THE SURFER INTERVIEW

But even then, there had to be some sort of benefit from being the best surfer in the water.

Oh, sure, everyone went to the best guys to buy pot. That was it. That's what it got them. That's how it worked. The North Shore was this little haven for outlaws within the bigger secret society. It's no secret guys like Hakman got busted smuggling weed back from Thailand but everyone was doing something. Everyone was out of their minds. Brewer had the best sunshine, which is the stuff Jock Sutherland surfed Waimea on that one night. There was a little cocaine, but most of it was psychedelics--mushrooms and acid. I remember washing things down with mushroom tea and sitting around going, "Oohh, I can hear the earth singing, mannnn." All that hippy shit. It was the '60s. There are large parts of '69 I don't even remember. But I do remember buying blanks from a guy living in a tree house for a baggy of pot, then I'd give Brewer another little baggy to shape it, take it to this guy Wolfman to finish. The whole thing would cost me like 80 bucks. For a Brewer man! The Holy Grail of boards back then.

Do you believe there is a correlation between the experimentation with psychedelics and the whole design revolution.

Oh yeah, c'mon. It's not a coincidence that the acid movement and the revolution in surfing came at the same time. Anyone that tells you differently--please...we were so high we would have tried riding a barn door. Every month things were changing drastically. Things on the North Shore were revolutionar. Not just within surfing. We were living in the country, and it was an enclave in the middle of nowhere where this amazing stuff was going on. The boards got ridiculous. Guys like Reno were riding 16-inch wide pocket rockets. Drugs are the only explanation for stuff like that. (Laughs)

How did the North Shore effect you philosophically?

It changed my entire attitude. In the book, I wrote about how there really was a saying on the North Shore in 1969 that "surfers can do anything." And I sincerely believed it. Later, when I went to Morocco and all that, dealing with these...well, cutthroat types, I really was like, "Well, these guys have never surfed Sunset." So I wasn't afraid. Truth is we--my buddy and I--we were out of our minds. They could have easily killed us. But our attitude was in some ways a self-fulfilling prophecy. We had no hesitation. Just like taking a big wave--you can't back down.

O.K. but how do you go from committed surfer living on the North Shore into full-blown smuggler? What were the outside forces involved in that transition?

Well, I had a house on Ke Iki Road, near Log Cabins, when that famous swell of '69 hit. The firefighters came to evacuate us, and my buddy and I were like, "Yeah, we're on our way." But our real plan was to smoke some hash on the roof later and watch the show (laughs). This part is in the book too. So we started smoking inside and at one point, my buddy Christopher goes to check the surf. He opens the door looks outside, freaks out, runs back in yelling something and then WHAM! A huge wave just disintegrated the house. It washed us all the way across the street. There was nothing left. No surfboards. Nothing over a foot long. Our cat was killed but somehow we survived without a scratch. We were on the front page of the paper the next day and everything. But to get to the point that whole thing really freaked us out. We were hippies, so our theory was, "Whoa, man, Mother Nature's trying to tell us something. We need to bail."

So that epic swell is what sent you to Morocco?

Yeah, we'd been smoking Moroccan hash that night, so we figured there was some symmetry in that. We'd take our student loan money and go over there and see what we could do. We knew we could get stuff cheap there and we could ride some waves.

But was smuggling pot really your primary mission?

Well, when we got there we realized just how cheap cheap was. You could buy 40 bucks worth and sell it for $1000 stateside. You didn't have to have an MBA to figure out you could make some serious money doing that. So that's what we did. I mean, we became criminals then and there. We launched ourselves into a lifestyle without hesitation, because the alternative was to go home and get a job. There was no choice as far as we were concerned.

So you became a criminal just to keep surfing?

Yeah, the dream was to make a bunch of money and do The Endless Summer one better. Remember this was around 1970. The world was a blank slate as far as surfing was concerned. Indo was still a rumor. We figured we'd find the perfect wave, the perfect place, whatever, and just buy it. Hey, I'm 21-years old and coming off the North Shore--anything is possible. Surfers can do anything.