Herbie

Herbie and his Kawasaki in the front yard of the Pipe house, looking for some help to launch his ski. Photo: Denjiro Sato

Herbie Fletcher is one of the surfing world’s most colorful characters. If a single word could most completely describe his life, that word would be passion. Herbie always has something going on, something that momentarily consumes him with passion. This trait is infectious. It permeates his whole family.

There were plenty of good times over the last forty years, but a lot of them centered on the time we owned the Pipe house together. His boys were growing up fast. Christian was just beginning to polish up his high-flying act. Nathan was still a youngster but had a memory like a steel trap. He could tell me what everyone was wearing as many days or weeks back as I wanted to go: shirt, pants, shoes, right down to the color and style of the socks and how high or low they were.

Dibi, Herbie’s wife, was in a class all her own, an avid and intense pursuer of most anything life threw at her. She went after, in turn, athletics, business, art, music, and dance. She embraced each with that characteristic Fletcher passion. She mastered it, wrung from it all she could get or want, then moved on to something new and completely different with undiminished zeal.

Dibi’s enthusiasm is illustrated in the example of her receiving a call from the high school administration to report that Christian was being disruptive in class, and to inquire whether she would care to accompany him for a day to see for herself what the problem was. Certainly, she agreed, saying she would be there for his first class of the day the following morning.

The bell rang to start school. The class members seated themselves, and the teacher settled in to begin the day’s lessons. Suddenly the door swung open with a loud bang and in walked Dibi. She was dressed in a very short leather mini skirt, a skin-tight net top, high-heeled boots up to her knees, and sporting her hair ratted out in a Tina Turner-style hairdo.

Dibi is a very well-built woman and dressed in such fashion was a sight to turn heads at the Academy Awards ceremony, let alone in a ninth-grade class. She stood in the doorway demurely looking in on the shocked students, who, along with the teacher, gaped with their jaws hanging open. The room emanated a silence as if to invite heavenly sounds, perhaps the wings of angels softly stirring.

What came instead was one of Christian’s friends whispering, “Christian, it’s your Mom.”

Dibi announced to the teacher and the class that she was there to spend the day with her son, who didn’t seem to understand the importance of school—and furthermore, that the lessons to be learned there might grow in importance as life unfolded.

The class was utterly disrupted, albeit duly impressed. The unfortunate teacher was in shambles. Nothing in her career had prepared her for the radiant apparition of Dibi the Disco Goddess at 8:00 a.m. None of the students could take their eyes off Dibi, who sat there like a queen, aloof and undisturbed by the hubbub around her. Christian, of course, was trying without success to melt into his seat and disappear. When class ended, everyone bolted, running to tell the rest of the school about Christian’s mom.

Christian tried to steer his mother around the back way to his next class. Dibi would have none of it. She flatly informed her errant young son, “No way buster, we’re going right down the middle, where everyone can see us, and if this doesn’t teach you a lesson about how to behave here at school, wait till you see the outfit I have picked out for next time.”

Life in the Fletcher family could make Technicolor blush. This episode, centered on the head of the family, Herbie, began early one morning at the Pipeline house I shared with them. We all woke up to a giant swell hitting the Country. Huge waves were breaking out on the third reef in front of the house, way out of control and unrideable.

“Come on Herb, let’s go check Waimea,” I suggested to Herbie, as we absorbed our morning herb tea while watching mountains of whitewater churn the Pipeline into chaos and confusion.

Eventually we stumbled out to Herbie’s station wagon and drove out Ke Nui Road. The sun had not yet come up over the hills that shadow the beachfront of the North Shore. Going by Three Tables we got a quick glimpse of the surf and it had Waimea Bay written all over it. Turning the corner by the Waimea Tower, I looked back and saw a set pouring into the Bay. It was definitely Waimea size. As we pulled into the parking lot the set was still going. The waves looked good in the twenty-foot range with clean, morning offshore winds careening the spray back off the crests as they climbed into the sky.

“Herbie, don’t even stop, let’s go get your ski, you’re all over this,” I said to him.

We circled the parking lot, but Herbie, ever the careful surfer, said “Hey, we gotta check this out a little better.”

So we turned right and drove up to park alongside the road up above the Bay where we had a nice vantage point to look down on the lineup. There were a few guys sitting outside and the lighting was still dim where they were waiting. The sun had yet to emerge from the hills shadowing the lineup, but way out to sea, light was shining on the next set marching toward shore.

Those waves looked majestic in the morning light. The lines were tall and thick; they looked solid. We watched as the surfers in the lineup spotted the set coming and paddled to get into position. One of them spun around and paddled for one of the bigger waves. It jacked up like only Waimea can, hanging the hapless surfer in the lip until he freefell into oblivion.

No one else tried for any of the other waves. The wiped-out surfer finally surfaced after long, scary seconds. He was swept in toward where his surfboard already had washed ashore.

“Come on, Herbie,” I taunted. “This is what you want, this is you, there’s hardly anyone out, it’s perfect for your ski. This is what you’ve been waiting for.”

“OK, let’s go get it,” he agreed, and he turned the car around and headed back to the house.

Herbie’s Kawasaki Jet Ski was a product of years of trial and error. He was one of the few guys to really push riding the machine in big surf. His experiences at Outside Pipeline were heroic, downright death defying. Randy Laine was another surfer who was jet skiing in the surf, although not very much in the big waves that Herbie liked.

Herbie paid particular attention to the engine on his ski. That motor had more time, work, and money invested in making it run better than the cost of a whole new ski. It was tuned as finely as was possible for this machine. Herbie had big Pipeline and Waimea in mind as he was paying to have the motor prepared for him.

That morning at Waimea was everything he had been hoping for during all the preparation and months of waiting. I kept reminding him of that. If it had been me about to do this, go out in giant Waimea, I would have said, “Shut the hell up so I can think and mentally prepare myself for what is ahead.” But Herbie is a mellow guy, and all my bantering and telling him to hurry up had little or no effect on his state of mind.

Maybe he needed someone to push him a little bit. Those were some pretty huge waves he was about to challenge. While he had been in a lot of big surf in front of the house at the Pipeline, he had never ridden his ski at Waimea. The specter of Waimea Bay and all the scary stories that surround it are pretty heavy stuff.

Back at the house we got the ski loaded up, collected Herbie’s sleepy son Nathan, who had just woken, and headed back to the Bay. As we pulled into the parking lot a set rolled through that broke across the entire front of the Bay, closing it out completely. It was a chilling sight. Herbie started to slow down a little as the whitewater closed down the channel. Still, I kept pushing him.

“Come on, there should be a nice lull after this set and you can get out easy,” I said as we pulled the ski out of the back of the car.

Herbie had this clever little sand trolley with fat tires so that he could roll the ski down to water. We got him going, pushing his ski down the beach right in the middle of the Bay. There was a long lull, so the shorebreak was pretty tame for the moment as Herbie got the ski down close to the water. I grabbed the trolley while he waited for a surge to push the ski into the water.

Nathan and I dragged the trolley up past the high water mark and went over to the empty lifeguard tower where we could watch the action. A little wave washed up the beach. Herbie pushed his ski into the water, fired it up, and zoomed out toward the lineup.

Watching a guy who knows what he’s doing in big surf, especially on a souped-up jet ski, is very exciting. Herbie was probably the world’s leading expert for this specialized exercise, and he had it completely dialed in. He blasted out to the lineup at high speed just as the next set was arriving. On the first big one, he did what we call the “berm shot.”

Riding up on the swell, he banked it back around, carved a perfect track 180 degrees, and dropped into a beautiful, big wave. Stalling a little at the bottom, Herbie let the wave stand up taller before making his turn toward the shoulder. Just like any surfer would want to do if his surfboard had a throttle, Herb turned, cutback, and weaved all over that wave, riding it all the way into the Bay. The two waves behind were bigger and were breaking across the whole channel again as he pulled out of his wave. It was another closeout, but Herbie was an expert at this. He stalled around, waiting for the whitewater to dissipate a little before punching over it just at the moment it was backing off before it lurched up again and dumped in the shorebreak.

Stalling again for the next tumultuous wall of whitewater, he played it perfectly once more. He barely got splashed as he waited for exactly the right moment to go over the closeout. In the lifeguard tower, Nathan and I were fighting each other over the single pair of binoculars so we could see the action up close.

Herb motored back out toward the lineup. Through the binoculars I could see a lone surfer sitting over in the middle of the channel away from the lineup, probably resting after that last closeout set. From the vantage on top of the lifeguard tower and through the magnified binocular lens, I suddenly spied what seemed to be perhaps the biggest set of the day so far.

Herbie was in position and this time decided he was going to go for the biggest wave since it appeared that none of the surfers in the lineup were interested in those waves. He went over the tops of several twenty-foot-plus waves, dropping out of sight into the trough for a moment before reappearing in front of the biggest, meanest-looking wave I had seen all winter. Banking around in his patented “berm shot,” he dropped over the edge and down the face of the enormous wave.

This, however, was one of those killer waves, thick and extremely powerful. It kept jacking up, ledging like only Waimea outside the boil will do. I had Herbie centered in the binoculars and could feel the incredible power of this wave as he gassed it down the face. That wave was feathering across the entire bay and was still outside the boil that is the normal takeoff at Waimea.

It was a wave of gargantuan proportions, probably a death wave on a surfboard, but I felt Herbie had the perfect tool in his souped-up Kawasaki Jet Ski. As he got near the bottom of the wave, I figured he would just throttle up and drive away from the wave face, staying safely out in front of the maelstrom. Squeezing hard on the binos, as if that would make me see better, I could see he was not leaving the wave behind, but in fact was staying dangerously close to the face.

Is his super-duper, blueprinted, and ported engine crapping out on him? I asked myself. That would be very bad. Or maybe he was just stalling to play it tight. This was potentially the wave of a lifetime, and Herbie seemed to be aware of that as he weighed his options.

I watched the wave grow more in height as the thick lip, arrayed across the width of the Bay, pitched up and out. It landed with an earth-shattering crash right behind him; the explosion seemed to blast him and his ski up in the air. Herbie’s body was fluttering like a flag, his hands on the handlebars his only attachment to the ski as the rest of his body flapped like a towel on a clothesline in brisk wind and his mechanical savior bounced like a ping-pong ball in the whitewater.

“Gas it, Herbie, run away from there, what the hell are you doing,” I muttered.

But he couldn’t seem to get away from the wave. The whitewater boiling behind threatened to eat him alive at any moment. The ski bounced so high in the air that I thought it would come down nose first and endo before our eyes. But somehow Herbie maintained a death grip and hung on through it all. Later he would say that he had the throttle wide open but to no avail. The wave was too big and strong; he simply couldn’t run away from it.

He hung on, heading to shore and finally running right up the beach as far as he could, high and dry and, more importantly, safe and sound.

I remembered the guy sitting in the channel. I swung the binoculars back toward the channel, searching in front of the whitewater of the next wave, which also had closed out across the bay. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a surfboard’s nose but no person as the next wave came relentlessly forward. Almost the instant before the whitewater washed over it, I saw a head surface and then get buried again by the mountainous foam.

Herbie does his patented berm-shot takeoff: going full speed toward the incoming wave, then power turning on the face, and banking it back around a full 180 degrees. Photo: Jeff Hornbaker

“Nathan, I just saw someone caught inside of that wave,” I said to him sitting right beside me on the lifeguard’s seat.

“I don’t see anyone,” he answered. He was uninterested because there was nothing to see except boiling whitewater.

I kept looking through the binos, watching as the next wave approached, another closeout. The surf had definitely come up since this morning and it wasn’t even 8 a.m. yet. Again as the whitewater rolled in, I saw the board come up and like the last time, only a moment before the wave hit, I saw the head again.

“There he is again,” I told Nathan. He looked and saw only whitewater; there was nothing else to see.

“I think you’re seeing things,” he said, “There’s no one there.”

But I had seen someone, and I knew he wasn’t getting much air as the sets churned over him. He must be on the verge of drowning. The shorebreak was tremendous in a set like this. The explosions were sending water thirty to forty feet in the air and shaking the sand under the tower. We could feel it where we sat.

The next closeout came on, and once again I caught a quick glimpse of the board and head of the surfer before it hit. This time Nathan was looking at the right time.

“I saw him. Oh man, I sure wouldn’t want to be where he is,” he said.

We kept watching as the next two waves came on, seeing the guy for just an instant before the wave rolled over him. He probably only had time for a little gulp of air before he went under again. The power of those big closed out waves was staggering. I could only imagine what kind of thrashing this guy was going through underwater. Finally the outside sets stopped, but still he had not come to the surface.

At last he popped up as though the ocean was done chewing on him and spit him out. He was directly in front of the lifeguard tower. Nathan and I sat there, rendered speechless by what we had just witnessed.

Somehow the guy flopped on top of his surfboard. He was only about twenty feet from shore. Without a backward glance he paddled straight in.

Normally there in the middle of the beach at Waimea on a swell like this, the shorebreak would be backbreaking and deadly. But it was as if the Bay had had its way with this poor surfer and was giving him a momentary reprieve. Not another ripple came as he paddled, pretty fast considering what he had just been through, to the safety of the dry sand. Likely, seeing the beach so close galvanized him with one last rush of adrenaline after the horrible pounding he had just received. He made the shore, staggered up, and just keeled over face first in the sand.

Kenny Bradshaw was just walking down to the corner to paddle out. He put his board down and walked down to the collapsed surfer. Kenny is a strong man. He picked up the guy by his shoulders, stood him on his feet, wiped the sand off his face, and appeared to ask if he was OK.

Nathan had the binoculars and exclaimed, “It’s Scott Farnsworth.”

Once Kenny stopped holding him up and let him go, Scott immediately collapsed again. Ken picked him up and literally carried him further up the beach. Kenny dropped Scott in the sand, grabbed his own surfboard, and headed out.

Herbie, walking up to retrieve the trolley to go get his ski, looked over at Farnsworth lying in the sand and asked, “What happened to him?”

I just shook my head. Nathan went off with his dad to bring the ski back to the car, and I could see the hand gestures and body language as he told the story as only a thirteen-year-old could.

Herbie had had his fill of Waimea for the moment. He would return later that afternoon and completely rip the place apart on his jet ski. No one would ever ride a ski like that, at least not that I’ve seen in my life thus far.

Herbie was riding one of the early standup-model jet skis, a notoriously unstable machine, in enormous waves, bigger than anyone else had ridden at the time. What he did will be remembered. Herbie was the Man when it came to jet skiing the big surf.

A few days later when the surf had dropped and the Pipe got good, Scott Farnsworth was out surfing, took a late drop, got slammed into the reef and washed, momentarily paralyzed, up on the beach. Herbie, Fast Eddie, a few other guys standing in the yard, and I went down and carried him up the beach on his surfboard. As if we were carrying a fallen warrior on his shield we brought him into the yard, hosed the sand off him, and waited for the lifeguards to run down from ‘Ehukai.

I said to him, “Scott, this hasn’t been a few good days for you. I watched what you went through the other day at Waimea and now this.”

He was in pain. He told me his parents were coming in that day from California to watch him surf. At that moment he didn’t feel like ever surfing again. But he was a very good surfer, young at the time with a pro career ahead of him. I knew that how he felt then would change. The ambulance came and took him away. Sure enough, he returned with his father a few days later to thank us for helping him and pick up his surfboard left in the yard.

I had been right, too. Although a little stiff and sore, Scott was most anxious to get back in the water.

Herbie and I would go on to have a lot more adventures together in different parts of the world. Nathan would grow up to become not only an outstanding world-class surfer, but also a top-notch skateboarder, high-flying motorcyclist, daredevil snowboarder, as well as a rock star in his own band.

The Fletcher family still goes through life at their own pace, in their own way, setting standards everywhere and in everything they do. I feel fortunate to have them all as friends.