Chicken Soup from the Soul of Hawai'i by Jack Canfield

Author:Jack Canfield [Canfield, Jack; Hansen, Mark Victor; Linnéa, Sharon; Rohr, Robin Stephens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul
Published: 2012-09-07T20:56:00+00:00

The Queen of Mkaha

You can’t surf in Hawai‘i for long without hearing about some of the great surfers of all time. You can’t be near Mkaha on O‘ahu’s West Shore for long without hearing about a local girl who became a legend.

Rell Sunn grew up just past the Mkaha break around the corner from the ocean. “I was four years old and knew I was in love,” she said. “It was surfing. Every morning it was always a mad scramble: five Sunn kids, fighting over the one board we had, and if you lost out, you’d grab one off the beach and surf as long as you could before the owner found out.” She laughed at the memory. “As I got a little older, every board I ever got spent a night in my room with me, sometimes in my bed. Can you imagine being four years old and knowing what true love is?”

Her heritage was a fascinating blend of Chinese on her fathers side and Hawaiian Irish on her mother’s side. Then and now, Mkaha was a special place among surfers, providing waves from two to thirty feet. It was the center of the surfing universe in the 1950s, when Rell was growing up. She couldn’t get enough. “People like John Kelly, George Downing and Wally Froiseth were my idols. I learned how to dive from Buffalo and Buzzy Trent. Those guys taught me how to really listen. I learned so much from their stories that I knew how to dive Mkaha before I even started.

“I never had a vision or a desire to be the best in the world. My role models were the guys who weren’t competitors first; they just had good fun. You know, if you lose your board, you just go ahead and bodysurf in; if it feels good, you leave your board on the beach and bodysurf a couple more times. We were fortunate to have the Mkaha International every year when I was a kid, and that was the contest back then. We got to hear all kinds of great stories. As a woman, I swore they would not be stories that belonged only to men.”

She took on the surf with her sister Kula, whenever the big swells arrived.

Rell had no idea that women didn’t surf big waves. “That was our upbringing,” she said. “Back then, people watched out for each other. If you couldn’t swim fifteen-foot surf, you couldn’t surf it; but if you could, you were one of the boys. It was a wonderful world.”

Not surprisingly, Rell became Hawai‘i’s first female beach lifeguard.

She also joined the first Women’s Professional Surfing Tour in 1974. This was a period now fondly remembered as a golden age, which featured world-class surfers such as Margo Oberg, Jericho Poppler and Lynne Boyer. Friends say Rell had no ambition to destroy her opponents in the water; for her, the contests were about having fun. And yet she finished third twice in the year-end world rankings.

Rell was determined to spread the joy she felt in the water.

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