Now, people here say the lazy days of summer on the North Shore are nothing more than a memory.

"The slow, laid-back summer season is a thing of the past," said resident Jodi Young, who handles promotions for the Triple Crown of Surfing and other North Shore events. "I swear, it's over."

As the winter surf crowds begin to thin out toward the end of the season, they are being replaced by a new breed of sightseer — average Janes and Joes, many of them with families in tow. They may not know surfing, but thanks to widespread media exposure they now know about the North Shore.

They're making it a must-see on their visits to Hawai'i, and that's giving the North Shore a popularity it has never known during the summer.

The size of this group has steadily increased to the point where Young and others say there's little difference between it and that of the surf season throng.

"I just look at the numbers of people and the traffic and say, 'How the heck is this place going to support itself with just one road?' " said Young.

No one has conducted an official summer head count, but merchants here are too busy counting gross receipts to notice. They report off-season business is up 30 percent to 50 percent over what it has been in years past.

"It started three years ago," said Terry Gerber, who operates the Flavormania Exotic Gourmet Ice Cream Palace in the Hale'iwa Shopping Plaza. "Last year was bigger than the year before. This year was bigger than last. The day after the Fourth of July was the biggest day we've had in 19 years of doing business."

Steve Ellis, who owns Cholos Homestyle Mexican restaurant in the North Shore Market Place, broke it down like this:

"March is generally the biggest month of the year for us. But we did better in April. And then we did better in May and then June. And these three months that were better than any we ever did before. And July is just going to be off the scale."

A decade or more ago, the North Shore was known to surfers one and all, said North Shore surf contest promoter Randy Rarick. But to the general population it was a relatively unknown entity.

That changed dramatically with the 2002 summer release of the movie "Blue Crush," which was filmed on the North Shore. Suddenly younger women became the fastest-growing surfing segment everywhere.

Mike Markrich of Markrich Research, who has studied surf contest crowds on the North Shore, said between 2002 and 2003 the ranks of American surfers swelled by half a million people — "and it's believed that about 90 percent of them were females," he said.

One such would-be wave rider, Amanda Leggett, 16, of Wiggins, Miss., said she has seen "Blue Crush" 150 times — "at least!" — and she dreams night and day of traveling to O'ahu. She enters every free-trip-to- Hawai'i contest she comes across, while socking away earnings from her job at Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits, just in case she has to finance the trip herself.

"I'm planning on going the summer I graduate from high school in May of 2006," said Leggett, who has never surfed and doesn't know how to swim. "It's just like a nonstop passion of mine to go to the North Shore."

The North Shore even has a network TV show named after it.

"If they didn't know where it was before, they do now," said "North Shore" line producer Harry Bring during a break last week in the shooting at Sunset Beach.

Bring said some 6 million people watch the Fox network program each week.

Rarick says big waves and surf contests have helped transform the North Shore into a summer destination in its own right. Les Enderton, executive director of the O'ahu Visitors Bureau, said summer visitors are the result of a combination of factors — namely a concerted marketing campaign and exposure from films and television.

On a recent weekday afternoon a line of patrons two and three abreast snaked out the door at Matsumoto Shave Ice and wound along the sidewalk past the edge of the building and spilled into the parking lot.

Having waited in line for more than a half-hour, 11 members of the David Brooks family of Coppell, Texas, were enjoying their first-ever shave ice.

"This is our first trip to the North Shore," said Brooks. "We did our research. We read about it in the travel guide. We made a list of places to stop, and this was the place to get shave ice."

Brooks' wife, Marilou, said family members would like to have laid eyes on some awesome North Shore big waves, but they were pleased with what they found instead — gorgeous beaches and calm, inviting waters.

As merchants hail the hordes of cash-toting summer visitors, and residents wonder about the increased congestion they bring, Antya Miller, administrator of the North Shore Community Chamber of Commerce, hopes some sort of balance can be reached.

"We need to stay rural and countrified," said Miller, whose organization is working with the recently formed North Shore Destination Group to entice tourists to vacation at area locations such as Turtle Bay instead of coming in from Waikiki and leaving after a few hours.

"One of the drawbacks to being a destination is that we don't have the infrastructure in Hale'iwa to support the visitors. We don't have sidewalks, we don't have a public bathroom, we don't have a visitors center.

"It's important how we handle this thing because we will ruin what we have if we get too overrun with people."