‘Ehukai, or “sea spray”, a small, 1.2-acre beach park on Ke Nui Road across from Sunset Beach Elementary School, is the public access point to one of the world’s most famous surf sites, the Banzai Pipeline. During the winter surf season, traffic is heavy everywhere on the North Shore, but is especially congested here as residents and visitors drive from all over the island to see the Pipeline and its challengers in action. On a big day at the Pipe spectators and photographers crowd the beach to watch an international mix of surfers ride some of Hawai’i’s most dangerous waves.

The Pipeline was named in December 1961 when California surfing movie producer Bruce Brown was driving around the North Shore looking for filming opportunities with two California surfers, Phil Edwards and Mike Diffenderfer. They stopped at the then-unnamed site where Brown filmed Edwards catching several waves. After Edwards returned to the beach, the three of them decided to come up with an appropriate name. Coincidentally, a construction project for the repair of an underground pipeline was in progress on Kamehameha Highway. As they drove by, Diffenderfer looked into the open trench and suggested that they name the surf site the Pipeline. They all agreed, and in 1961 Brown introduced the name to the world in his fourth surfing movie, Surfing Hollow Days. At that time the beach fronting the Pipeline was known as Banzai Beach, which resulted in the compound name, Banzai Pipeline.