People Who Surf: An Interview With Palos Verdes Artist and Charger Zen Del Rio

Zen, charging

It’s kept it from being overrun by the surfing masses.

And it’s still doing that today?
Pretty much.

What’s changed?
There are a lot of professionals who are locals now. Family men. A lot of older surfers are still surfing. Mostly though, the old crew is still the main crew running things today. And they’re all pretty good still. A lot of the guys who I went to high school with have designed their lives around surfing. They travel in the summer and surf here in the winter.

So what about big waves? How did that get under your skin?

In Hawaii. I saw the guys doing it and I really wanted to do it too.

When was your first trip over there?

‘72. I was still in my teens. And in ‘75 I went over to Hanalei and there was this huge, perfect day, and this guy kind of talked to me and said, “Hey, you know, it looks like you want to do it. So why don’t you go do it?” And I had all these excuses; “My board’s not big enough.” So he says, “Well, I have a board that’s big enough.”

Who was it?

This underground charger named Donnie Jimenez. He was hurt at the time, he had a compressed vertebra in his back or something, and he said, “Do you feel like your life has meaning?” And I said, “Yea, I’d like to think so.” So he says, “Who’s to say that your death doesn’t also have meaning then?” And then he sort of explained that if I went out and kept my wits about me and played it conservative, I’d be able to come in and come out. And I was like, “What would it be like just sitting in the channel.” And he said, “That’s easy. You don’t just want to do that. You want to get a wave. I can tell.” So, something changed then for me. I felt like it was all meant to be. I felt like this whole exchange was destiny, just from the look in his eye. So he lent me his board.

Was this your first trip over?

It was my third trip. So then I decided I was just going to go sit in the channel and see what happened. It was like 15-foot-plus. And we got down to the paddle out spot and we saw Joey Cabell paddle out. So we figured, “perfect!” He was the man at that time. Everybody looked up to him. So we sat there and it was just mind blowing. It was huge and perfect and the wind was blowing into the tube. All the sections were being held up. The wave just looked like it was standing still. And we saw Cabell get a wave and after he took off, I paddled up and over to where he had been sitting. I saw another wave come through that was a little bit smaller than the one Cabell had gotten, but I saw that it was going to break in the same spot. So I went and got this ride where I was in trim the whole way, but towards the end, the wind was blowing so hard it blew me out the back. And I couldn’t see my board. I thought it was going out to sea. But Cabell ended up retrieving it and pushing it back to me. And that was unbelievable. I thought the board was gone, but now it was back and I actually got to talk with Cabell as we were paddling back out. And I asked, “Is this a good day here? How does this compare?” And he goes, “Well, this is a good wind direction, but I surfed it like this eight years ago, only it was 10 feet bigger.” And I just got this visual of Cabell on 25-foot Hanalei with perfect conditions. He said there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and you could see all the waterfalls in the background.

How did that day affect your surfing life?
I figured out that I could do it. That I could survive it. And then the Puerto thing started. In ‘77 we went down there. And that got completely under my skin. We drove down there and we scored it.

How did you hear about Puerto?