf thinking nothing could possibly harm them after what they’d been through in the jungle just days before.  Theirs were gut wrenching cries that sounded oddly out of place in paradise, because they came from deep within the psyches of young men who were fresh off the battlefield.  They seemed to think they were invincible, and their presence brought home the reality of the Viet Nam War to us in a very primitive way.   We befriended many of them, jarheads, swabbies, and grunts, mostly from small towns in places we’d never heard of, with farmer tans and accents of every kind imaginable.  I still remember one of these guys who had successfully made it outside on one of the biggest days I’d ever seen at Sandy Beach without wearing any swim fins.  That alone was an accomplishment.  He had been stuck bobbing out beyond the break since before I arrived because the relentless shorebreak was just too big and powerful to risk swimming back in, and he was becoming weary.  I had been watching him for over an hour myself, and had tried to wave him in several times, but he seemed to ignore me until he became so exhausted he finally called out for help, thrashing his arms about, slipping beneath the waves for longer stretches each time he went under.  I quickly made my way to him but stopped a few feet short.  I was younger and he was clearly so much stronger, and I suddenly remembered the warnings our Eagle Scout father had given us about lifesaving, how someone in a state of panic could drown you if they grabbed you and held you under in an innocent attempt to save their own life.  He said if you ever encounter a drowning victim, remain at a safe distance, and threaten to leave them if they don’t calm down.  I remember saying exactly that, “I can’t help you if you don’t calm down.”   It had an immediate affect on him.  I’m sure he’d had lifesaving in the military, because right away, half to himself, he said, “I know, I know,” and I could see the shame wash across his face as he realized that for all he’d been through in the jungle, he was now dependent on a 15 year old boy to save his battle-hardened life.  He did calm down, but he could barely lift his arms to get them out of the water to swim, and he was down to his last few kicks and was barely staying afloat.  I felt safer now coming close to him, though I was still very concerned he might panic again, so I naively resolved to kick him hard and dive down deep to get away if he did, figuring the last thing he would do is try to follow me to the bottom.  Relief came over his face as I reassured him.  He swallowed his pride and let me swim him in.  Part of the exhaustion I think, was just pure panic, and now that it had subsided, he was better.  I had swim fins on, and pulled him for a ways until he recovered to the point he was ready to swim again on his own, which came pretty soon, partly because he was embarrassed I think, and partly because of his military conditioning.  Most people don’t recover that fast.  We were near the shorebreak now, and I reassured him again, saying he had but one more gauntlet to run before making it to safety.  We waited for an in-between set wave, and after warning him to try and keep his body parallel to the shore as he tumbled in the shorebreak in order to avoid breaking his neck, I shoved him over the falls on the next in-between set wave that came by, one that was still pretty big, about 6 to 8-feet at the face.  Then, I threw myself over the falls with him to see him through it.  Given the high surf, it was the only way I could get him to shore.  The lifeguards arrived and yelled at me to get out of the way, which they always did.  We kind of made a game of it with them.  They hated it when we got there first.  I always thought it was because they thought we made them look bad, and maybe that was part of it, but maybe they were worried we might get held under by a swimmer in a state of desperation, or do something that could hurt a tourist like shove them over the falls.  They pulled him the rest of the way in.  I watched, getting knocked around inside until he got on dry land and collapsed on the beach as the lifeguards checked him out, and then swam back out to catch some more waves.  This kind of thing happened to us all the time.  Frank and probably everyone else I surfed with from those days have similar stories to tell, some more dramatic, some less.  It was constant, and there was always the threat it could strike one of us. The magnificence, the natural beauty, the exhilaration, and the cold silent death of those remarkable years will always go hand in hand.  My father, a WWII veteran once said to me upon the loss of one of our friends, that he couldn’t believe how many of my contemporaries had been taken for all the various reasons, far more than in his own life, including casualties in his unit during the war.  It was partly the times of rough and tumble characters that Frank alludes to in his introduction.  But this constant presence, this confluence of beauty and silence took one of my very best friends at 18 by way of shallow water blackout at Kealakekua Bay, the one who was stung by the eagle ray, near where another of our friends, his own best friend, was lost just two years before, who was found resting peacefully on a blanket of beautiful clean white sand inside a network of a lava tubes that together they had learned to navigate summers before; learning how to get from opening to opening, where to come up for air, following the surge of the cold, deep currents, depending on their rhythms to keep them alive.   He was one of the best divers I’ve ever known, who pushed me to see things I never would have seen otherwise. He could hit 80 feet, and went places I knew I couldn’t reach, and I always felt I had to pull him back from the edge when we went diving together.  And as we climbed back out of the water after one of our dives, I always had the feeling that somehow I had been lucky that time, and I wondered how he did it.  He seemed fearless.  His brother, who is also a gifted and knowledgeable waterman, and one of my best and oldest friends from that time, shared a similar experience when his brother, using superior equipment, went deeper than he could follow in a dive at 70 feet on the back side of Rabbit Island, one of the most wild places we know.  He told me, “Of course [My brother] felt fear, just like the rest of us…But I never heard him say he was afraid of anything in the water…He wasn’t afraid of the ocean.” When we dove together, I held enough fear for the both of us, and when I learned of his death, I couldn’t help but recall a time he had disappeared far into a cave at Waimea Bay about 25 feet down.   It was about six feet in diameter, with a narrower cave splitting off to a dead end, and he had found a way out the other side.  When he didn’t return, I reluctantly went down and in after him at great risk to my own life, searching each branch of the cave, fighting the current on the way out to go the shorter route, my abdomen convulsing and getting lightheaded while still deep within the cave, when I ultimately decided to take the longer route and go with the current which I had almost always found to be the right decision in those situations, and nearing shallow water blackout myself upon returning to the surface. If I had made the choice to continue fighting the current, I might not have made it.  Among the recollections of this very close call, along with the loss, anger, and futility when my mother told me the news, I had a twinge of irrational guilt that I was not there to pull him back from the edge one last time, but deep down, another part of me that I struggled to recognize, was grateful I wasn’t.  I knew I could never keep up with him, and I wanted to live.  I was always a little worried that I might not make it back myself, and he showed great kindness and understanding about my fear, which surprised me.  He was not judgmental about my holding back at all.  He just loved the ocean so much.  When you love someone who loves the ocean like that, who sees the beauty much more clearly than the silence, you have to be prepared to let them go.  It took many years, and ultimately a moment of staring my ghosts, and the stark beauty of Kealakekua Bay in the face, to do so. To come full circle, years later I went free diving in Kealakekua Bay with my young son, whose own strength in the water brought back vivid muscle memories of diving with all these friends back in the paipo days, and quite regularly, with exceptional rigor, I had to remind myself that I wasn’t 18 anymore, and that my son was only 12.  The day started with me being drawn deeper and deeper into finding out what had happened to my two friends, and where they might have been diving when they were lost.  I spoke to the captain of the dive boat who gave me some clues, but I knew not to investigate too closely for my own good, and I tried to set it aside.  Feeling my own ghosts around me as my son in his innocence and excitement, pushed me to go towards the deeper water, I did drop down to 50 feet once, feeling the tug that I could still do it.   There was a time I could hit 60, and work 45 all day long, like I had done with my oldest friend from those times as together we tried to find our limits before he lost his brother.  But it was cold down there, inhospitably cold, and I was suddenly aware of the familiar crackling silence and the sense of closing darkness.  The red light had been almost completely filtered out by the crystal blue of the sea around me.  I felt irresponsible leaving my son up there on the surface, and glanced upward.  I looked off into the abyss, how quickly it dropped off, and thought of how just a few hundred feet away my friends had slipped quietly into the silence, and I realized that I was hearing a siren song, and I had to bid my ghosts farewell.  I looked up at my son, now watching somewhat anxiously, and suddenly felt a deep longing for the goodness of life, for simple times, for my friends and family, and for sunlight.  By the end of the day, I realized I had completely forgotten about my friends whose time had come and gone, unconsciously letting them go, and had moved fully into the present, appreciating the stunning natural beauty with my own family and the friends and the other people on the boat, the living who were with us still.  The day ended with my son and I finding a huge, magnificent predatory crown-of-thorns starfish near the cliffs where the Hawaiians buried the bones of their Ali’i long ago, among brightly colored corals in about 6 feet of water.  A frighteningly beautiful sight, and a perfect symbol of nature’s seeming indifference as it quietly and patiently devoured the reef beneath us, brilliantly lit by the afternoon sun.  The reef showed no horror, no fear, only acceptance, as though to breath new life after the predator had passed.  And the parallel rays reflected both the beauty and the ever present plowing under of life into my eyes, to burn bright again as one, as though to whisper once more to any who would listen, perhaps now wiser, that we not take the wrong lesson from loss, or beauty.  Through quiet acceptance I became part of the connectedness, and in his own way by my son’s insistent finger-pointing and the squeals of excitement coming through his snorkel, I knew he was a part of it, too.  It was a magical moment for both of us, and I realized in that instant that by the grace of the very beauty that surrounded us, and the love of my friends and family, I had been healed.  To commemorate the joy and the resonance with nature that we had both felt, my son later drew a picture of that scene for me as a gift, filtering sunlight and all.  I was glad for him; to understand such things at a young age is extremely valuable.  We climbed back into the boat, and suddenly it was all about towels and a clean dry shirt, hugging my wife, getting a drink of water, and finding my sunglasses for the boat ride home, the little things.  I was ready for a nice night with my family, full of new stories to share.  It was a beautiful day indeed.  As we passed by the spot, I thought once more of my friend’s surviving brother, the friend I had competed with years earlier to rescue the girlfriend of one of our less water-savvy classmates when she got washed off the rocks at Portlock Point by a freak wave; (He still maintains he hit the water first as we jumped off the lava rock cliffs to save her, but I’ll never admit it to his face.)  This friend who thankfully supplied many of the details of these events for me in this writing, who had quietly made a similar journey on his own, I wished he could have been there with me. So for the simplicity, for all the hard-earned lessons of beauty and loss, for the joyful moments of friendship and brotherhood, and many more reasons purely visceral, paipoboarding and bodysurfing are the soul of surfing to me, because they create the most intimate connection with Mother Nature in her ocean.  And diving is such a huge part of it because diving is what you do when there’s no surf and you have to get in the water.  Paipoboarding and bodysurfing are two of the greatest simple pleasures in life.  The big secret is, that with these forms of wave riding, you can get locked in all day long and no one has to know.  From sheer repetition, on almost every wave, I have such vivid memories of looking up to see the early morning sunlight filtering through a glassy lip, memories of the most clean and clear water imaginable pouring over my head, that every time I think of it, I am still amazed at how simple and accessible a joy it is.  The sensate flow of the water rushing past your skin, through your trunks and between your fingers along the slippery face of a wave, is far more intimate than board surfing.  Yet I can see why it is overlooked.  Until you try it for real under the right circumstances, the intimate connection with a rough-hewn homemade piece of plywood is hard to imagine.  Surfing is easier to understand.  It is flashier, the boards are far more beautiful, it is incredible to watch, and a hell of a lot of fun, but it began as a sport of kings, whereas paipoboarding evolved as more of an everyman sport, and there is something lovably simple about it as a result.  Anybody who can find a plank of wood and has a little ingenuity can play.  Watch the clip above that Frank has of the guy paipoing at the Waikiki Wall, or better yet, go to the Waikiki Wall yourself at sunset and watch the kids with no parents anywhere in sight staying out until well after dark.  I was one of those kids.  Frank was one of those kids.  But like those kids, there was a time when paipos were all we had to surf on, or the boards we had or could borrow were tanks that were so heavy they were barely surfable, or the breaks we would surf with our boards weren't breaking that day.  But above all that, we probably got into paipoboarding because we lived near one of the most naturally wild and unpredictable but prolific breaks in the area, Portlock Point.  It is still legendary in an underground sort of way.  There are so many memories of Point.  We’ve left blood, skin, teeth, and incremental parts of our innocence behind on the rocks there, and said our final goodbyes to friends who never made it back from the sea.  It is a magical place, hard to find unless you know someone who can tell you where to find it, and it is a very local scene.  And since the waves at Point break right into the rocks, where in those days you were sure to lose your expensive board into “the cave” if you had one back before there were leashes, the paipo was the perfect wave riding device for surfing Point, because if your board broke, you could always make another one.  And the best part, there were always plenty of waves.   A few years ago, while I was at a shipping store to box up my red paipo to send home to where I now live on the mainland, a shaper from Ben Aipa Surfboards came up to me and asked if I would sell it to him.  I know why he wanted it.  It is a relic of a bygone era.  The pop-out foam board industry has rendered wooden paipos extremely rare.  I think the novelty of commercialized boards lasted just long enough that the next generation of kids grew up thinking it was normal to buy a foam board instead of making one for themselves out of plywood, and they lost the institutional memory of making paipos.  I'm sure in some families the tradition continues, but foam has made wooden paipos almost extinct.  Web sites like this one that Frank has built, and the Hawaii Paipo Designs website www.paipo.com, are doing a great service by keeping the tradition alive.  It’s a beautiful thing.   ( For Keone, the living )   Aloha to all, and Mahalo Malcolm Orrall    (p.s. Don't forget to scroll down to the bottom to read Frank's poem for a sensory experience of day to day life in Hawaii )   ( All rights reserved. Used by permission from the author. ) Leave a comment about this article or a reminiscence about Paipos, bodysurfing etc., here ->>> write comment  read comments   ( Click here to watch Gerry Lopez in action at Pipeline )      (Most of the pictures below are from the website:  Hawaii Paipo Designs at www.paipo.com) & one from www.surfersjournal.com   Also Check out:   http://www.rodndtube.com/paipo/MyPaipoBoards.shtml   Before bodyboards there was plywood. Paipo rider Sean Ross, Pipeline, Hawaii.  Photo: Alan (Bud) McCray, Photo courtesy Rod Rogers David Swanson and his and Val Valentine's Paipo Collection, Haleiwa, 2000. Photo and article by David Pu'u The Surfer's Journal, Vol 9 No 3, 2000 Pages 122-123