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Casual but well-organized and highly decorated surfing club founded in 1948 by California-born John Lind, and originally located on the Waikiki beachfront; best known as a founding sponsor of the Makaha International Surfing Championships.

Lind was a 25-year-old surfer and hotel supply employee when he moved from Long Beach, California, to Honolulu, in 1939. Wasting no time, he put himself in the middle of the post-war Waikiki surf scene, founded the Hawaiian Surfing Association, and began to organize and run surfboard, paddleboard, and canoe races.

The Waikiki Surf Club was founded both as a social group, and as an alternative to the Outrigger Canoe Club. If was officially launched in March 1948. Weekley meetings were held in the WSC clubhouse located above the Waikiki Tavern, a popular and somewhat notorious watering hole ("It was like a boxing ring in there," club member Rabbit Kekai later recalled, "fights every night"), but WSC members for the most part congregated below the tavern, where boards and clothes were stored in basement-level locker room which in turn opened up directly to Kuhio Beach. Club-owned beach chairs and umbrellas where available to members, as was an outrigger canoe; members also received a pair of red-and-gold WSC trunks. A $10 initiation fee was required; monthly dues were originally one dollar.

Lind and local surfer Elmer Lee together worked out the WSC mission charter, which struck a distinctly egalitarian note. As reported in a January 1949 

 article, the nonprofit WSC was for "the many men and women whose social and recreation activities are found at the beach," and that it intended to be a "well-integrated group representing all races here in Hawaii. Anyone, no matter what race or creed, can belong to the Waikiki Surf Club. The only requirement to be a member is to be of good moral character."

Because Lind himself was originally a California surfer, and because of the club's open-to-all credo, WSC was an especially welcoming place for the first wave of incoming Mainland surfers, including Walter Hoffman, Matt Kivlin, Tommy Zahn, and Joe Quigg.

Unsaid, but obvious to everybody who was familiar with the Waikiki beach scene of the period, was the WSC's stark difference to the nearby Outrigger Canoe Club, whose membership was almost exclusively wealthy white people.

WSC entered teams in nearly all surfing, paddling, and canoeing events in Hawaii. With a membership that included surfing and paddling heavy-hitters like George Downing, Wally Froiseth, and Rabbit Kekai, the WSC was by far Hawaii's all-around winningest club.

WSC also sponsored dances and dinners, and in the early years published a semi-regular club newsletter called The Surfer.

Lind, the WSC's original president, had the idea for a surfing competition at Makaha while waiting for a meeting with officials from the Waianae Lions Club. The WSC and Lions together organized and ran first Makaha International Surfing Championships. The event soon became the largest and most prestigious event in surfing, and remained so until 1964, when the World Surfing Championships debuted. The Lions dropped out of the Makaha contest 1958, but WSC backed the event until its final year, in 1970.

From the early '70s forward, the WSC focused almost exclusively on canoe racing.

Waikiki Surf Club

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