Thunder From The Sea

Edwards hasn't surfed regularly in 10 years, but he's still drawn to the ocean. Now he sails catamarans and designs their hulls and foils. "I shape things," he says, describing what he does with an emphasis that gives the impression he would consider it pretentious to call himself a designer. "I am very good at creating shapes. I see shapes in my mind, and I can make them happen." Indeed, in the '60s he shaped a culture.

"See these hairs right here?" says Allan Seymour, 38, a surfer for 24 years. He rubs a finger lightly over a patch high on his cheekbone. "As soon as I was old enough to shave, I didn't shave here because Phil Edwards didn't."

Edwards was never the boldest on a board, just the most beautiful. When he talks about his Pipeline days and North Shore winters, his eyes grow almost misty, and he taps his heart gently with a fist, as if to say, "This is how special those days are to me."

"I went there for the first time when I was still in high school, at Christmas vacation," he says. "My mommy put me on a plane—this was before jets—and said, 'If you're not back in three weeks I'm coming over to get you.' On my second day there I hitchhiked out to the North Shore. It was fabulous. I went there every winter after that.

"Hardly anyone surfed the North Shore then, and none of us knew anything about the Pipeline. All we did was mind-surf it. We thought that if you got crushed by one of those tubes you'd die for sure. We didn't know that the bottom was a much worse enemy. Nobody knew. Somebody would say, 'Let's go out there and ride that,' and he'd get, 'Oh, no, no, you'll get killed doing that.'

"The Pipeline is a geographic anomaly. It's a spectacle of nature. That reef is radical. Those waves haven't seen a thing shallower than a mile deep for 2,000 miles, and they come blasting into that coral wall and the top of the ocean just flops off. The result is a beautiful, beautiful wave. If God designed a wave for surfers, he couldn't do any better than the Pipeline."

Excited now, Edwards jumps up in the opulent house in Capistrano Beach, Calif. where he's house-sitting. He snaps into his surfing stance, gesturing at the modest waves beyond the window, pretending the wall behind him is a wave. He gingerly feels the wall with his fingertips to assure himself it isn't closing out on him. He rearranges his feet on the imaginary board, moving lightly, as if the floor will heave him off if the shift is too sudden. "I may have been the first on the Pipeline, but I was just a stylist and was sort of hanging on for dear life," he says. "There were a lot better surfers at the Pipeline than me, and most of them were goofy-foots. They'd stand with their right foot forward, like this, which is a big advantage at the Pipeline because the wave breaks to the left. That way they're looking right at the wave and can see what it's doing. A regular-foot like me has to surf with his back to the wave at the Pipeline."

That first ride in 1961 was historic, but not spectacular. The boards were much longer then—about 10 feet compared to the current seven-footers used at the Pipeline—which made turning difficult and getting tubed all but impossible. What Edwards did was make the wave: paddle out, take off down its face, turn in and ride it to the beach. Some surfers suggest Edwards' wasn't even the first ride there; after all, when Captain Cook "discovered" the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 he was greeted by surfing natives on huge teak boards. There are even Polynesian surfers immortalized by petroglyphs in lava rocks near the Pipeline. Who's to say that none of them ever surfed the Pipeline?

Says Edwards, "For 20 years people have been saying to me, 'You weren't the first. Some ancient Hawaiian king probably rode it on a log centuries ago, naaaa-naaaa.' Well,——them; I was the first. I dragged a bunch of guys down there that day. I wanted somebody to hold my hand; I admit it. They all had the chance. They were all tougher guys than me. I don't claim to be a macho man, but I did it and they didn't, so there.

"I had an experience recently that made me realize how much that day is still with me. I walked into this store, and a guy ahead of me just let these double doors slam in my face. He was kind of burly, had a beard, you know—Mr. Tough Guy. I just thought, 'Oh brother, one of those.' Then I thought, 'You're not so tough. I was the first guy to ride the Pipeline.'