Eighteen year-old Rick Kane has just graduated from high school. He uses his winnings from a wave tank surfing contest in his native state of Arizona to fly to Hawaii for the summer before the start of college, in order to try to become a professional surfer. He takes a plane to Honolulu with plans to stay with a surfer that he met in Arizona six months previously. He finds the friend tending bar at a seedy gentlemen's club.

At the bar Rick meets up with two pro surfers, Alex (Robbie Page)[1] and Mark (Mark Occhilupo), and stays with them at the house of Lance Burkhart. In the morning, he goes out surfing with Alex and Mark and realizes that surfing in the ocean is totally different to surfing in a wave tank. He is not as good as he had initially thought. They end up at Sunset Beach and tries to paddle out, not knowing how to duck dive he struggles his way out to the line-up. During this scene he gets in the way of Vince Moaloka (Gerry Lopez), who is leader of a local group named "The Hui" ("The Club"). This causes Vince to wipe out and leads to a confrontation where Rick is chased off the beach, after he realizes his stuff was stolen from the beach by another member of the Hui.