The Coral Cruiser

Photo: Art Brewer

The price of surfing the Pipeline on a regular basis came in a variety of forms. All of them are etched vividly in my memory. There were the psychological costs: dealing with the fears and anxiety induced by the most terrifying and powerful wave in the known surfing world. There were the physical costs inflicted on flesh, blood, sinew, bone, and muscle during wipeouts that were as certain a part of any session there as the paddle out into the fearsome lineup. The material costs of broken surfboards were, however, arguably the most painful and certainly the most frequent.

Throughout the winter seasons of 1969 through 1971, I’m sure I broke at least one board for every two times I surfed the place. I made all my own boards and most had some design flaw I wanted to improve upon, so breaking them wasn’t so painful. But it did end my surfing for the day. I dragged the broken pieces into the shaping room, figured out how to make a better one, and by the next day I’d have a new board to try again.

If I thought the fin was working well, I’d salvage it off the broken board and use it on the next one. Surfboard materials were cheap and the waves uncrowded. Life more or less moved from one surfboard to the next at a slow and enjoyable pace. Those early days were a wonderful and exciting time to be a surfer and a shaper in the finest and most fertile surfing area in the world.

No two surfboards of that period looked alike. This was a function of unique design theories but also of the fact that, during the transition from longboards to short, no one knew what surfboards were supposed to look like or what worked best. Everything was in a state of transition, and there was no established norm.

The foam longboard era had been roughly a decade long. That period saw many innovations. Hobie Alter had the first signature model by Phil Edwards, who was considered to be the best surfer of the 1950s. The Yater Spoon was a favorite of noseriders at Rincon. In the South Bay, Greg Noll copied several features of Yater’s noseriding design into his ‘Da Cat’ model marketed by the inimitable Miki Chapin Dora. Hap Jacobs sold the Donald Takayama model. The Morey ‘Penetrator,’ endorsed by John Peck, came and went. Rich Harbour Surfboards had a popular design in the Trestle Special. Further south Gordon & Smith featured shapes by Mike Hynson and Skip Frye. The Hawai’i shops making longboards, Inter-Island Surf Shop in Kaka’ako and Dick Brewer’s Surfboards Hawai’i in Hale’iwa, for the most part made no radical departures from California design ideas.

But none of those boards were ready for Pipeline. That Pipeline was ridden on longboards at all—most notably by the late Butch Van Artsdalen, but also by Jock Sutherland, Jackie Eberle, Stanley ‘Savage’ Parks, and a handful of others—without numerous fatalities is astounding.

Everything began to change in the fall of 1967 when Dick Brewer returned from a hiatus in California, where he had been working for Bing Copeland creating his “Pipeliner” series. He showed up at Ala Moana with what looked like a child’s surfboard he’d made for his team rider, Gary Chapman. Basically it was an 8’10” scaled-down Pipeliner, but it was a big step away from the longboard standard. Enter the shortboard.

A few months later, Brewer shaped the first mini-gun for me at his Lahaina Cannery shaping room on Maui. It was an 8’6” dream board that stood surfboard design on its head. This was a quantum leap toward the kind of surfing we dreamed about doing on the waves that our previous equipment just didn’t allow.

Brewer got very busy after that, providing similar mini-guns for everyone else, and I got tired of waiting for boards from him. I began to build my own surfboards. When my attention turned toward the Pipeline, the whole process suddenly became more serious and focused. Surfing the Pipeline was no joking matter. Instant terror and severe injury were only one slip on a banana peel away.

At the Pipeline, the routine seemed pretty basic. A surfer caught the wave, hoped he made the incredibly steep takeoff, and turned left as quickly as possible before the whole wave crashed over to form a spinning tunnel. The surfer either made it out the end or, more often, he didn’t.

We weren’t short on desire. We knew where we wanted to be and what we had to do to get there. The technique to make the wave was to ride through the tunnel on a line that moderated between getting axed by the falling lip and getting sucked up the face and over the falls. Either of those was a horrifying thought and an even worse pummeling. There was a fine line between riding too low and riding too high. Finding that line was a key to survival in big Pipeline.

Another factor involved was that the tunnel was the fastest part of the wave. Early shortboards, like the clumsy longboards that preceded them, were notoriously unstable when subjected to sudden acceleration and high speeds. Surfboard lengths gradually stabilized enough that most surfers knew what size board fit their own styles and the waves they were attempting to ride. More subtle features such as outline templates, rail and bottom contours, and rocker curves were still evolving. Different designers had different ideas, and nearly every day there was a test flight in progress.

There was a day at Sunset Beach when Bob McTavish boldly attempted an off-the-lip on an extremely wide-tailed, deep vee-bottom Australian design. Much to the amusement—and horror—of seasoned Hawai’i surfers watching from the point, McTavish looked as though he was launched off a springboard from a tall building. To his credit, he paddled back out to try again but the results were similar. The powerful winter waves quickly revealed design limitations of the new equipment while showing little mercy to the test pilots.

One day on the drive home after another session at the Pipeline resulted in the usual broken board, I had an inspiration. In talking about design theory with other surfers, one of the ideas that seemed to hold merit was the concept of the “nine-inch tail.” Nine inches, measured twelve inches up from the tail, was a very narrow tail. The few occasions it had been tried before were with experimental Waimea big-wave guns that were ten feet or more in length.

A tail that narrow would be difficult, if not impossible, to turn, but the waves of Waimea had not required much maneuvering. As I drove, I thought that a narrow tail might actually be an advantage at the Pipeline, where the wave was so steep, hollow, and fast. I had read that the steering on fast race cars was tighter than normal because at high speeds, loose steering could be dangerous. I figured the same theory applied to the Pipeline.

I got to the shaping room and drew an outline that included the nine-inch tail; it looked very narrow. I laid the blank on the floor and stood on it in where I would be as I took the drop at Pipeline. My back foot almost touched the outline. If my foot had been any further back, my toes and heel would have draped over either side. Despite that minor detail, I felt I was on the right track, even though the outline shape was different from any of my previous boards, or anyone else’s for that matter.

A new energy flowed through me as I started running my Skil 100 electric planer up and down the blank, shaping it to match the vision I had in my mind. A flat to slightly concave bottom shape flowing into a slight vee out the tail worked best for me. The rocker was much less of a consideration at that time and was predetermined by the blank; basically, it was very flat.

I shaped turned-down rails from nose to tail, a result of experimentation Reno Abellira and I had done with Mike Hynson, a great surfer and shaper from La Jolla, California. Among many design ideas during the abrupt transition from the California foam longboards to the shortboards of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hynson’s low-rail theory was perhaps the single most significant breakthrough. Low rails were the linchpin that tied all the other design factors together to make the shortboard a truly functional direction for the future.

When the shaping was done, I put the board on the glassing rack, draped the fiberglass over it, and mixed up a batch of resin. My previous boards had been yellow tints, the smoothest color to laminate evenly, and the easiest to spot in rip currents when swimming after a board in the days before leashes. For this departure, however, I wanted something unique. I added a dash of brown pigment into the yellow, stirred it up and poured it out on the fiberglass-shrouded blank. The color, depending on who was looking, was sort of a sad yellowy tan, but there was no turning back on the already catalyzed resin. I suppose in a generous mood one could call the color coral, but one might also have described it as baby-shit brown.

Tail stalling the Coral Cruiser to set up the tube through the inside section at the Pipe during the 1971 Expression Session. Photo: Jeff Divine

For me the best days were when there were only a few good waves mixed in with a lot of bad ones.

Back then I never gave much thought to a surfboard’s lifespan, especially at the Pipeline. I figured if I didn’t grow to like this color, the board probably wouldn’t last long anyway. I finished up the lamination, stuck on the fin I had used on several previous boards, and put on the final hot coat so it would be ready to sand the next morning.

I was shaping at Surf Line Hawai’i, a shop owned by Fred Schwartz. Fred, although a tough taskmaster and shrewd retailer, was still a great boss. As long as I finished up my orders, I had an open schedule and, the best part, a constant supply of Clark Foam blanks to make myself a board anytime I had a new idea to try.

A phone call to the Country had confirmed that the swell was still running, so I went in early to sand my board and get out to the Pipe to try it. A fast way to get a new board done quickly was to do a sand finish. All showroom boards were glossed after sanding to make them shiny and more saleable. By foregoing the gloss coat I would have a less attractive and slightly weaker board, but I could ride it right away. I sanded the bottom, the fin lay-up, and just a little bit of the way up the deck. In a short time, I was ready to go.

Strapping down my new board on the roof racks of my VW Bug, I stepped back to eyeball the side profile. The rack level was a perfect setup for a clean side view of the shape. This look could tell a lot about how the board would ride before it ever got into the water. I liked what I saw and that image stayed in my mind as I began the drive out to the Country.

When I got to the Pipeline, the waves were decent but nothing spectacular. This was fine by me because the infrequent good waves were not enough to attract anyone else. The beach and lineup were empty, perfect for trying out an experimental shape. All shapes of the period were experiments, but my new board was a dramatic departure from the general standard of the time. I didn’t want to “make ass” in front of my friends if it didn’t work; that had happened enough times already.

I already had a thing going with the Pipeline, a relationship with the break that went beyond the usual favorite surf spot connection. On certain days during the preceding few years, I felt the place was trying to communicate with me on some deep level. Most surfers regarded the Pipeline as a heavy duty “yang” surf spot because of the explosive nature of this powerful break. I felt differently and had already decided that the Pipeline was a “she.” I loved her but was still trying to figure out if she loved me. If she did, it must have been tough love because I got my butt kicked on a regular basis.

But that was standard; everyone took a licking at the Pipe. For this reason, there were not a lot of guys who surfed there often. The Pipeline was one assault after another on minds, bodies, and wallets. It just plain wore guys out because there wasn’t any question about whether or not a surfer was going to suffer a terrifying wipeout; it was only a matter of when.

One reason the wave is so hollow is because the reef is shallow. A good fall almost certainly resulted in hitting the bottom, but to eat it with the force of the lip pressing down was similar to a high-speed head-on collision in a thin-skinned convertible without seatbelts. A Peruvian surfer named Shige had been killed there a few years before, smashed headfirst into the bottom, crushing his skull.

I had fallen out of the top of a wave once, landing feet first and going down a lot deeper than I anticipated. Upon finally hitting bottom, I pushed off only to bang my head on coral. I had gone into one of the deep crevices and smashed into an overhang when I tried to resurface. It was impossible to see with the turbulence but I could feel the reef on all sides of me. For a moment I began to panic until the whitewater washed me up and out of the hole. I made it a point to dive the entire area between swells, study the bottom, and know what to expect next time.

The more I surfed it, the better I understood the many moods of the Pipeline. I found that those picture-perfect days when every wave was good were exceedingly rare, with some winter seasons not having even a single day like that. And when those great days did occur, the lineup was packed, as were the photographers on shore. Everyone hoped to strike it rich.

For me the best days were when there were only a few good waves mixed in with a lot of bad ones. The ugly waves would deter most surfers from even checking the surf for very long.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sunset Beach was the main spot. The best surfers were found there, as were the biggest, most consistent waves. But there just weren’t that many surfers back then, which is why the Pipeline could have good waves and nobody surfing.

That’s how it was for my new surfboard’s maiden voyage. I paddled out to a completely empty lineup and had my pick of any wave I wanted. I already knew which ones I liked. I had a lineup right in front of Warren Harlow’s house and hung out over the boil from the big crack that I had once been stuffed inside. It was as though an “X” marked the spot for my takeoff point.

Without many bodies in the takeoff zone, I was free to range around. There were several different starting places further inside, depending on where the sets came. There were also several places to avoid where the waves broke too fast and too hollow to safely ride them. I liked my outside takeoff best of all; it was the most likely spot to get in easy and set up for a long tuberide through the bowl section.

A good-looking set approached and I got ready. I let the first wave go past. My theory was to take the biggest wave of the set so I wouldn’t be kicking out of a smaller one, only to have the next one break outside of me. The third wave looked good, so I swung my board around to get into it.

It never took more than two or three good strokes of paddling to catch the waves I wanted at the Pipeline. If it took more than that, there was something wrong with the wave. The best waves were always very easy to catch. The bad ones were difficult. Too many times before I had kept paddling, thinking I had it, only to get hung up in the lip, drop into space, and freefall into the pit.

Falling out of the sky on the takeoff is never a good way to eat it at the Pipe. The water in front of the wave is being drawn into and up the face of the wave—this guarantees that the hapless surfer will be sucked back over a second time immersed in the powerful curl. That’s how guys got really hurt, being driven into the shallow reef bottom in an uncontrolled body contortion, often as not headfirst.

My first wave, however, was an effortless takeoff. I leapt to my feet and began the steep descent. The board held the vertical line so easily that I was able to curve into an angle on the drop, instead of being forced to drive straight down. With plenty of speed and a good angle at the bottom, I cut a quick, easy turn to duck underneath the falling lip and entered the tube section on a perfect line.

At Pipeline there was always plenty of room in the tube, and that new board leapt across the bowl section, accelerating as it crossed the part of the wave that made the Pipeline so famous and challenging. I exited the tube in a spray of mist from the air compressed by the spinning tunnel. It literally blew me out of the tube, stinging my face and body like a thousand tiny needles.

Well, I thought as I rode out over the shoulder, the new board seemed to work fine. Or had that been just an easy wave, one of those “free rides” a surfer gets every once in a while?

I paddled back out wondering about that and returned to sit on my lineup spot to wait for a second try. While I waited, I got off the board to see how it sat on the water. Again I liked what I saw. Some surfboards are that way. I could look from any angle and the curves would flow together smoothly. I ducked underwater to look at the air bubble the board rested on, an indication of how much wetted surface the board would plane on. Reaching up to feel the rails, I ran my hands along both sides, as I held the board in place with my toes on the fin.

I climbed back aboard as another set approached. Picking the wave that looked best, I once again caught it without much effort. Just three strokes and I could feel the board lift as it connected with the wave’s energy. It was a bigger wave with a steep face but the narrow tail held in firmly on the slide down. I was early at the bottom, ran out into the flat ahead of the wave, and banked a long bottom turn. As I came around, my direction parallel with the wall, I pressed down into a tail stall to allow the curl to get ahead. The tube rushed by and I lowered the nose back down, letting the board run again. It took off like a jet, and again I was amazed at the instant acceleration and positive control speeding through the tunnel.

Other boards before had felt squirrelly in that position, on the verge of spinning out. I moved slightly forward and into a tighter crouch when the tube funneled down toward the end. Like a cherry pit spit out with force, the wave shot me out into the daylight. I cruised with plenty of speed over the shoulder of the wave until I came to a stop.

Sitting back down, I knew I had something special in this surfboard. It seemed to fit the Pipeline wave like no other board before. It made everything easy, a total cruise. Right then a name popped into my mind, and from that moment on the board would be the Coral Cruiser.

Somehow the Coral Cruiser defied tradition and stayed in one piece. On an early morning with a clean west swell and glassy conditions, it revealed to me the biggest, most significant lesson about surfing the Pipeline and big, hollow waves in general. That morning I pulled into a long, unmakeable tube. For some reason, instead of bailing out like everyone did in that impossible situation, I stayed on my board until the wave closed down around me.

I really don’t know what prompted me to keep riding until the end, but I was certainly surprised when I surfaced and found my surfboard right next to me instead of on its way in to the beach. I thought about what happened as I jumped on and paddled back out.

On the next wave, the section again closed down, and again the Coral Cruiser popped up beside me. A light bulb went on in my mind. I thought that if a tube was collapsing on itself, then there was no place for the surfboard to go. Once the force of the wave passed on, the board would resurface in the same place.

Furthermore, it might be safer to ride into the inner ending of the wave because the board slowed down or stopped altogether. Bailing out as soon as one realized there was no way to make a wave was a risky maneuver. At the Pipeline, the risks were magnified. It was downright dangerous, and after attempting this escape technique, many guys had been carried up the beach on their boards much the same as fallen warriors were carried on their shields from the battlefield. Tuberiding in 1970 was a somewhat new experience in the broad context of surfing.

Surfers had been getting inside the curls of waves since the beginning of surfing, but the equipment precluded anyone from riding the hollowest deep surfaces. There were several surfers who had figured out how to ride inside the Ala Moana bowl on the old longboards. Jackie Eberle and Jock Sutherland were skillful tuberiders as far as their equipment allowed. But for the general surfing public, a tuberide usually had been accidental and short. Surfing a big wave, especially one like the Pipeline, involves a great degree of uncertainty.

Mostly through the innate design characteristics of the Coral Cruiser, and not through any tremendous skill on my part, I had stumbled upon a discovery of significant magnitude in regard to riding inside the tube. The design of the Coral Cruiser was the result of a long process of trial and error, but the lightbulb moment I had was more in the nature of a divine revelation. I suddenly knew something that no one else had found out yet, or if they had, they weren’t telling and certainly were not using this information to increase their success in riding the tube.

My confidence swelled with this realization. My surfboard had taught me a trick that, in the future, would save me many swims to the beach and probably a few to the emergency room. Everyone knows this stuff now, but back then, it was brand-new information that accelerated the learning curve dramatically.

The Coral Cruiser got complete validation during the 1971 Golden Breed Expression Session. This “non” event was the collaborative brainchild of Jeff Hakman, Duke Boyd, and Dick Graham. Created as a promotion for Golden Breed surfwear, affiliated with Hang Ten, it reflected the sentiments of most surfers of the period in that it wasn’t a contest and there would be no winner. All the invitees would be paid the tidy sum of $200 for surfing twice in a free-flowing, noncompetitive format.

The idea was that this atmosphere would enhance creativity and a higher level of performance. The inaugural event had been held the winter before, but the surf had been uncooperative at the designated venue. The winter of 1971 was a different story, as the invited surfers gathered at ‘Ehukai Beach Park on a grey morning that looked like rain. The gloomy weather was offset by a strong west swell that was too powerful for Sunset Beach, where second reef sets mauled the inside lineup.

At the Pipeline’s Second Reef, booming sets stood up tall from an ocean laced with lines of swell. Most of the invitees were not regular surfers at the Pipe, and many had never surfed the outside lineup. There was an air of apprehension mixed with the excitement that the event was finally getting the surf its promoters had dreamed of. Massive sets rolled in without let up, causing discussions about the difficult paddle out, the horrendous drops, and gaping barrels. I was smiling because it was exactly the kind of surf in which the Coral Cruiser reveled in.

Finally, the first heat was called and the 1971 Expression Session got underway. Eddie Aikau and Barry Kanaiaupuni paddled out to the Pipeline for the first time I had ever seen them surf there. Both were fearless surfers in the prime of their careers, but backside at Second Reef Pipe was a formidable challenge. Collective winces went up from the beach as they bravely pulled into closeout sections that looked like tall buildings falling. Eddie ventured outside and picked off a beautiful peak on the Second Reef lineup.

A photo of his wave ran on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser the following morning. I kept a copy for years until the newsprint eventually deteriorated to dust. It was my all-time favorite photo of the Pipeline.

Billy Hamilton, Sam Hawk, and Jackie Baxter in the next heat charged the hollow, difficult waves and put up a good showing. A skinny, young, fresh-faced Rory Russell got the best rides, crouching low and streaking through several long barrels.

Tom Stone and I were in the final heat of the day. It was still grey and cloudy, but the giant sets had tamed down and solid ten-foot sets focused on First Reef, the premier Pipeline lineup. Tom and I had grown up together surfing Ala Moana. We watched the best tuberiders of the longboard period, Conrad Cunha and Sammy Lee, do their thing on thick, tubular Pole Set days when the south swell ran big. Of the entire field of invited surfers, we were the only two who surfed the Pipeline on a regular basis, and there was no apprehension on our part. We were totally pumped by the waves and couldn’t wait to get into them.

Tommy, one of Mike Diffenderfer’s team riders, had some beautiful boards by the master shaper. He preferred a sleek balsawood gun that had served him well during many sessions at the Pipe, and he was riding it that day. I had my trusty Coral Cruiser, a homemade surfboard that looked drab next to Tom’s shiny gun. But I knew there was infinite magic contained within her lackluster exterior.

The waves were neither clean nor perfect. The swell was raw and a little unruly, but to Tom and me, it was still good Pipeline with plenty of tubes. Tom caught a wave, and then I caught one. Both gave up decent tuberides. Tommy got another while I waited through the few behind until a big, healthy wave rolled toward me.

I had to paddle out to it, and it lurched up suddenly, forcing me to spin quickly and take off late. The thick lip heaved just as I stood up, and I felt my board disconnect from the wave. It was a bad moment: Airdrops at the Pipeline have a scarily low rate of success. But the Coral Cruiser re-entered the water smoothly, allowing me to set my line and pull up cleanly into the tube. Out of the corner of my eye as I went over the ledge, I had seen Tom paddling out over the shoulder. He had a perfect ringside seat to my late drop. The thought that he had witnessed the heavy takeoff made me smile.

When I paddled back out, I could see he was shaking his head. With a rueful smile he asked, “How did you make that drop? I could see your whole fin not even touching the wave.”

I laughed and gave all the credit to my surfboard. The Coral Cruiser, masked in her plain-Jane glass job, was the most efficient shape for riding the steep, hollow waves of the Pipeline. The next issue of Surfer magazine ran a cover shot of an inside tuberide from the session that day.

I got orders for the same shape as the Coral Cruiser, some of them from very good surfers whom I admired, and I gained quite a bit of confidence in my surfboard shaping. Two summers before, Jack Shipley, the head salesperson at Surf Line Hawai’i, and I had joined together to open a shop of our own just down the street. We called the new shop Lightning Bolt Surf Company. The brand and insignia would go on to become recognized by surfers everywhere. Eventually it would grow into an international licensing company, the first of its kind in the surf world.

The Coral Cruiser would stay intact, and at one point, I painted a small blue lightning bolt on her deck. Eventually, she would become relegated to the back of the pile, replaced by shiny, new bright-colored Lightning Bolt boards. She sadly sank into obscurity, left under a house somewhere and forgotten. When I did think of her and all she had done for me, it was too late. She was gone. But I’ll never forget the magic, the excitement, and the many glorious moments when she was the best that ever was.