HOW TO MEASURE A WAVE
Written by Ricky Grigg (Ultimate big wave & surf legend)
Ricky Grigg’s words…
Once upon a time, an old Hawaiian surfer told me that those surfers who measure from the back have already missed the wave. Of course, you could argue that surfers who measure the wave from the back do so on purpose so that they can purposefully underestimate their size. But why would anyone want to do that you ask? Perhaps they are the macho guys.“Shucks ma, that overhead wave is only three feet, at least to me. Its no big deal”.
But then one day a wise guy like me comes along and says,“Three feet, for an overhead wave? What are you anyway, only three feet tall?”
The 5’6 surfer says, “Huh? What? Are you blind?”
“No” I say, “maybe you are blind. That overhead wave was way over your fully upright body.”
“Hey man,” he tells me, “you measure waves from the back.”
I say, “You mean the back of the wave you can’t see?”
And of course he says, “Right on, dude, right on.”
Wish that all this banter was much ado about nothing, but unfortunately it is not. There is a history and a very good reason why so many surfers these days measure from the back. Let’s go back about 40 or 50 years in Hawaii and revisit the golden years of surfing and try and find the answer. Back then waves were bigger, bluer, and much less crowded. Surfers at Waikiki rode huge waves all measured from the front. Duke Kahanamoku’s famous 1.1mile ridehad to have been 20’+ when it first broke at first break (out near Castles). Today’s surfers would have called it 10′ had they been there. Trouble is, had they been there, they would not have been able to see the wave, at least not from the beach. So how did all this back of the wave nonsense get started anyway?
I was surfing the North Shore in those days, the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, and what started to happen very slowly over this time period was a gradual tendency to underestimate waves. As it got worse and worse, everyone started realizing that the smaller the estimates were, the smaller the reports were on the radio and TV, and fewer and fewer people were showing up to surf on any given day. Hey, man, this was way cool. A super cool method began to develop to keep the surf a secret. Eight to 10′ waves at Sunset slowly became 4-5′ with a few pulses. But how in God’s name could anyone call an 8′ wave 4′, or a 10′ wave 5′? Not that difficult. The surfers and lifeguards simply invented an new system of measuring the waves from the back. It worked great, because, of course, waves from the back are about half their size from the front. Since few people could actually see the backs of the waves, few people could disagree or claim otherwise. Fewer Townies went to the North Shore and the local guys had the waves all to themselves. The lifeguards liked it too, because they had fewer people to guard and so they could go surfing longer. The system prospered and more and more surfers grew up believing that measuring the waves from the back was the way to do it.
End of story. There were a few old-timers around who remembered the old way, the first way, the simple way, the face-value, from-the-top-to-the-bottom way, from the front, from the crest-to-the-trough, the way oceanographers define wave height, the way in which ordinary people can judge a wave simply by looking at it. By its face value. Not only did the old-timers remember, but they also reminded the lifeguards about safety. It wasn’t to safe to broadcast to Hawaii’s tourists that 8-10′ waves were only 4-5′. People drowning and getting slammed into the bottom by shorebreak could sue, and guess what, they did sue. A number of visitors throughout the Islands suffered severe neck injuries producing paraplegia and quadriplegia, all caused by shorebreak waves that were larger than those reported. Several cases were settled or won to the tune of millions of dollars. It was not long before the City and County of Honolulu was under a powerful economic and legal gun to change the system back to the old way of measuring waves from the front by the face. This old way is now called the ‘new’ way, because so many young surfers never heard of the old way, until now perhaps.
The ‘new’ has been adopted by the National Weather Service in Honolulu and is now reported by all of Hawaii’s news media: newspapers, radio, TV – everyone. Even the lifeguards are now reporting face values. A special course in how to measure and report surf was designed by the National Weather Service tailored specifically for the lifeguards of the City and County of Honolulu. Over the course of about 15 months (in 2000 and 2001) about 80 lifeguards successfully completed the class. With this new awareness, the lifeguards have embraced the ‘new’ policy. And, there is no question that their first and foremost concern is safety for Hawaii’s visitors and residents alike. Its been a rapid transition back to the old way, the simple way, the safe way, and the HONEST way. Its just like my old Hawaiian friend said, “Never measure the wave you missed. It’s the one you ride that counts.”
The end. This is a great article and anyone who wants to see the original can do so in The Surfers Journal Vol 12 No 1 page 6. Lets get back to the TRUE way of measuring wave heights and size. FACE VALUE. Its really all that matters. Doesn’t matter whether it’s from a macho attitude, bravado or whatever, if a surfer is riding a head high wave and he/she is 5’6 tall then its gotta be a 5′ wave, end of story.
For more on Ricky Grigg check out his website on: www.soest.hawaii.edu/rgrigg/surfbook/
Apart from being a legendary surf and big wave legend, Ricky now lives in Hawaii, and amongst other roles works for the Dept. of Oceanography, University of Hawaii (and the Scripps institute).
Des from Constantine Bay Surf Stores had this to say…
Yep, I caught that article when it first appeared in the Surfers Journal a while back and completely agree with it entirely. One of the surprises I had when first visiting Hawaii was how accurately the surf size was reported by the vast majority, considering I was expecting gargantuan surf to be trivialised. But then, a great many water users over there are very accomplished, educated and confident in that environment.
But that still doesn’t quite cover the whole debate. Everyone who enters the sea can’t help but agree with Rick Grigg’s wry observations and yet disagreements do seem to continually occur. It’s all to do with scale it seems and it just can’t be helped. If you’re surfing daily your body becomes attuned to it, your mind does too but also your eyes seem to adjust to a changing scale of wave size. Waves that I thought were huge whether measured from front, back or side when I was a kid turned out to be insignificant after just a few years of regular surfing. Mind you, that seems to be working in reverse as age creeps in! And I can’t help but think how unimportant it all is. Don’t get me wrong, the rescue services, and regular inshore water users rely on surf size information sometimes as a matter of livelihood and sometimes as a a matter of life but generally we hedonistic surfers do tend to use our own scales.
The crux of the matter is that a really big day at Constantine is not the same as a really big day at Hossegor which equally is out-scaled by a really big day in Hawaii. But even that doesn’t matter – we all have our own limitations as to what size surf we favour and those limitations are very flexible and are instinctive to each of us and apply wherever and whenever we go in. I guess we have all been out in conditions that make you a bit twitchy and uncomfortable at a break on one day and yet we are completely at ease in exactly the same conditions at the same break on another day. So how do you apply a numerical scale to a constantly changing environment that also has a constantly changing perception based on something as simple as how we are feeling that day? I would guess that to each and every one of us, “three feet and clean”, has covered actual sizes of waves from two to five feet depending on where you are with your surfing, your confidence and the physical break.
When I was a teenager, I was fortunate enough to meet a guy called Kemp Aaberg (the first cover shot in Surfer mag) in Biarritz. Kemp is an awesome guitar player (classical) but had been surfing since the fifties and had been in the mags surfing Hawaii and other exotic locations and riding very big waves. Well, I was watching what were to me very (very) big waves coming through at the old La Barre when he asked why I wasn’t out there. I explained that coming from the UK, these waves were huge compared to anything I’d ever seen in my life. He then went on to tell me of his first trips to Hawaii and how the wave sizes just seemed to be ridiculous. But once he had ‘got his eye in’ (in a darts player kind of way) then things became a bit more handleable. He very kindly nurse maided me into what was, with hindsight, probably five or six feet, glassy La Barre. Nevertheless I was still very nervous at the time. Equally i was quite surprised just last January when chatting to a well respected big wave surfer while on the North Shore of Oahu who after an offshore tow-in session quietly murmured, “that’s why we always under exaggerate wave sizes here. If we were honest with ourselves we just wouldn’t go in”.
The real debate seems to arise when we are trying to let others know what size the surf is, has been or is going to be. And that’s where a uniformly accepted scale could be useful. Impossible but maybe useful. With the advent of web based surf forecast sites and premium rate telephone surf reports, accurate reporting of surf conditions is becoming more important – at least to those operating those services. Unfortunately computer models based on scientific data can only tell you the purely scientifically accurate swell size. It can’t (yet) differentiate between the hell pits of Pipeline or the relatively soft, fluffy peelers of Watergate. A three foot swell is a three foot swell to a computer. Mind you, with Doctors Russell and Butt (read their book ‘Surf Science’) bringing their years of top level ripping to the scientific table, who knows what wonders lay ahead.
So, I don’t think there’s anything strange at all in one person’s three foot surf being another’s five foot pits from hell and being yet another’s “ah small mate but maybe worth a paddle about!” And the strange thing is how quickly we adjust to each other’s scales of size anyway. We all know some people who say it’s five foot and we immediately think“so three foot fun surf”, while there are others who when you hear “three foot and fun”, you immediately reach for the pin tail gun. That’s just the way it is and that’s probably the way it should be. As Barry Kanaiapuni put it back in the early seventies, “wave heights up to six or eight feet are inconsequential, after that they are measured in increments of fear”.
Des Moore (Constantine Bay Surf Stores)
Lyonnesse Surf 