Ride on Marty

As requested here are some stories of my time with Marty Sugarman:

Marty and I met at State Beach in Santa Monica and surfed Malibu together as well. One day back in 1965 I told Marty I was going to Hawaii for the summer and asked if he wanted to come with. It turned out to be a full blown 'surf safari' even though we mostly just surfed the breaks of Waikiki for a couple of months that summer. We lived in "The Surfboarder Motel", had no car, and carried our sticks everywhere. The hotel was a two story dump at the corner of Liliuokalani and Kalakaua on the beach  at Waikiki, and we would hang out on the planter wall in front of "Da Swamp" bar on Kalakaua at night to talk to 'tourists' (nudge, nudge, wink wink). We met a few people with Marty's flamboyant dialogue and my 'surfer tan' and spent some quality time out of the water on those warm summer nights! One night sitting in front of the Da Swamp bar a creature ran up my arm and I jumped for high heaven! Turned out it was a cockroach about an inch and a half long. (Coming from Pacific Palisades and Malibu I had never seen a cockroach! Now staying at my RV park on Boulder Highway in Las Vegas you can go out and see their Kumbaya parties every night because the sewer runs right under the middle of that boulevard and they come up out of the manholes at night and do their dance!) 

We enjoyed many good days of surf at Queen's, King's, Number 3's, rock pile and Ala Moana. The warm water was such a great change from the 'frigid' temperatures in California that you didn't even hesitate to go out. And in the warm water a go out usually lasted between 3 to 5 hours.  We also found out that July is not the greatest surf month in Hawaii so we did some tourist things like visiting Hanama Bay and walking out around the northeastern point to 'the toilet bowl'. It's a really fun little volcanic hole in the shore lava about eight feet in diameter with a crack that runs out into the ocean. When the waves come in the water flow is amplified by the lava crack and comes squirting up out of the toilet bowl and all the people in it get a 'hydro-vertical ride' and are plopped on the surrounding smooth lava. It's like a blow hole only bigger so it doesn't shoot up high into the air.

Since the surf was generally small we also went searching for kicks and back then you could still jump off of Waimea Falls (about 50 feet in one spot and 70 in another). Yep, we jumped off that. The low cliff anyway. Kinda scary climbing up a mossy waterfall so you can jump off a cliff but that's what young jackasses do.

One of our greatest eating joys was the buffet at the Queen Surf Restaurant close to Diamond Head in Kapiolani Park. It was open air dining and at sunset you could watch surfers silhouetted against the flaming orange horizon catching their last waves of the day at King's surf. Once Marty asked one of the Hawaiian servers at the restaurant what a certain dessert dish was and in heavy pigeon English he said "Dat's Dello".  It was Jello, but that became one of our pigeon English jokes for rest of the trip. Got dello! The full buffet was $3.50!!! We ate so much we would have to waddle out into the park and just lay on the grass under the palm trees for an hour after the meal. The place was packed every night and we'd leave with a huge stack of dirty dishes on our table! The 'restaurant Mafia' of Waikiki has since had it torn down and now there is just a cement slab. And where Da Swamp bar and our Motel was is now a McDonald's! You can see the McDonald's on a google satellite map view now! Of course back then there were no personal computers, no Internet, no satellite pictures and no Google Earth. Times change. So today from my computer in Las Vegas I took a little trip down memory lane and looked all over my 1965 Hawaiian stomping grounds via satellite! It's still there, but no Surfboarder Motel or Da Swamp bar!

Now Marty has light sensitive skin and burned easily so there was a little challenge for him in Hawaii, but not to worry. One day we were sunbathing with some girls from the San Fernando Valley on the beach in front of the YWCA complex near Number 3's. One of the girls was fair skinned and had put Zinc Oxide on her breasts for sun protection just above her bikini top. Marty asked if he could have some of her Zinc Oxide for his sensitive nose and when the girls said yes, Marty reached down and scooped a big finger full of the cream from her breast and applied it to his nose! Needless to say we were with the girls for the rest of their short stay. Now I understand the term 'Valley Girls'.

We knew there would be good surf in August at Malibu so we cut our trip a bit short and decided to head back. But wouldn't you know it, the day we had to fly out a huge south swell came in! We didn't  really have time for much of a go out because we had to pack and tape our boards in the cardboard boxes the airlines used to provide before the introduction of the reflective coated zipper board bags of today. I did take movies of the swell because it was really a good one. Line after line all the way to the horizon and we went to the top of one of the new high rise buildings to film it. I've still got the 8mm film and projector in my storage bin near Sacramento! The last time I watched the films was with Mitch Lachman in Santa Cruz in 2001!

Ride on Marty!

Walt Ely