Words by Catharine Lo

Photos by Allen Mozo

“When we were kids growing up, we didn’t care what we rode, we just wanted to be in the water,” says Todd Bradley, who grew up playing on the shores of 1960s Waikiki. As a small kid, he mimicked the beach boys who rode around on their big planks using canoe paddles, not realizing that one day he’d have a hand in the modern revival of what has become a wildly popular adrenaline sport.

As a grom-grown-up, Bradley still has that innate desire to play in the sea. He and other pioneering watermen respond to an instinctive urge to push their boundaries, and they constantly invent tools to go bigger, faster, deeper, longer and stronger. Last year, Bradley teamed up with Brian Keaulana, Dave Parmenter and Mike Fox to produce stand-up boards and paddles, forming a company called C4 Waterman, one of the sport’s modern pioneers.

A few years ago when the first stand-up boards hit the water, there were lots of photos of guys cruising around in flat bays, like a Sunday walk in the park. Today, however, stand-up paddlers are racing across the Moloka‘i Channel, and guys are stand-up paddling into outer reefs once reserved for tow-in only. From crocodile-inhabited rivers inAustralia to massive barrels in Tahiti, enthusiasts of the hybrid sport are going where they’ve never been before.

***

“The world gets so locked into ‘I’m going to practice my surfing and I’m going to surf great,’ when surfing is the easiest thing to do. Surviving is the hardest,” says former Makaha lifeguard and stuntman Brian Keaulana. After all, it’s not only your physical equipment, but your mental equipment, knowledge and attitude, that matters.

“I was brought up in a waterman’s world where my father is like the ultimate waterman, really. He’ll go out and he’ll dive and he’ll feed [everyone on] the beach. He’ll give without expecting to receive anything back—no payment, no reward, just the fullness of someone’s belly, the smile on a kid’s face,” Keaulana says, talking about his dad, Makaha’s legendaryBuffalo Keaulana. “And then he’ll paddle out and surf one to two-feet waves and he’ll bodysurf a six-foot wave, and that’s the thing: No one piece of equipment makes us who we are.”

When Bradley gave Keaulana a hat with the company logo on it, Keaulana said he took a marker and blacked out “Waterman.”

“Todd said,  ‘What did you do that for?’” Brian remembers. “I told him, ‘Well, because to me, it’s [about] the hidden waterman in each person.’” In other words, a true waterman doesn’t wear his skills on his boardshorts. He demonstrates by example. Read More...