Hawai'i loves big waves, and honoluluadvertiser.com scored big on Dec. 7 and 8 by providing a livestream broadcast of the event that was the most successful in our online history.

Many people deserve credit but our online operations manager and webmaster Scott Morifuji went above and beyond the call of duty.

Morifuji was set to cover live ceremonies at Pearl Harbor but was diverted when the waves were predicted to hit massive heights.

He left his Pearl City home at 4:15 a.m., made it through driving rain in Wahiawä and snagged one of the last parking spots at Pupukea Beach Park by 5 a.m. He started walking down to Waimea Bay and got the livestream going at 7:30 a.m. just as viewers were tuning in. He kept the broadcast going until his laptop batteries died and he walked a mile and a half back to his car to recharge them.

Realizing that it would take too long to recharge all the batteries, he moved his car instead and found a beachfront stall. He hooked his cables to the camera sitting on the tripod, resumed livestreaming and burned about half of his gas tank keeping our viewers glued to our Web site.

Then he had to repeat the scene the following day because the real waves were coming.

Morifuji and online staffer Scott Nishi headed out to Waimea Bay the next day with traffic even more clogged, and they found a spot in a church parking lot at Sunset Beach. At 7:30 a.m, back at the same spot he spent 12 hours the day before, Morifuji listened to a freelance photographer theorize that The Advertiser livestream had forced every TV news director to send out crews and forced the Eddie Aikau to go off because of all the cameras. I somehow doubt that was the case but it certainly made Morifuji and the rest of us feel good.

By 10 a.m. on the day of the Eddie, Morifuji had photographer Richard Ambo bring the portable generator Morifuji left in the car. Morifuji was asked to go back to the beach to get some audio of the waves, but the beach was jammed and there were no suitable spots. Aircards barely worked and Morifuji searched for his original spot. He called for the generator a second time and it took an hour to get delivered with all the traffic. It arrived just as his last camera battery died.

Think of babysitting a tripod and camera for about 23 hours over two days without someone getting in the way and rare bathroom breaks and you can imagine what Morifuji went through.

"It was pretty monotonous sitting there, but what kept me motivated was the thought of all of our readers locally and around the world watching it," he said. "I felt better when a reader approached me and told me that she was watching from home and decided to come out to Waimea Bay to see the surf live, even though she and her husband had to park nearly three miles away to get to the action."

On Monday, 11,669 users came to our site and 12,140 followed the next day, shattering our previous livestream records for President-elect Barack Obama's visit last Christmas and the Japan emperor Akihito's visit this summer. We even eclipsed our very healthy numbers for the 2009 Honolulu Marathon last week.

Great team effort, as usual, but special thanks to the hard-working Scott Morifuji, who once again showed his value during one of the biggest visual stories of the year.