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Intrepid and semi-reclusive regularfooter from Manly Beach, Sydney; described by surf writer Nick Carroll as "the first and the greatest of Australia's big-surf waveriders."

Pike was born (1940) and raised in Sydney, and for a time attended the prestigious King's School. His family lived one street back from the Manly Surf Club, and Pike began surfing at age 14 on a huge hollow "toothpick" paddleboard. In 1956, he watched a visiting team of American surfer-lifeguards riding their new balsa "Malibu" boards; Pike was later able to buy one of the boards from Santa Monica lifeguard Tommy Zahn.

Pike left King's School at age 15, completed a two-year course at Sydney Technical College to become a qualified wool classer, and quickly found work on a Queensland sheep ranch. In 1961, having saved £600 from shearing, Pike, along with nearly two-dozen other gung-ho Aussie surfers, made his first trip to Hawaii. While there, he bought a big-wave gun from master shaper Pat Curren, and before the trip was over was sitting in the lineup and trading waves with Curren, Jose Angel, Ricky Grigg, Greg Noll, and the rest of the first-generation North Shore big-wave surfers. "Pikey was at the front of the big-wave attack at Sunset, Pipe, and Waimea," fellow Aussie Midget Farrelly later recalled of that first trip. "He was an ironman, always training—just passionate about riding big waves."

American surfers would get a look at Pike's hell-for-leather big-wave style in movies like 

Pike, oddly enough, won the small-wave portion of the 1962 Peru International, the first overseas even won by an Australian surfer. Just a year later, Pike said to a writer, "I don't like to compete. It takes too much of the pleasure out of [surfing] . . . competition is against the spirit of the sport." (In 1972, Pike nonetheless made the long trek south to compete in the big Easter Bells event in Torquay, and placed 3rd in the Veterans division.)

As the Australian surf industry blossomed in the mid-'60s, Pike removed himself entirely from the commercial surf scene and worked as a fireman. In 1968, he married Jane Farrelly, Midget's sister; the two honeymooned at Torquay and reportedly entered the tandem division of a Bells Beach surf contest.

Pike kept a low profile for the rest of his life. "If nobody had ever heard of me," Pike said in a 1998 interview with 

 magazine, "if no one had ever known if I'd surfed or not, it wouldn't have mattered one iota. I did it because I loved doing it."

The following year, the 59-year-old Pike killed himself by asphyxiation.

A bronze plaque dedicated to Pike was installed at Manly Beach in 2000, with the inscription describing him as "The first and greatest of Australia`s big-wave riders."

Pike, Bob

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