50 First Dates|Hālona Cove and Blowhole — The Kiss That Had to Be Learned Again

Pull off Kalanianaʻole Highway east of Hanauma Bay and the parking lot puts you on a shelf of black lava with the ocean directly below. A collapsed tube runs under your feet. When a swell arrives at the right angle, seawater is forced up through the hole and fires a plume ten metres into the air with a sound like a dropped sheet of steel. That is the Hālona Blowhole. Look right, down a steep scramble, and there is a crescent of sand walled in by rock: Hālona Cove.

Hollywood found this pocket long before Adam Sandler did. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolled in the surf here in 1953 for From Here to Eternity, and locals have called it Eternity Beach ever since. 50 First Dates came back for the montage of kisses — Henry leaning in, Lucy startled, the whole thing reset and shot again — and for the sequence after he is knocked cold and dreams of her.

The cove is public and free and has no lifeguard, no bathroom, no shade. The scramble down is loose rock. The shorebreak is short, steep and dumps directly onto sand, which is exactly why it photographs so well and exactly why people get hurt in it. Most visitors stay at the railing above, which is the honest way to see it anyway: from up there the cove is a set, framed and lit, waiting for two people to walk into it.

Go at mid-morning with a rising tide and an east swell. That is when the blowhole works. Stand at the rail long enough and you notice the rhythm — the water builds, fails, builds, fails, then goes off. A place that does the same thing over and over and still surprises everyone watching.

Photo: Hālona Blowhole Lookout, Wikimedia Commons.