Subjunctive past tense preterito

Question

The surfers said, "We hope that there are big waves today."

Answer 1

I probably don’t understand the question, and am not a native speaker, so there may be something incorrect in what I say, but from what I know:

In a direct quote like this one, the past is not used in the location in which you need subjunctive in what you wrote.

The surfers said, "We hope that there are big waves today."

Los surfistas dijeron “Esperamos que haya olas grandes hoy.”

Or

Los surfistas dijeron “Ojalá haya olas grandes hoy.”

If you change it to reported speech, you can use past subjunctive, but there is only the imperfect.

The surfers said that they hoped that there would be big waves today.

Los surfistas dijeron que esperaban que hubiera olas grandes hoy.

These are just my thoughts on this.