Saipan’s Garapan could be a mini Honolulu with its noise and glitz. Sadly, it lacks Hawaiian surf appeal, being stuffed way too far into the West Pacific. The island is an inverted backward letter F with a southpaw of reef dangling off Wing Beach (straight closeouts), which widens above the popular Pau Pau Beach (more closeouts) before it flares 2 miles from shore—a peninsula resembling the droopy index finger of Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
This coral finger cusps Saipan’s oft-polluted Tanapag Harbor, its dreamy blues dotted by Mañagaha, a once-magical 100-acre islet now brutalized. Mobs of tourists daily board to-and-fro ferries, including the yellow catamaran operated by Hawaiian-owned Tasi Tours, which manages Mañagaha, a 20-minute ride from Tanapag.
One afternoon, I counted 53 Chinese urbanites on the catamaran to Mañagaha. Most wore kooky-looking sunwear—rash guards and shorts, big floppy hats, and faces slopped white with perfumed sunscreen. A safety demonstration was delivered by a woman who spoke not in Mandarin but in crude English. As we crept from the dock, I approached the captain, a stout Filipino sucking on a cigarette at the helm of the big, bright boat.
“Ever see anyone surfing out there?”
“Ah, no. Unless when it’s bad weather, then yeah, maybe. Big waves in typhoon. Today, it’s flat.”
I asked him about the passengers sitting behind us in rows of white plastic chairs.
“Used to be all Japanese. Sometimes from Russia.”
“Any Americans?”
“Never.”
On Mañagaha, Tasi Tours ran a restaurant, toilets, picnic pavilions, a gift shop, a dive shop, and even a massage/henna tattoo parlor. Lifeguards sat in tall yellow beach towers, like vultures overseeing the volleyball courts, the netted sandy shallows, and the squeaky-clean Maalaea-style rights booming along the reef.
Flat? Not. I watched three waves pitch and spit and freight-train. The swell had arrived suddenly, radically.
A mile southwest, swells wrapped and bowled around the finger before dying in the mile-wide channel abuzz with humanity: parasailing, diving, snorkeling, banana-boating, water-skiing. Here, the trade wind blew offshore. Smiling Cove Marina was in front of American Memorial Park, full of small speedboats. I hoped to find a surf taxi. Time was crucial.
From an email I’d received three months prior from Bruce Bateman of the Northern Marianas tourism office: “There are only about 10 decent surfing days a year on Saipan. We have deep water all around and no surfable waves except when storm surge and wind from the southwest push some decent, though small, waves over the barrier reef or through a gap down by Sugar Dock. There are waves outside the reef a few additional days a year for those who are not risk-averse. There is no surf ‘season.’ It comes when it comes.”
Bruce wrote like a surfer but would not expound when I followed up. Typical. Anyway, “not risk-averse,” I was unexpectedly witnessing one of these “few additional days.”
Meanwhile, soundtracked with this surfy roar, Mañagaha’s beach was covered with bored people smoking cigarettes, staring at mobile phones, taking selfies, and clicking Like. As I waited for the return ferry to Tanapag Harbor, Mañagaha’s long dock rumbled with loud 1990s-era jet boats that sounded powered by Chevy small blocks. The boats were there to collect and return tourists for parasailing lessons and other watery thrills for hire.
Late that afternoon, the vast hallway windows of Hyatt Regency’s Floor 7 afforded me a clear view of the reef. Not a guest, and technically trespassing, I’d slipped through the closing doors of a courtyard elevator filled with loud, pimply young men. Dusk was near, the tide was in, the swell still very much up.
Below lay Micro Beach, an idyllic spot crowded with tree silhouettes and hand-holding sunset gazers. Dozens gathered on the white sand to watch the fading orange pastels, big ships anchored in the distance, the scene backdropped by ironwood, mango, pandanus, pine, coco palms, and a car park. The hotel’s glass windows mirrored the western sky.
The waves looked perfect through my binoculars, especially at the reef’s end—the Ghost Finger. I wished to be there. Smiling Cove Marina and its speedboats were just down the road.
Next morning, the tide was dropping, so I had time to find a boat. But first, I went to the Hyatt for another Floor 7 surf check. I snuck into the same elevator, which lifted me to the end of the same hallway with the same bird’s-eye view of the same reef finger. I stared at it for an hour. Then another. The water—more blue than white. A 12-hour swell. What a jerk. The spot had lived up to its goddamned name.
[Feature image by Michael H. Kew]
