New York-born writer Allan Weisbecker was a screenwriter for NBC’s Miami Vice, and later wrote articles for Men’s Journal, Smithsonian, and Popular Photography. "In Search of Captain Zero" (2001), Weisbecker’s second book, details his life as a 1970s hardcore surfer and oceangoing pot smuggler. “Jock’s Night Trip” was originally published in a 1992 issue of Surfing magazine. This version has been slightly edited.

1969 was, of course, the year Man first walked on the moon, and much was made of that fact when the Swell of the Century hit the Hawaiian Islands some six months later; the temptation to see cause and effect in these two unrelated though admittedly significant (and let’s face it, somewhat, uhhh . . . 

) events was very much in keeping with the long-haired psychedelicized pseudo-philosophies rattling around in our simple skulls in those days. (One guru of the heavily Karmaed-out Vegetarian Contingent theorized that it wasn’t Man’s walking on the moon that raised the ocean’s destructive wrath, it was the fact that Man had left his excrement up there.)

In retrospect, it was a wild year, even not counting the Mets, Jets, Woodstock, and assorted other Mainland follies. The same was true on the North Shore of Oahu. It was the year you’d buy a surfboard blank from a guy living in a treehouse, have it shaped by Dick Brewer down at his Waimea shack, then glassed by a maniac named Wolfman, within hooting distance up the road. Total outlay—eighty bucks in cash or smokeable trade. It was the year Lopez was doing fin releases at Pipeline and when that giant December surf had eased to comprehensible proportions, Greg Noll summarily retired after stroking into what was then the biggest wave ever ridden, admitting he’d finally scared himself.

Pundits of surfing history like to mark Noll’s ride as a sort of symbolic end to the surfing decade—it sure sounds right—but I’ll here put forth an alternative occurrence as fitting punctuation to the era.

Jock Sutherland was an unusual guy back then. Offbeat, for sure. Always different than the rest. Eschewing the shaggy badge-of-the-Sixties look, he wore his hair short, with a neat, middle class—I’d call it dweebish on anyone else—part. While his contemporaries sold dope and evaded the draft, Jock, in the ultimate maverick move, would soon enlist in the army, doing his duty as he saw it. In the midst of the aggro North Shore lineup chaos, Jock found no need to yell, whistle, grimace threateningly or pull rank, as other name surfers often did. He’d slink around out there, simply out-positioning everyone, and thereby getting more than his share of waves and raising yodels from one and all with his deep and creative barrel-riding style. Jock rode the North Shore well that winter—probably better than anyone—and was equally at home in four-foot Backyards or nutso Sunset Beach. He was a born goofyfoot but could switch stance at will, even in big waves, and his skills as a regularfooter were just as impressive.

Jock was an unusual guy alright, but there was something more to him than astounding natural ability and quiet intensity. It was something in, or behind, Jock’s eyes that got your attention. A surfer to respect, if not like.

One day at Waimea my respect for the guy exploded into full-blown, dumbstruck awe.

The Bay was breaking and getting bigger. I remember because I’d looked at it in the morning and thought seriously about going out; I’d never ridden the place but I’d survived twelve-foot-plus Sunset with only some minor puckering of the posterior. And I had that new and still-unwaxed nine-foot Brewer pintail and Dick kept asking me if I liked it. The sets at Waimea that day were maybe eighteen feet; a big drop then a flat shoulder. Minimal size for the place. But still Waimea.

I went home and tried to eat something, but you need spit to swallow food, even brown rice sogged down with milk.

My first emotion upon returning to the beach was an immense relief. Just an hour had passed since I'd checked it, but in that time Waimea had gone from eighteen to a solid twenty (two feet at the Bay is not like two feet anywhere else) and nos it had that 

 Waimea look. BIG and getting BIGGER. I don’t remember who was in the car with me but I turned to him and said, or yelled, something like, “I’m not going out, so fuck you anyway!”

I was a happy boy. I would survive the day.

About twenty surfers were in the lineup: Eddie and the local boys; Hakman and the 

 crew. They looked jittery, everyone seemed to be edging further outside; it was definitely getting bigger. The afternoon wore on and the boys worked out the peak and the pecking order. The Show got good, with hoots, whistles, and almost continuous applause from shore. My stomach never quite settled down—a combination of fear and shame, I suspect. Fear because I’d almost paddled out, and shame because I hadn’t.

Sometime that afternoon Jock walked down the beach and stroked out. He had trouble getting waves and even from shore it was obvious why—his board was about two feet shorter than anyone else’s, forcing him to sit inside and pick up the dregs. It was fruitless and hairy and obviously frustrating, but Jock had been quietly asserting that the Bay could be ridden on an under-eight-foot board (I think he was on a 7' 10" that afternoon) and he was out to prove it. Well, it wasn’t working and I began to wonder why he didn’t come in and switch sticks. The Bay doesn’t break very often and here he was wasting a good day. The thing I didn’t realize was that Jock had a plan.

The sun dipped behind Kaena Point, casting the Bay in slick gold shadow, and the lineup began to thin out. The twilights are short in the Islands and the light faded quickly. Pretty soon there were a dozen guys in the water, then a half dozen, then two or three. I don’t remember who else was out at this point—it was impossible to tell one surfer from another in the failing light—except Jock. With the crowd gone he started getting waves, started doing his switchfoot dance on his undersize stick. Climbing and dropping like he was riding fun six-footers.

Okay, he’d made his point. You could ride the Bay on a shortboard.

The other couple of guys made it in and the spectators dispersed. Heading for my car I watched as Jock took what I assumed would his last wave. I mean, it was practically dark. The moon, pale and full, was rising down to the right, over Sunset Beach . . . wait a minute. 

 A few people noticed, pulled up short, and stayed.

I’d once surfed three-foot Chun’s Reef by moonlight, with a couple of buddies, and it was very weird. I mean there are demons out there at night, reaching up out of the phosphorescence for dangling pink toes. And the 

 Even little knee-knockers are tough to figure in the dark, as your depth perception goes bazooey, making it impossible to judge size and distance. Spooky.

But this thing Jock was doing was in a different realm. A foreign concept. It was insane. I mean wasn’t it?

Hey, wait. What’s that? A white streak there on that feathering wall, trailing off just ahead of the white explosion freight-training across the Bay and shaking the earth under our blood-drained toes, curled tight as we grasped the implications of what we were seeing.

We all kept staring out to the darkened lineup, the usual North Shore strata of race and ability forgotten for the moment, local boys and 

, hot and not-so-hot, all of us gathered together in the spectral half-light, watching as wave after wave was taken and mastered, deep snaking luminescent board-wakes, Jock himself invisible in the moon shadow under the lip.

And so it went. I don’t really know how much time went by, or how many waves were taken that night—probably dozens—but it was late when a piece of Jock’s board finally washed ashore, a forlorn shard chewed up and spit out by the angry Beast out on the reef.

So we waited, squinting uneasily into the hazy glow of the whitewater, imagining the dark speck of a head, then Jock dragging himself to land, wild-eyed and disoriented. But no one, nothing, not even the rest of Jock’s little board, emerged from the shorebreak. Somebody must have made a phone call, because suddenly the fire trucks and ambulances were there, crackling radios and rotating lights adding an unnatural rhythm to the night. And then a rescue chopper was overhead, the beam of its gargantuan spotlight futilely searching the nearshore froth—a joke in those conditions. The road and beach were once again lined with people, and the night air was filled with half-whispered phrases and questions: “What’s going on?” “Jock?” “He was what?” “But it’s the middle of the night.”

And the thought, left unspoken by Jock’s surf-brethren, was finally voiced by a man in a firefighter’s hat and boots, after examining the remains of Jock’s board. “He’s drowned, that’s for sure. Nobody could survive out there.”

Those who had witnessed Jock’s moonlight romp were pulled aside and asked a few questions, with the authorities shaking their heads at the foolhardiness of it.

Later, much later it seemed—but I had no grasp of clock-time—as the crowd once again began to disperse, a figure was spotted walking down the Kam Highway from the east. Lean, sandy hair, yellow trunks dry from what had apparently been a long walk—it was Jock alright.

A few words were exchanged with the authorities and Jock hoofed it home. He was so calm, still so deep within himself, that nobody even thought to offer a ride, and I’m sure he would have refused it anyway.

The next day I ran into Jock’s brother, Jim, and asked about Jock’s state of mind that night. Jim laughed. “Who knows,” he said, “he was dosed.”

“He’d dipped his finger in (Famous Name)’s baggie of Sunshine before he stroked out.”

It was common knowledge that (Famous Name) was the keeper of the most potent Orange Sunshine LSD on the North Shore. It was in powder form and the dosage was measured by how deep you stuck your finger in the baggie.

Twenty-some-odd years later I’ve come to see LSD as a bad thing, but I did my share in the late Sixties and had surfed once or twice under the influence. I never believed you could perform well or even competently while whacked. Everything became too brilliant . . . too intense. Too many odd, distracting thoughts. You’d tend to either freeze up in paranoia or, deranged from all the synaptic misfires, attempt to spread imaginary wings. I mean people would jump off buildings, figuring they could fly.

And here Jock had ridden the Bay, at night, on a 7' 10", under a finger-lickin’ big hit.

It was as if Jock had jumped off a tall building and lo and behold . . . he 

So hey, fellas, at least those of you aged enough to remember those days, those wacky incredible Sixties, what say you? If you believe my tale and have a bend towards the metaphorical view, as I do—shall we say the decade, if not ended, was at least somehow epitomized by this occurrence at Waimea Bay, in the winter of 1969?

 to read Sutherland's rebuttal to Weisbecker's story]

“JOCK’S NIGHT TRIP,” BY ALLAN WEISBECKER. 1969, BIG WAVES, SHORT BOARDS, ORANGE SUNSHINE

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos