This article originally ran in the July 1964 issue of Surf Guide. This version has been slightly edited. Candy Calhoun won the 1963 West Coast Surfing Surfing Championships and placed 3rd in the 1965 World Championships. In August 1962, Calhoun and Nancy Corfman became the first two women to bodysurf the Wedge.

The one time that I bodysurfed the Banzai Pipeline was in January of 1963. Most of my vacation in Hawaii that year had been spent bodysurfing the comfortable and, as yet, relatively uncrowded waves at Makaha. I probably would have stayed there if Bud Browne and Fred Van Dyke hadn’t mentioned that, when the waves are between six and ten feet, the Pipeline is excellent for bodysurfing. Because of my respect for their judgment, I took their word about Pipeline over all the scare stories I had heard.

The next day my mother and I drove to the North Shore. When we arrived at the Pipeline, it seemed that we couldn’t have chosen a better time. The sun was blazing and there was a clean, well-formed five-to twelve-foot surf running, with a slight offshore breeze.

I walked past the small group of spectators that invariably appears when there are board riders out at the Pipeline. The swim to the surfline was an easy one; the break was close to shore by Island standards and a deep-water channel running out alongside the break was a welcome detour around incoming lines of churning foam.

There were only seven or eight surfers out. Before moving over from the safety of the channel into the break, I paused momentarily to study the rides. All but one of the surfers followed a procedure of catching the wave as soon as possible, driving to the bottom third of the wave, executing a bottom turn and then trimming for the rest of the ride. Butch Van Artsdalen varied from this procedure in that he rode a little bit higher (no one rides high at the Pipeline), trimmed almost from the start of the ride and seldom did any bottom turns.

When I thought I had the general idea, I moved into the lineup and dropped into a wave. Because I didn’t head for the lower part of the wave at once, I was swept to the top where, for an instant, I hung suspended from the underside of the curl. Then I continued over the falls.

The next wave was more successful. Driving as hard as I could for the bottom third, I held in by turning onto my left shoulder, embedding it as deeply as I could. Ordinarily I would also have used my right arm as an outrigger but to do that there must be some wave slope and these were impossibly concave; it was like surfing without a skeg. At any rate, this time I was able to get a long, steep ride before the break caught up and engulfed me. From then on, the wipeouts became fewer and as the day went on the rides became more and more enjoyable.

My last ride was the best. I can remember the impact of looking up and seeing, not the blue sky, but the silver-green rim of the curl arching over my head, and thinking that it was nice to be “inside” on a day like this.

"BODYSURFING THE PIPELINE," CANDY CALHOUN, SURF GUIDE (1964)

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos

Contests