Pākā: Surfing

In his book, The Hawaiian Canoe, Tommy Holems writes:

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In stone-hewn dugout canoes, they rocketed down the faces of exploding liquid mountains. Canoe surfing (pakaka nalu)—in all the world, only the ancient Hawaiian, with his rugged canoe, tamed the wild surf that was the demise of so many lesser men, so many lesser craft. Hawaii, having relatively few protective reefs, lies naked in the path of mammoth wave trains that seasonally roll out of the north and south Pacific, sweeping down her channels and battering her coastlines.

 

 No other culture is known to have had its survival linked to the surfing ability of its indigenous craft. The Hawaiian canoe had to be able to regularly gain access to life-sustaining deep water marine protein sources. So it was that in Hawaii a relentless siege by surf, with wave forces of up to thousands of pounds per square inch, exercised a classic shaping effect on both the canoe and the culture.

 

Canoe surfing, as a learned and practiced skill and ultimately as a highly sophisticated sport, was the sole preserve of the ancient Hawaiian. Neither before nor since has any people developed canoe or boatsurfing skills even remotely comparable to those held by the early Hawaiian. No other ancient culture has ever taken its indigenous craft and surfed them purely for the recreational value.

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In surfing a canoe the take off is critical.  The paddlers must get the canoe moving as nearly as fast as the wave is mvoing shoreward so they must start paddling well before the chosen swell lifts the canoe up on its run to the shore.ʻ

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Once the canoe is on the wave, the steersman must keep the canoe on the wave, holding it on course and not allowing the canoe to breach sideways.  The crew members must keep the canoe balanced by shifting their weight either towards the ama or away from it depending on how the canoe is dipping.