By Einar Ollua* 

It's very difficult to describe that day. A lot of things happened. Here they were already prepared, they already knew that the swell was coming and when it comes it is palpable. I am in a house on the North Shore and on Friday night after midnight you could start to hear the sea rising and the dark horizon roaring, but you could tell that it was rising.

I'm at Alligators. In the morning, the sun was shining and the outer reef on the horizon was turning around and there were giant walls.

As it was Saturday there were a lot of people who came from all over the island to see the show.

The natural amphitheater was Waimea because of the cliffs with a view from above. All the beaches had been closed to the public because of the size of the swell; Pipe and Sunset were closed because they were too big. The only one that held up was Waimea.

John John and Kelly surfed differently, but we couldn't see it from here... That was a prior arrangement to avoid the tumult at Waimea.

One of the clues that made you understand the size of the surfers was the size of their boards, and then the foam was huge. And the waves were impressive.

It attracted a large audience from all over the island who hung from the cliffs to see what was happening. And the show was truly spectacular.

It's impressive to see it live because you assume that they go for all the waves and that they're going to catch one after another, and the reality is that even though the sets were frequent, you realized that it wasn't easy and that the size was impressive because they didn't catch any wave, they caught several.
The biggest ones you saw everyone rowing to get past them, the biggest one caught everyone in the wrong position and then that monument of water, that giant locomotive that fell, you saw everyone doing things that were completely out of the ordinary… The energy of the people and what the swell produced was palpable from the outside.

People were parked on the cliffs… There was an army of jet skis coming and going to assist the surfers, it was impressive.

These are the things you see in videos, but being here and witnessing it in the amphitheater that was Waimea was spectacular.

*Einar Ollua is an Argentine audiovisual producer with more than 20 years of experience and travels around the world. He worked for many years on the well-known action sports program, Gravedad Zero