A COSTLY WIPEOUT

It was the winter of ’82. Not a lot sticks out in my mind about that season, except the Pipe Masters contest and the story I’m about to tell.

This was the year Michael Ho won the contest wearing a fibreglass cast on his broken wrist, a result of a skateboard run gone awry right before the event. We sat upstairs in the Pipe house watching all day long. During Michael’s heats, his brother Derek and I would signal the sets coming by waving a towel from the balcony. I had done some research into Genghis Khan and his Mongol army for a movie I’d worked on several years earlier and discovered that he was the first military leader to incorporate a signal corps so he could communicate in battle. Our system was much more simple but along the same lines. Genghis used flags (we used a towel), and the positioning and movement of his flags was how he could tell his troops where and when to go, stop, advance, etcetera. For us, different positions of the towel and how much we would shake it indicated where the sets were going to come in, how big they were and which one looked like the best wave. Over the next 20 years we would perfect and use this simple signaling system for Michael, Derek, Johnny Boy Gomes and Larry Rios to great effect. But this was the first time we tried it and we still had a few bugs to work out.

Martin Potter figured out what we were doing and in a heat with Mike, he caught one of our signals and got one of the most perfect big Pipe waves anyone had ever caught in the 11-year history of the contest. It was an amazing wave and a beautiful ride. We did get Michael into a lot of good waves and he went on to win the event with a stunning display of backside tube riding that was even more remarkable, considering the cast on his right arm. As the final heat got down to the last few minutes, a crowd of Pipeline regulars was ready on shore to paddle out and get their share of the great waves that the contestants had enjoyed exclusively all day long. I waited until Michael