stand on the iako? Holding a board, especially a solid wood (koa?) board? NFW. But dream on.
IF YOURE HOT…
YOURE HOT,
and dots dot
…ambrose…
if drew can say
snats snat
whell dats dat
the hawaiian iiako has a characteristic swooping character unlike other southern island outrigger configurations…
were these lare koas specificly designed for
booster lift take offs?
or way offshore waves of imensity
not necessarily top to bottom
contemporary big drama drops
but think about the long albatross glides…
[or perhaps them brown pelicans
for the california eye
the old spots are virtually unsurfed.
Hello Honolulu- In the definative book on surfing history by Ben Finney he describes many types of surfing practised by the ancient Hawaiians, including “Lele wa’a: canoe leaping: leaping from a canoe with a surfboard into a cresting wave.” He also describes the surfing spot of Pau Malu, known today as Sunset Beach, as being " known throughout the islands for its huge and thundering waves."
You need to take a trip to the Maritime Museum by the Aloha tower and buff up on your surfing history. It is well worth the trip.
Thanks Surfersensei for the correct spelling on that one. I was winging it and missed by a few letters.
You’re welcome. I wing it a lot myself. I just happen to have that book this time.
Here is something to consider. According to Finney, 500 AD is considered to be the era that the first polynesians settled in Hawaii. They brought some basic surfing skills with them. The islands were first discovered by Euorpeans in the early 1700's. That means that the Hawaiians had over <span style="font-style:italic">1000 years</span> to develope their surfing skills and surfboards.
The Hawaiian culture was sufficiently evolved to allow them plenty of leisure time to surf and most Hawaiian men and women participated. Surfing skills were crucial to a Hawaiian Ali’i’s status and power in their society. So a great deal of energy and time was probably spent to design the best possible equipment.
You put all that together and you could assume during that time that many thousands of surfboards and designs were shaped, re-shaped, surfed to death or smashed on the reefs. You would have to think that the ancient Hawaiians had a vast and sophisticated knowledge of surfing that is lost to history. When the Europeans arrived they disrupted their culture and banned surfing as being sinful. So most existing surfboards were thrown away, left to rot in the jungle.
Now we have only a few examples left of the ancient surfboards. And these may not represent their best designs. Their best may have been ridden and used up long before we could have seen them. Suppose that the examples we know of now are around because they didn't really surf that well? They may have survived simply because they weren't ridden that much. They may have just have been wallhangers.
Imagine this scene- A famous big wave surfer is magicly transported 500 years back in time to ancient Hawaii. He is lugging with him his lovingly crafted Koa wood reproduction of an Olo board that hangs in the Bishop Museum. He meets with an Ali'i and proudly presents him with the Olo.Suddenly the ali'i bursts out laughing and says(modern translation) "Bruddah, only <span style="font-style:italic">kuks</span> ride those kine shapes anymore!"
Even the best surviving boards at the Bishop Museum are only about a hundred years old, the humidity and termites having long ago consumed any relics much older than that. These board were crafted using iron tools and from sawn wood. Tom Stone in his attemp to re-create the boards of old using hand tool techniques are what lights a fire under my butt. Never let the fires burn out !
A few years ago there was a thread here about someone finding a board recently in a lava tube/cave burial site, a fairly short one at that. Pele is pissed !
Chuck Shipman has several books by Finney that he brought out to show me some of his favorite stories. History once lost is gone forever
Jim, here it is…
"I was recently contacted by an individual who possesses the oldest known surfboard ever discovered in Hawaii… guarded in a private collection, it`s been carbon dated, and was created and used centuries prior to the landfall of the first Europeans.
Discovered deep in a volcanic flue, doomed by an impending construction site, carefully hidden for hundreds of years next to the weapons and accoutrements of a warrior who never returned… not a burial… near a shore with a series of excellent reef waves (only for the skilled)… it was preserved in almost perfect condition.
It features the most exquisite craftsmanship, with a slight concave deck, thin, parallel rails, subtle displacement/rolled bottom, very low rocker, finless… and 4 feet long. An ancient story to ponder."
Also see the following archive threads:
ancient Hawaiian surfboards
ancient Hawaiian surfboards/etc.!
Hard vs Soft Rails (Yes… But…)
Kapu Boards
Ancient Hawaiian fins
that 'ole paipo
I wonder what the ancient hawaiians would have thought of surf mats. Or… maybe they already had 'em. Made out of some sort of tapa cloth or animal/fish skins. Hmmm.(Imagining some ancient hawaiian saying "been there, done that.)
One thing that’s been interesting to me is something called Mitochondrial DNA… it’s not storytelling, acid dropping poetry, shrooms with phycodelic wanderings, or anything else, it is scientific fact… Since the mapping of the human Genome, there have been lots of studies of the ancestory of lots of people groups… there is a scientist here in Hawaii, Rebecca Kahn, who has mapped the dna of several hawaiin people groups that could follow their families through recorded history very far back… and she has found that the ancestors of Kamehameha the Great didn’t come from Tahiti or the Marquesis islands but from Central America, and she can tell exactly what tribe that they came from with the DNA testing that she’s done…how about that ? We might not be who we think we are after all…maybe the Japanese really were the Menehune of yesteryear, so the “Aina” really does belong to the Japanese!!!, that would make a lot of people mad…
The Hawaiians brought sweet potatos to the Islands, the sweet potato is native to south America. All people of south and north America, prior to european intervention are of mongoloid blood lines, I can’t see Hawaiian blood lines coming from a race of 5 foot tall mayans. The Samoans, Tahitians, Fijians, Maori all are very similar in looks and cultures. So how did the polynesians wind up with sweet potatos?
Sweet potatoes are a staple crop of aboriginal peoples of New Guinea. New Guineans, some southeast Asian groups, Australian aboriganis (sp?) are considered Australasian(sp?) root stock. This also includes the Polynesians. The Science Channel. Potatoes come from South America. Sweet potatoes are a bit different than potatoes. I think they are considered a root and not a tuber. Mike
It seem that the DNA work adds fuel to the Kon Tiki theory of migration from the Americas.
I think a course in cultural anthropology and the study of language and pottery anthropological forensics would be a better course of action. Just like how they did it at bishop museum with soto and the rest of those who did all the ground work…
Benny1 would know…
Did my college minor in the stuff (definitely more fun that physical oceanography) but very eye opening and very disheartening to learn how things really were versus what we were taught on the hill at Kamehameha.
What about Easter Island? The south American link kind of makes sense now, if you follow the language and pottery path from indochina…
Ever heard of the Mu?.. (hint menehunes were not all legend)
They would give you some insight to the Hawaiians before the new Hawaiians came and conquered them. Imagine the same old same old has been going on since those days…Different colors of the rainbow that’s all…
Decandant societies create decadant lifestyles (south america, japan, china, europe).
I guess you could say the one of the results of the lifestyles of the rich and famous precontact was surfing…
Sorry if this doesn’t make sense…
Yep, lots of “theories”, i wondered how the DNA lady knew that the central american village was the originator of the dna, or the other way around, that the hawaiins landed in central america… except that the central american village predated the accepted history of the hawaiin islands, but that “history” seems to not be exactly accurate, scientists must have as much fun as surfboard builders every now and then learning, trying new things …
That made perfect sense to me…my father told us that the story was that his mother’s great grandmother was pure cherokee, i talked to my father’s brother recently before he died, he told the same story…but my father told us to go out and make your life in the United States of America, the land of oppertunity, don’t wait for somebody to tell you that somebody owes you something… i think he gave us good advice…it is interesting to try and understand what’s going on around us though, and i might just pay the $400.00 that it will cost to have my dna tested to see exactly what percentage native american i am, they just need some spit and one of my white hairs… cool, maybe i’ll be able to get some of you guy’s tax money after all!!!
Quote:
One thing that’s been interesting to me is something called Mitochondrial DNA… , it is scientific fact…
…that would make a lot of people mad…
Mytochodrial DNA is transfered only through the mother’s side of the family. It was also used to prove that it was Jesse James laying in his grave. …a few others as well. The only people that it made mad was people telling a story to serve their own purpose. According to them, Jesse was in two other graves. Science said nope. I’m sure they’re working on another story as we speak. ha!
Too much info is never enough.
Welcome aboard.
Speaking through a degree in Anthro/Archaeology…
Every theory is some professor’s shot at getting him or herself published. The truth is never as absolute as a single theory. Reality is probably that there was travel all across the Pacific, in every direction, for far longer than the old Euros could ever imagine.
My field of study was North American migrations. For every strong theory you read of - 14,000 years ago it was Mongols - no, 9000 years ago it was Siberians - no, 44,000 years ago the first americans lived in Chile and probably came across the Pacific… - there is supporting data. If you only subscribe to one theory, then you’re saying all the other data is wrong. I imagine its the same with polynesia and oceana. There’s a bit of truth in everything.
The Mu, yeah, that’s a trip. Irian Jaya? True little people. Menehunes.
Bottomline is that if you put your mind to it and with alot of enthusiam and ingenuity (like Dales’ picture say) you can “surf” just about anything that floats, including other human beings (you should try that one)
Wooden planks, canoes, dingys, broken pieces of cooler, air filled garbage bags, innertubes, wading pools and of course just by yourself… been there done that.
Just wish I had more free time and gumption to play around like that again. Funny I guess with age you kind of lose the freedom to goof off and make a fool of yourself infront of all your friends on beach. It was alot easier when the beach was your home and you really didn’t care about those things. The lost innocence and pure joy of youthful abandon.
By the way Jim Phillips made some absolutely beautiful replicas for Bonga folks a year or so ago…Saw it in the Maikai magazine waiting for lunch at Jamba Juice. Aside from him, Tom Stone and maybe Casey there’s not alot of guys doing them cause Velzy’s dead now… For the 808 boys you can check Casey’s work over at Tropical Blends…
Takes two big guys or more to lift the thing probably do better as a dining table but beautiful wood work none the less…
Oh yea and no matter what the rich think, surfboards belong in the ocean not hanging in some museum or someones wall costing over $2500.00.
And Dale those pics reminded me of 67-69 riding our plywood paipos at the wall at waikiki we couldn’t afford fins and some guys could stand up on theirs. Surfing one with a shriners hat like that with a tassle would’ve been cool…
This sure is a nice thread- throwing a little deep cultural education in with the board design thing. The whole Polynesians coming from S. America thing really seems to be a figment of Thor’s imagination- I think he was bummed to think that the supposedly primitive polynesians (no iron tools! no pottery!) were able to build sailing canoes that could enable migration against the prevailing winds, so sweet potatoes in hand he rafted to Easter Island. Unfortunately there’s sweet potatoes in SE Asia and there is pottery, the Lapita, that fans out from New Guinea as far as there is clay to make it with. I think the bottom line is that the polynesians built phenomenal water craft with precisely made stone tools and developed incredibly sophisticated navigation techniques (Mau & the Caroline Islanders proved that beyond a doubt) that let them cross the largest ocean and accurately find small islands while Thor’s relatives were scared to sail out of sight of land. Hard for the eurocentric to believe, but there it is. If you can do all that it seems logical that building a few good surfboards wouldn’t be out of the question! From what I’ve seen of Tom Stone’s boards they are flat out beautiful and pretty damn functional, as Bonga proved- I saw that Maikai mag too and it’s awesome. As was already said, it’s just a different way of surfing rather than a primitive way. (and one I’d love to try if I could put in the training to lift one of the damn things) Oneula couldn’t be more right about the boards belonging in the ocean, and the great the variety out there the more fun we get to have.
“All the ships of Columbus and da Gama combined could have been stored on a single deck of a single vessel in the fleet that set sail under Zheng He.”
Zheng He’s armada set sail 600 years ago last month. How about them boat building and sailing skills? And that is coming from a Viking.
Read more:
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/feature2/index.html