Surf Is Where You Find It (Revised and Expanded)

Photo: David Darling

Dick ‘RB’ Brewer came to Hawai’i from Whittier, California, in the underpopulated surf scene of the 1960s. He had a background in mechanical engineering and liked to build fast cars. These interests converged in this fertile surfing-ground; soon he was designing and building big-wave guns.

He opened Surfboards Hawai’i, building innovative surfboards for many top big-wave surfers of the day, including Buzzy Trent, Peter Cole, and even a very young Jeff Hakman. Brewer was a great designer and surfboard shaper, but he wasn’t much of a businessman. After only a few years his shop was losing money.

On the strength of his reputation, Dick formed an association with Hobie Surfboards, the premier surfboard manufacturer of the period. After years of making surfboards out of balsawood, Hobie Alter pioneered the art of building boards with a polyurethane foam core. Hobie sold the business of making the foam cores to his partner Grubby Clark. He kept the surfboard factory business, which was home to many great surfers of the time: Phil Edwards, Mickey Munoz, and the great Waikiki surfers, the Patterson brothers. Dick shaped Hobie big-wave guns with offset colored foam T-bands that were popular during that time. After that, he spent a brief period working with Rich Harbour at Harbour Surfboards. Jackie Eberle and Jock Sutherland rode several of the Harbour/Brewer guns to fame at Waimea Bay. In 1965 Jackie rode a Brewer gun fading left backside at the Bay, a move that was talked about in the Country for a decade.

Next Dick hooked up with Bing Surfboards in California. In 1965, he began making the Bing Pipeliner series. The Pipeliner was the zenith of surfboard evolution at that time. The Pipeliner was the board to ride in Hawai’i then. They were thin, finely foiled, and had the most progressive rocker of any surfboards of the time. Brewer was shaping boards for David Nuuhiwa, Jock Sutherland, Jimmy Lucas, Jeff Hakman, and many of the young, hot, Hawaiian surfers of the period.

In 1967, RB had a falling-out with Bing. He sawed down all the wall racks in Bing’s shop, claiming that the racks were twisting his shaped blanks. Soon after that he was back in Hawai’i.

I met RB when he arrived on the North Shore. Jock was unquestionably the Man then, with all respect due to Barry Kanaiaupuni for his unforgettable domination of Sunset Beach, a dangerous place then and now. Jock was kind enough to lend me his 9’4” Pipeliner. He did this on a regular basis and his 9’4” was the best surfboard I had ridden up to that point. RB saw me riding it one day at Velzyland, and while we were waiting for the next set, Dick offered to shape me a board of my own.

That pause in between sets at Velzyland was the beginning of our long and fruitful friendship. Soon after, RB moved over to Lahaina, Maui. Reno Abellira and I visited him there to get our boards shaped. RB told us to bring our own blanks.

We bought a couple of reject blanks full of holes from Fred Schwartz at Surf Line Hawai’i. Fred and his Surf Line shop carried boards from Yater, Hansen, Harbour, Dewey Weber, Gordon & Smith, Jacobs, and of course Bing. Surf Line Hawai’i was the main dealer for the Bing Pipeliner models, as their progressive shapes were best suited to the thick, fast waves of Hawai’i. Fred also carried a small supply of Clark Foam blanks. These were all rejects; they were cheaper and the only surplus foam Clark had for sale.

Reno and I flew into Kahului and hitchhiked to Lahaina with our precious blanks. RB had entered into an arrangement with ‘Buddyboy’ Kaohe, also known as ‘Kolohe Joe,’ a most notorious con man, but also one of the best surfers of his time. Kolohe Joe had a shaping room in the old Lahaina Cannery, where he put RB to work.

Buddyboy wasn’t pleased when Reno and I showed up with our own blanks, expecting free shape jobs from Brewer; he had an eye for getting his part of any deal. We agreed to pay him a fee for use of the shaping room, and he graciously gave RB the green light to do our boards.

Reno got his board shaped first. His was a sleek Pipeliner gun shape scaled down to 9’6” to suit Reno’s small stature. The next day it was my turn for a shape.

But things didn’t turn out as I had expected. Up drove a car full of surfers, and out jumped Nat Young, Bob McTavish, George Greenough, Ted Spencer, Russell Hughes, and John and Paul Witzig. A big swell was forecast, and they had come over from the Country hoping to catch some good surf at Honolua Bay.

McTavish had shaped all of their boards. They were unlike anything any of us, including RB, had ever seen. These unusual boards were short and wide tailed with deep vee bottoms and long, finely foiled and raked fins. RB and McTavish bullshitted for hours before the others could pry the Aussie loose to look for waves.

McTavish would leave a lasting impression on Hawai’i surfers of the era with his performance on his Aussie shortboard in that year’s Duke Kahanamoku contest at Sunset Beach. Sunset was for real that day. McTavish took off deep on the backside of the west peak, went straight down, carved a huge turn, and shot almost straight back up the pitching wall all the way to the top on a line no surfer before had ever taken while still standing on his surfboard. There he paused for a split second, with his wide vee-tail stuck into the face just under the lip, then proceeded unceremoniously to fall out of the sky. To his credit, he paddled back out. That one wave was the best he could do on his vee-bottom that day. But McTavish’s advanced theories of board design would leave many unanswered questions among elite Hawai’i surfers about their own surfboard shapes. He also would remain etched into the lore for his sheer guts.

RB was lit up from talking to McTavish as we walked over to the shaping room, where my blank waited on the racks. I was about to witness one of RB’s greatest assets. He possessed a quick and creative mind. He was able to grasp new or extreme concepts that passed over the heads of most of the other surfboard builders of the time. In addition, he had a spontaneous nature that sometimes got him into unfortunate situations. Still, he remained open and eager to try anything new and different.

RB grabbed his handsaw and, before I could say how long I wanted my surfboard, he sawed several feet off the blank. I had been hoping for a board similar to Reno’s. I think I almost cried. But RB was on a roll and drew out a template radically different than any we had seen before. While Reno snickered over in the corner because he already had his board shaped, RB proceeded to put together a wide, hotdog nose with a drawn-out, full-gun tail blending the curves together into a smooth but very different outline. The length was 8’6”.

He began planing away with his Skil 100, and before long a magically foiled board appeared. RB incorporated some of McTavish’s bottom theories, putting in a slight vee-bottom. We knew the vee-bottom used to be a significant design feature on the old Hot Curl boards of the 1940s and 1950s, but that was prior to the advent of surfboard fins. When RB was done, we carried the shaped blank across the street to John Thurston’s glass shop and put it on the rack.

John had come over from Laguna in the early 1960s to open a shop for Fred Wardy in Honolulu. Between 1963 and 1966, during my high school years, I had ridden Wardy surfboards that I bought from John. His shop was right down the street from our high school, so we had spent most of our after-school hours hanging out there.

I knew John quite well. John was involved with the Baha’i Faith and moved to Maui to start his own chapter. When Reno and I showed up with no place to stay, he kindly allowed us into his home in Honokowai where a whole bunch of O’ahu surfers, including Tom Stone, Gordie Benko, Pia Aluli, and Hoku Keawe, were crashing out.

I remember John looking at my shaped blank in his somewhat inscrutable manner behind his thick coke-bottle lens glasses. He commented simply, “Interesting.”

John glassed it, Larry Strada sanded it, and in a few days my board, along with Reno’s and Buddyboy’s new boards, were ready to go.

The surf was big that morning as we drove out toward Honolua Bay. We parked down at the boat ramp and looked out to ten-foot waves pounding into the cave that fronted the takeoff spot. All of us paddled out on our new sticks. I didn’t stay in contact with the others. I was looking out for my own interests. I was very tentative and wanted to be sure of my territory.

My first photograph at the Pipeline on the first mini-gun of the shortboard revolution. Photo: tim McCullough

Shortboards were the beginning of successful tuberiding at the Pipeline and in Hawai’i: this 8’6” Brewer started the trend. Photo: tim McCullough

Honolua Bay is a board killer at any size; there are rock cliffs just inside the takeoff zone. Perfect as it may look, underestimating the power of the peak fronting the cave is a serious lapse of judgment. At that size, it was instant mayhem. This was years before the surf leash came into use, so once a board was out of a surfer’s control he might as well just say aloha. Better that than to retrieve a board from the cave with its slippery seaweed-covered boulders and powerful waves funneling in the mouth and crashing up into the ceiling. By the time anyone could get to his board it would be splinters anyway.

Reno and I caught a few waves and played it safe out on the shoulder. But this was a north swell—it wasn’t as cleanly lined up as a northwest swell would have been. Before long, I watched Reno wipeout and lose his board. There was no way I could go in and retrieve his board with the waves that big. I watched in horror as Reno’s new board was smashed to bits.

Buddyboy was doing the Bay justice. He had every contour of it wired, even on this uneven swell. Folks used to call the place ‘Buddy’s Bay.’ But in time he also got creamed, and his brand new board too was in pieces.

I guess my momma didn’t raise a complete fool. Discretion took the better part of valor. After one wave all the way through the last inside bowl, I decided to paddle back to the boat ramp. My new surfboard was intact even if my dignity was not.

The Aussies had just arrived and paddled out on their strange-looking vee-bottoms. Nat’s board tracked out on his first wave, much as McTavish would do later at Sunset in the contest, and being stringerless, it broke about two feet back from the nose. After a while everyone else went in except Russell Hughes. He had the whole bay to himself, and he surfed it well and with style. He was conservative, choosing his waves and his lineups carefully. Eventually the Kona winds came up and blew the surf out.

Meanwhile RB, Reno, and I went with Tom Stone. Tom said he knew another good spot on the other side of the island that was offshore when the Kona winds blew. We drove over to Kahului harbor and looked at some great lefts at Paukukalo. It had a bit of a rocky shore but was nowhere near as intimidating as Honolua. We all paddled out.

This was my first time there. Later, when I lived on Maui, this place would always be my first choice during any Kona wind conditions with a northerly swell. On that first day, my new board worked like a charm. My pals begged to try it, but I wasn’t letting that board out of my grasp just yet.

Later on all the guys would ride it and realize, as I had, that RB had created a whole new generation of surfboards. We would call them mini-guns. Although we never knew it until years later, this was the precursor to what became known as the shortboard revolution.

Some weeks later, Nat came back to Maui. The surf was a more manageable size and groomed clean by the trades, and with his board repaired, Nat took the place apart. The smaller clean walls of Honolua were an ideal canvas for the lines that vee-bottom boards wanted to draw. Nat showed his surfing genius, and the vee-bottom became an integral part of surfboard design from then forward. We wouldn’t, however, see anything resembling those radical prototype Australian boards again. Their weaknesses were harshly exposed during that first winter in Hawai’i. Those wide tails simply could not handle the thickness, speed, and power of Hawaiian waves at serious size.

Maybe McTavish and his crew had started their own revolution down under, but following that first 8’6” that RB carved out for me in a moment of visionary ecstasy, none of us ever looked back. Surfing and surfboards would never be the same again. A border had been crossed, and I was privileged and very lucky to be there when it happened.

I became intimately involved with surfing and surfboards at that time and have been ever since. I give RB credit for almost single-handedly starting the shortboard revolution in Hawai’i. As duly noted, McTavish and the Aussies had their own thing going. Also that chance meeting between RB and Bob McTavish certainly prompted part of the vision Brewer had as he shaped that first mini-gun. Maybe some guys in California were doing something with shorter surfboards as well, but in Hawai’i, it was all Brewer. He shaped that 8’6” in late 1967.

By 1968, the longboard was passé. The surfboard industry was no longer the get-rich-quick scheme it had tried to become in the heydays of surfing in the 1960s. Surfboard manufacturers built up an inventory of more or less mass-produced surfboards in winter to unload on kooks in the summer. The new surfboards were designed for surfers at the top of the pile who were innovative, progressive, and always in search of something that made them surf better.

It soon became difficult to get a board from RB because he was in such demand, so I started building my own boards. In the summer of 1968, RB asked me to come to Kaua’i, where he had moved, to ghost shape for him at Hanapepe Surfboards. It was an up close opportunity to see a surfboard genius at work. In all probability, this period on the Garden Island set the course my life would follow from that point forward. Dick Brewer will certainly go down in the history of surfing as the greatest surfboard designer to ever live.

During that time, we built Jock Sutherland his famous surfboard, Purple Haze. Jock stood the surfing world on its head riding that board at the Duke Kahanamoku contest that winter. Although he didn’t win the meet, his surfing was far above the level of anyone else’s. Next came Reno’s Pocket Rocket that he wowed everyone with during the World Championships in Puerto Rico the following summer. Reno didn’t win that event either, but his surfing was the most talked about. The surfing world got the message: The surfer has a lot to do with the ride, but the surfboard is the vehicle that will take the surfer to the next level.

It was a great time to be a surfer, and an even better time to be a surfboard builder working hand in hand with the most innovative designer of the period. I guess the best lesson I learned from RB was simple: As satisfying as it is to build a surfboard that works better than the ones before it, the joy is in realizing that it is just another step in an endless progression of design that is wholly fascinating and captivating.

Surfboards are in an infinite and endless evolution. Just when the shaper thinks he has built the perfect board, he thinks of something different to make it better. I’m still doing it. So is RB.

This next adventure occurred during my time in Hanapepe. RB and I had worked all day and then heard that the surf was up. We decided we would try for an afternoon session out on the west side of the island. We drove through the lush green sugarcane fields, passing by ‘Ele’ele, Makaweli, Waimea, and Kekaha. We were headed out to the end of the road at Polihale, to a place called Queens Pond. It’s a big, beautiful white sand beach with a clear view over to the island of Ni’ihau. It was a favorite spot of ours because there was always some kind of surf.

We pulled up, parked in the kiawe trees, and ran up the side of the sand dune to see what was in store for us. A broad, clean white sand beach sloped down from the dune a good quarter of a mile before disappearing into the water.

Our first sight was a lined-up set peeling from the left and right perfectly for a distance before they came together into a closeout. It looked like it was about five or six feet where it started and about half that where the left and the right finally met. From there the whitewater rolling in to shore looked only a couple of feet high. Small, but still, it all looked good.

We had surfed here fairly often, but usually it was a typical beachbreak, disorganized and all over the place. We had never seen it so lined-up and perfect-looking. Without a second glance we ran back to the truck, jumped into our shorts, grabbed our boards, ran back up the dune and full speed down toward the water’s edge. We headed for the little channel where the left and right came together.

As we got closer, I began to see that maybe it was a little bigger than it looked at first. I slowed down a bit to check it better as we got closer. RB had worked hard all day, was hot and sweaty, and wanted to surf in the worst way. He kept running full speed, down to the water, threw his surfboard in, and started paddling out. The first thing I noticed was that the little whitewater that we thought looked about two feet from up on the dune was actually about six feet or more. Where the left and the right met, which we had thought was three to four, was at least ten feet.

It was breaking so hard that the whitewater and sand were exploding thirty feet up in the air behind the waves. The rip sucking out to the horrendous closeout was like a raging river, and it had RB in its grasp. I don’t know what he was thinking, but it was obvious he wanted to get out there fast: He had his head down and was paddling hard. He hadn’t looked to see the disaster to which he was inexorably being drawn.

Standing at the water’s edge, I couldn’t see how big the waves were outside as the whitewater in front completely masked the waves behind. But from the sound and the impact I could feel reverberating through the sand, I figured they had to be at least twenty feet. It was serious surf, and dangerous too. The riptide that I was standing in front of probably went all the way to Ni’ihau. The entire beach behind us was completely deserted. We were the only two people there. If we got in trouble, there were no lifeguards and no telephones to call anyone, even if there was someone to call. There was nothing, just us two fools.

One of us was a bigger fool because as I took this whole situation in, I knew I wasn’t about to get into the water if I could help it. Just about then, RB got to the first big whitewater; it immediately ripped his surfboard out of his hands. He wasn’t even near the closeout yet, which was fortunate because it didn’t look like anyone was going to survive that meat grinder. His board washed in to where I was standing and I picked it up. Meanwhile RB put his head back down and swam as hard as he could back toward shore. He probably wanted to retrieve his board and try to get out again.

The rip, however, had other plans for him. Even though he was swimming in, the rip was pulling him straight out toward the washing machine closeout. Worse, there didn’t seem to be any gaps in the waves. There were no lulls, just one wave after another. Back then we didn’t have the luxury of wave forecasts to tell us if this was a growing swell or at what size it would reach its maximum. We hadn’t even checked the tide chart to see if it was an incoming or outgoing tide. We were the real thing, genuine cretins challenging nature in the absence of a clue.

I could see RB wasn’t going anywhere, at least not anywhere near shore. If he gave up swimming he would be sucked into the maelstrom of sand and foam. I had scant choice. As much as I didn’t want to do it, I had to take a chance and paddle out to help him. I hoped we could both make it in before we got tired and were sucked out to sea.

I got out to him and he climbed on the surfboard with me; even with the board overloaded, it was better than swimming. Adrenaline charged our paddle strokes. Slowly we began to make headway. Finally, with some help from the incoming waves of whitewater, we got to shore and safety.

The first thing RB did was turn around and gaze back out toward the waves. It actually seemed as though he wanted to try again.

He was referring to Buzzy Trent, perhaps the greatest big-wave surfer of the early days, a man of steel and “huevos grandes.” Buzzy wasn’t afraid of any waves.

I just shook my head, “Well he ain’t here, and I ain’t going to try to go out there today, so let’s go home.”

With that, we walked back up the empty beach with our tails between our legs, got in the car, and went home. Score: waves 1, surfers 0.