While we wait for Pipe to ignite, Tracks goes yard hopping on the North Shore with Benji Weatherly, Parko and Rasta.

The North Shore waits for Pipeline to re-awaken. Photo Nate Smith

Words Ben Whitmore

There’s definitely something in the air – an energy surrounding what is still a fairly flat ocean. As we call past team houses, surfers opt for another day off in preparation for what we’ve been told could be 10 foot Pipe tomorrow.

Emerald green room with the best view in the house. Photo Nate Smith

In the backyard of Joel Parkinson’s backup pad at Velzyland, Parko plays baby sitter to his growing flock; Dave Rastovich strums an eight-string ukulele and provides the fitting sound track to another lazy day on the North Shore. In front of him sits two boards. One, a fairly standard thruster, the other is basically a fibreglass boogie board with two fins. With one-foot tricklers out the front, it’s the ‘stumpy’ everyone’s fighting over to have a crack on.

A few small waves at Rocky Point had a few grommets frothing. Photo Nate Smith

Whilst Rasta fingers his uke’, Benji Weatherly cracks a beer. He won’t be surfing today, his plan is to simply drink beer and body surf the sand bar. I get chatting to him about the mansions of the North Shore. Benji’s generation did things a lot tougher when they first came to Hawaii. “If guys were lucky, they’d have a van or something to sleep in,” he recalls. Benji however, was one of the first guys to have a house on the North Shore strip. “One day I was surfing Pipe, it was like 10 foot and absolutely perfect. I looked into the beach and saw my parents standing on the beach and I thought, ‘fuck something must be wrong, they never come down the beach.’ I paddled straight in and they said, ‘You see this house? It’s yours.’ It’s the Volcom house today.

An occasion tunnel for the lucky few. Photo Nate Smith

Benji’s house quickly became a rotational doorway for travelling surfers to come and go, hangout, have a beer, leave boards. “Taylor Steele used to live in a van right near my place and Jack Johnson used to live a few doors up. Jack and I would get up early to walk to school and go and bang on the walls of Taylor’s van to wake him up and then run off,” laughs Benji. Without knowing it at the time, it was those antics and hanging at Benji’s Hawaiian crib that would later contribute to the building of the Momentum generation.

Mason Ho locked in at Rocky rights. Photo Nate Smith

“Guys have got it a lot different now though, All the teams own 10 million dollar mansions on the beach now man, kids from all over the world come here for the first time and they’re bunking down in a mansion! How good is that?”

Jay Davies flexes his way through a cutback that would pretty much make Chuck Norris cry. Photo Nate Smith

And it shows. At any point, all a surf check requires is a ten feet walk. Today, the waves are small, and whilst pro surfing’s heavy hitters take it easy in preparation for this new swell, the grommets have wandered down from their mansions and are dominating the North Shore.

Aloha.