Winter wave contests help keep Oahu’s businesses and services alive

The North Shore’s economy rides as high as the big winter waves as a string of surfing competitions from the Eddie to the inaugural World Surf League championship tournaments fuel interest in the region and lead to remaining opportunities for a financial boom.

Tourists and local spectators were in greater numbers than usual for the 2023 Eddie Aikau Invitational Big Wave Contest in Waimea, held on January 22nd. They lined every available vantage point to see Luke Shepardson, a 27-year-old North Shore lifeguard, win first place in the event, which saw competitors battle waves that averaged 25 feet tall, with 50-foot surfaces.

Part of the reason the Eddie’s boom is that it’s not held often. The one-day surfing event, named after the late North Shore lifeguard and indomitable big-wave surfer Eddie Aikau, dates back to 1985 but only had 10 heats. Prior to this year, the last Eddie was held in 2016 because it required certain conditions, including surf heights consistently reaching 20 feet in Hawaii-style measurements (40-foot areas).

With the opening of the World Surf League Championship Tour, which could start today with the Billabong Pro Pipeline, the crowds probably won’t be as huge. Still, the economic impact is significant, as is media and creative content, which is long-lived and showing year-round growth, said WSL CEO Erik Logan.

Logan said the repetitive nature of the WSL championship tour in Hawaii, which includes the Billabong Pro Pipeline, which runs through February 10, and the Hurley Pro Sunset Beach, which runs February 12-23, appeals to visitors actually offering a better chance at time traveling to the action.

Both events are part of the WSL’s 2023 Championship Tour, which runs through September and includes 10 regular-season events across seven countries. The WSL Championship Tour rankings at the end of the 2023 season determine 18 of the 48 places at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (10 men and eight women).

Logan said WSL championships bring WSL athletes, their families and friends, and professional personnel in need of room, board and other services to Oahu. Running the events also requires hiring local people to provide services ranging from design to production, vendors, judges, officials, food and beverages and more, he said.

Rachael Runyan, who works at Sunrise Shack near Shark’s Cove, said Tuesday the Eddie’s coffee stand is pumping, which she expects will provide another boost to business.

“Every time there’s a surfing competition, we expect a lot more people and bring additional products and merchandise. That’s a very significant difference,” Runyan said. “There’s still a lot of chatter about the Eddie because it’s almost like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It got more people excited about waves and I think that will make this waves season and all other tournaments bigger.”

According to Runyan, Sunrise Surf Shack plans to increase staff for the Billabong, the Hurley and other big surf events.

WSL and other surf events bring tens of millions of dollars in investment to Hawaii during winter surf season. The increasing popularity of shows, social media reach and even reality shows like Make or Break made possible by a partnership between WSL and Apple TV+ add a greater economic dimension.

Tank Reed, a visitor from Denver, was at the Banzai pipeline Tuesday watching the waves as the WSL set up their competition podiums. Reed, a self-proclaimed “big surf fan” and avid Make or Break watcher, said he’s staying in Waikiki but will be returning to the North Shore for the WSL competitions.

“I traveled to San Clemente for WSL, and I’ve been here before when Hawaii was part of WSL’s last tour,” Reed said. “Tourists will only come for these kinds of events.”

Locals will do it, too, said SharLyn Foo, owner of Backpackers, a plantation village and hostel on Oahu’s North Shore that was the brainchild of her brother, the late Mark Foo, a professional surfer known for loving big waves. who drowned at Mavericks, Half Moon Bay, California in 1994.

Foo said she usually gets visitors from all over the world who come to surf the North Shore in the winter.

“During Eddie, we got completely filled with locals,” she said. “People have been calling all day. Some just asked to pay for parking.”

Foo’s calendar shows that she’s gearing up for another surge in occupancy around the Billabong Pro Pipeline.

“The entire North Shore benefits from surfing,” she said. “Surfers tend to stay longer. In addition to their housing, they spend money on food and drink and usually buy equipment.”

Australian sponsored surfers Benny Haddad and Tyler Bartlett were among Foo’s international guests during Eddie.

“We made our stay for three weeks to be guaranteed big waves,” Bartlett said. “Being here for the Eddie was a bonus, but it was crazy. Overnight the whole area turned into a traffic jam. People were camping everywhere.”

The surfers said they’ve tried to keep costs down during their first surf trip to Hawaii, but estimate the cost will range between $8,000 and $10,000 between accommodation, meals and other costs like swapping out their boards, the they estimate they busted a 60 foot face wave.

“It was so worth it. The biggest wave we’ve surfed before was a 30-foot area before — that was about double that,” Haddad said. “That was bucket list stuff.”

Evan Parker, who owns Hawaii Surf and Kayak in Waimea, said he’s come back and forth twice for the Eddie and estimates he was spending more than $150 a day, even if he did get a room in one shared hostile neighborhoods and rented cars from Turo, where people rent their private cars.

“I also buy groceries from locals who have set up pop-up hot dog and coffee stands,” he said.

Excitement for this year’s WSL Championships has already been building. It has been announced that 11-time World Champion Kelly Slater will join the Billabong Pro Pipeline. He will defend his Pro Pipeline title before his 51st birthday after making history in 2022 and winning the competition for the eighth time, 30 years after his first Pipe Masters win.

Logan said, “We are now seeing a huge increase in consumption for the Billabong pipeline since last year when Kelly Slater won. If we host an event here on the North Shore, it will have a long-lasting reverberation.”

In addition to the two Championship Tour events in Hawaii, WSL will also host a big wave event in Maui at Jaws and three lower tier regional surf events, including one in Ala Moana Bowls with a hold period of April 12-19. June, one at sunset from October 28 to November 6, and another in Haleiwa from November 26 to December 7.

Senator Glenn Wakai (D, Kalihi-Salt Lake-Aliamanu) said there is an apparent link between surfing and the Hawaiian economy, including tourism, which is now an Olympic sport, fulfilling a long-held dream of the late Duke Kahanamoku , who expressed hope that surfing would become an Olympic sport in 1912 after winning his first of three gold medals in swimming.

Wakai said Hawaii has had new opportunities to capitalize on surfing since the 2024 Summer Olympics are moving to Teahupo’o Beach, Tahiti, French Polynesia. He said he brought Hawaii to USA Surfing as a surf training ground for the US surf team. He said he also reached out to Haseko, the developer of Hoakalei Resort, to see if its upcoming wave pool attraction could be used for Olympic training, similar to the one in Colorado Springs, Colo., where thousands of athletes competed at the US Olympic & Paralympic Training Center every year.

“For more than 100 years we have had the opportunity to come back to Duke Kahanamoku and say that Hawaii should be the surf capital of the world. We need to strategize to make that happen,” Wakai said. “The Olympic Games will be held in Los Angeles in 2028. We cannot allow California to adopt that designation.”

Data from the Third Quarter 2022 Visitor Satisfaction and Activity Report prepared for the Hawaii Tourism Authority supports the potential tourist appeal of surfing. The report showed that the top tourist leisure activities are sunbathing and spending time on the beach, as well as swimming in the sea, snorkeling, running or walking or hiking, or visiting a botanical garden. However, surfing was a more popular activity than golf in all major visitor markets except Japan.

According to the report, 7.8% of visitors from the western US surfed while in Hawaii, 8.4% of visitors from the eastern US surfed, 5.3% of visitors from Japan surfed, 12.2% of the Visitors from Canada surfed, 10.5% of visitors from Oceania surfed and 17.3% of visitors from Korea surfed.

Kalani Ka’ana’ana, chief brand officer for the Hawaii Tourism Authority, said, “Not only is surfing one of the leading activities that attract visitors to the Hawaiian shores, but the contemporary sport of surfing was born and is a cultural practice of Hawaii’s Native Americans it is therefore an ingrained facet of the Hawaiian Islands brand identity.

“Given this importance, we have a unique responsibility to educate our visitors about the values ​​of surfing as understood by Hawaiians: the history and reverence of what was once a practice reserved exclusively for royalty; marine security practices; Respect for our natural resources and marine life; as well as surfing logs and etiquette.”