One of those most interesting things about my Hawaii trip last December was getting to watch Gerry surf -- not just for one session, but every day for almost two weeks straight. He's got about 12 years on me, so he'd already departed the Pipeline god head by the time I was old enough to surf there...really I'd only ever seen him surf on the movies like everyone else.TrevG wrote: And how about Gerry Lopez? Now there's a legend.
In December I stayed in a house on the beach at Sunset, right on the corner next to the carpark -- the old Bernie Baker block. Gerry was staying a street or two up the point. At just before 7am every morning he'd come down the trail and onto the beach in front of the backdoor Sunset paddle-out spot, between Vals and Boneyards, where a channel leads directly out to a gap between the peak and the point. He had a SUP, one of the wide short ones that C4 makes. He'd stretch a bit, sit and watch for a few minutes, then paddle out and start surfing. Gerry is not a heavily built guy, so he doesn't confront the waves on the way out -- he judges the paddle-out quite carefully and is happy to wait for a break in order not to be inconvenienced by the rogue energy that's always lurking even in the mostly 4-6' type surf of the period. He's not an incredibly fast paddler either, but he doesn't rest, just keeps the paddle ticking over until he's where he wants to be. Watching Gerry day after day, I began to realise how his public image as a sort of Zen Master -- airbrushed so carefully by his numerous fans in the surf media from the early 70s on -- is a complete hoax, and that the truth about Gerry as a surfer is far more interesting: he is a hungry bastard, quietly ruthless in pursuit of waves. His wave alarm-clock is set at around three minutes and he'd never wait longer than that for a wave unless he absolutely could not help it; he was happy to catch a smaller or less well-formed one, or occasionally to politely drop in, if that meant he kept the wave count going. He spent as little time as possible in conversation with other surfers. His interest in each wave was total. He would work it from start to finish, looking for the pocket and the shoulder and the base rather than the lip or the faster lines on the wave-face, and sometimes riding a foam-roll almost to the sand before his little spell of concentration would be broken. He wore a cap and a fair bit of sunscreen, and did nothing at all to draw attention to himself; everything was done quite inwardly, but avidly, as if he couldn't get enough of the feeling of being in the water and riding waves. Maybe he couldn't. After all, he lives in Oregon these days a fair way away from the ocean, and this was a 10-day slice of Hawaii time.
Anyway, Gerry would stay out there till midday on some days, a wave every three minutes, then come in and vanish from public view until just before 7am next day, paddle out, and start the whole process again -- disciplined, casual, yet always with that hungry edge that to me gave him away as something other than the Image ... something. as I wrote earlier, much more interesting.
btw I wrote about this experience of watching Gerry for a couple of surf mags but nobody was interested...didn't have any good photos they reckoned.