“Mr. Clean: the Extraordinary Surfing Life of Randy Rarick,” by Bruce Jenkins, ran in the Fall 1998 issue of the Surfer's Journal. This version has been slightly edited.

There’s a classic beach-scene montage from 

 the 1970 World Surfing Championships film by Bob Evans. Michael Peterson, Terry Fitzgerald, Mike Purpus, and Keith Paull lend definition to a rebellious, wild-haired generation. There’s a trippy, stoned-out look to the spectators. The mind conjures up a familiar blend of offshore winds, the smell of resin, Jimi Hendrix, a hint of weed.

The camera eventually finds its way to Randy Rarick. Short-haired, clear-eyed, clean-shaven, his look is disarmingly straight. He couldn’t possibly be one of the hot young rippers from the Hawaiian team. He looks like a member of the Harvard crew, or maybe the finance department of a local bank. You’d trust that face to deliver $50,000 in cash to the Philippines by Thursday, but you couldn’t picture it in a heat with David Nuuhiwa or Nat Young.

That vision of the 20-year-old Rarick should stand for all time. Of all the surfers who made a difference over the last 30 years, he’s among the handful who never changed. Never took drugs, never bailed out, never lost his stoke or perspective, never stopped ripping. In the coming winter, you’ll find him cascading down a massive west peak at Sunset, or riding the nose in a Makaha longboard contest. He seems ageless, timeless, like a chunk of Clark foam or a Pat Curren gun.

Rarick tends to stay in the background wherever he is: running the Hawaiian pro contests, shaping boards, surfing big waves on the North Shore. At any given moment, his career is only mildly intriguing. But taken as a whole, he ranks among the most accomplished and influential surfers in history.

At the age of 48, Rarick has been everywhere, done everything, met everybody. He is reluctant to glorify his life, but the depth of his surfing experience is staggering. Since Rarick would never volunteer a resume for all the world to see, we’ll do it for him:

Taught to surf at Waikiki by Rabbit Kekai at age 10

At his favorite break growing up, a right-hander, advised a young Gerry Lopez to go left

Invited to the 1970 Duke contest at Sunset

Invited to the 1986 Quiksilver Eddie Aikau contest at Waimea

In Australia, Spring of ’68, when Bob McTavish, Nat Young, and George Greenough wrote shortboard history

At Makaha, Winter of ’69, when Greg Noll took the big drop

Traveled more countries, to ride waves, than any surfer in history

Co-founder of the IPS pro surfing tour, 1975: has witnessed and supervised almost every great moment of professional surfing in Hawaii since then

“I think Randy might be the best all-around surfer in the world,” says Noll. “I’m not bullshitting. He’s definitely the most underrated. This guy ripped on shortboards for years. He's tremendous on a longboard. He’s a master on a three-foot wave, then he’ll go out at 15' Sunset and rip. Nobody’s like this. Nobody! And why don’t you hear about him? Because he's not a chest-thumper, man. He surfs because he’s totally in love with riding waves, and he doesn’t care who knows it.”

It seems that wherever he goes, Rarick has a different identity. In Japan, he’s known as a right-on shaper from the Islands. The Sunset crew knows him as a regular in the lineup at any size. In Australia, he’s that contest promoter leading the charge to have the pro season finish in Hawaii. In dozens of countries around the world, he’s the well-mannered ambassador who never left garbage or acrimony in his wake.

He’s Randy Rarick, the unofficial president of surfing. Maybe someday, they’ll hand him the title outright.

Niu Valley was a treasure of Oahu’s southeast side in 1962, an attractive new suburb of Honolulu. A lot of great surfers grew up there: Mark Cunningham, Dennis Pang, Mark Foo (the Raricks’ paperboy) and a skinny kid named Gerry Lopez. As much as Murray Rarick wanted his son to follow him into the golf supply business, Randy felt otherwise. He was about to become the first of those red-hot surfers from Niu Valley, and a pioneer of Toes Reef.

“I used to walk a half-mile down to the beach with a ten-foot, 30-pound board,” Rarick recalls. “In ’62 everybody surfed in Aina Haina, which was the next valley down. We didn’t think you could surf the reefs out front because it was too shallow. But one day I was standing there and I thought, you know, that looks pretty surfable. Two brothers from the neighborhood, Rick and Todd Value, went out there with me. It turned out, if you could get over the initial reef and didn’t lose your board, it was a pretty good spot. We didn’t know what to call it. 'Coral Heads' seemed kind of lame, and 'Rarick’s Reef' was too vain. But there used to be a section called Toes on the Nose in the old SURFER magazines, and I had a friend named Scott Morey who had moved from Santa Monica to Hawaii and was riding for Dave Sweet. One day, Scott took off on this wave, ran up and got his toes on the nose. I yelled, ‘You got toes! You got toes!’ And to this day, the spot is called Toes Reef.”

Rarick and the boys were regularfoots and preferred the shorter but hollower rights at Toes. “It was sort of the cooler way to go,” says Rarick. “Lopez, who lived right down the street from me, was a little scrawny kook in those days. He rode Wardy boards, out of Laguna Beach, and we thought anybody who rode a Wardy was a kook. They were the guys who didn’t nose ride much, just stood on the tail and cruised along. Me and the Value brothers were the full surf nazis, and we controlled the place, so when Lopez came along, we said OK, you can surf out here, but you have to go left.”

Rarick laughed at the recollection of a young, impressionable Lopez receiving orders—and then going left into history.

Another crystal-clear moment was his first look at Jock Sutherland. “I was 12, and my dad dropped me off at Haleiwa while he went up to play the Kahuku golf course. Jock was just a year older, but I’d only been surfing a couple of years, and I remember being blown away by this kid. He was surfing a rental board with a number on the bottom and those little sparkly metal flakes they plaster on hot rods. And I remember watching him run up and hang ten. I’d never seen anything like Jock.”

When Rick Value turned 16, the Niu Valley gang had a chance to drive to the North Shore on their own. “We saw an ad for a ’51 Desoto wagon up in Waimanalo for $99,” says Rarick. “We got there and somebody was already there with a hundred bucks. We said we’d give him $120, and we drove off in this ridiculous thing that had belonged to some construction guy, just filled with mud and concrete. We got it back to my house, parked it on a hill, took a hose and just blasted the inside out. Put a bunch of surfboard decals on the windows, drilled holes in the ceiling and bolted our racks right onto the car. We didn’t have any money, so we’d hang around the bus stop and offer guys a ride to school for 10 cents. That would give us enough gas money to get out to the North Shore. Either that, or we’d get a five-gallon can and siphon gas out of our neighbors’ cars at night. We’d call that a five-finger discount.”

Rarick’s father had founded the successful Professional Golf Supply, and Randy'd oldest brother Ron had taken up golf. “He took over the business when my dad died, and to this day he runs it. I know it disappointed my dad, the direction I took in life. He always hoped I’d give up surfing. I said, ‘Dad, I just don’t have any desire to be shaggin' golf balls.’ You talk about a kid who was on fire, just full-on committed to surfing, that was me.”

As he began to get a feel for the North Shore (“driving out there praying it wouldn’t be too big”) Rarick became something of a ding-repair expert back in town, working for Hobie and Surf Line Hawaii in his formative years. For a young surfer, life couldn’t be much better than hanging around the shop, listening to Greg Noll and Charlie Galento bellow their big-wave stories, and Rarick became their official shop gremmie.

“Randy was the little shit running around, patching boards,” says Noll, “and we’re sort of kicking him around, you know, ‘Get out of my way, kid.’ Remember Charlie Galento? He’s Italian, and the rumor was that his dad was a heavy Mafia guy. When he got involved in surfing, we opened a shop where George Downing’s shop is now. Had it there for years. Charlie was a full-on motor-mouth, and he kept tellin' anybody who'd listen that he was going to be the first guy to ride big Kaena Point. He was just havin’ fun with the whole deal, gettin’ mileage for the shop. I don’t think he had any intention of actually doing it. But he’d be around the shop, and Downing, Ben Aipa, Peter Cole, Ricky Grigg, Kealoha Kaio—hell, we probably did 80 percent of the business on the North Shore. And Randy was just hanging out. His surfing roots go back to that shop, hanging out there at Charlie’s, doing repair work.”

By his mid-teens, Rarick began to realize that he had few limits in surfing. While most of his contemporaries bailed out on those gut-wrenching mornings when the North Shore was really pumping, Rarick thrived; he was riding serious Waimea Bay at the age of 17. He was gaining notice as one of the best young surfers around, a regular in the Makaha International juniors division when that contest was internationally known, and in 1967 he hit an early peak by winning the Hawaii State Championships at Ala Moana. “I think Clyde Aikau got second, Lopez was third, Jimmy Blears fourth. Jock and Reno Abellira were there, some pretty heavy guys. In those days, I was holding my own with everybody.”

But that winter, when the Makaha contest rolled around, Rarick blew his timing—for one of the few times in his life. "I was listening to the radio at my house in Niu Valley and they’re saying, ‘Today the surf is six feet, and the Makaha International is on. Junior Men’s starts at 11 o’clock.’ I figured I’d have plenty of time if I left at 9:30, so I kind of dicked around the house for a while. We got to Waianae, and the traffic was backed up for miles from people driving out to see the contest. I’m in the semifinals and a guy’s driving by telling me, ‘Your heat just hit the water.’ I came running up the beach with about three minutes left in the heat. And Reno, who I beat in every contest that year—every single one—went on to win the Juniors. I was so pissed. That was Reno’s launching pad, really, and I just blew my chance getting that Makaha win.”

As Rarick and everybody else soon discovered, nothing in surfing would be the same after the winter of 1967–’68. “It was a major transition year,” he says, “the year Bob McTavish and Nat Young brought their V-bottoms to Hawaii. I was pretty well connected in town. I was riding for Dewey Weber, working at the Surf Line shop patching boards, and Fred Van Dyke had asked me to work at the Duke Classic that year. So McTavish shows up, and we’re talkin’ wide tail, heavy V, big fin; some really dynamic changes when everybody else was riding pintails. They held the Duke on an 8–10-foot day at Sunset, and I remember standing next to Dewey as McTavish took off on this wave and just laid that thing over on the V panel. The board slid about three feet. If he didn’t have that huge fin, he would have spun out, but he caught it, then angled up into a 45-degree turn that nobody else was doing. It was such a different track. I remember I looked over at Dewey and went, ‘Oh, my God.’ And Dewey went, ‘Something’s happening here.’ And that’s when Dewey was king. He was selling more boards than anybody. I decided right then and there that I was gonna go to Australia. Those guys were onto something entirely new.”

How does a kid, not long out of Kalani High School, make such a heady decision—especially when it might cost him a spot on the Hawaiian team for the ’68 World Contest? “What you have to realize is, first, I’d been super-motivated in surfing from a really young age,” he says. “Second, I started working in surf shops at 14. I was making money, saving it, and the odd thing about me, I wasn’t into drugs. Everybody else was dropping acid and gettin’ stoned. I was just never into it because I couldn’t get any work done. I mean, I tried it. Not acid, but a few hits off a joint every now and then. But I just decided, this is stupid. You can’t work stoned. I hate this. So I stayed away from it. I’d drink my way through all those parties and have as much fun as anybody, but by ’67 I was becoming a real outcast."

After a moment, he adds: "This was during a heavy part of the Vietnam War, too, so going to Australia would get me out of the country and the draft.”

Never without a plan, Rarick signed up at Sydney Technical for correspondence courses in commercial law and accounting. He established a base in the city, but traveled the coast from Bells to Burleigh, needing only a library or a school to register his studies. He moved into a flat with Keith Paull, became his informal coach, and humbly took a bit of credit for Paull’s winning the ’68 Australian titles. “I surfed with everybody down there,” he says. “Midget, Ted Spencer, Wayne Lynch, Nat, Keith—the whole gang. Wayne’s mom used to drop him off at our place in Sydney, and we’d jump in my Volkswagen van and go find the best spot. Lynch was coming into his own, the wonder child of Australian surfing. The film 

—all of that happened that year I was there.

“In those days, Ian Cairns was a lanky tow-headed guy with a crew cut. Midget was the waning star, frustrated, sarcastic, bitter, sort of the old-school guy getting left behind. He still surfed unreal, and totally adjusted to the shortboards, but he got run out of the Australian surfing media by  John and Paul Witzig and the 

 crew. It was a shame—Midget just got blown right out of the limelight. Wayne was the hot young kid, Keith was the nice one, people like Spencer and Baddy Treloar were mainstays, and of course, Nat was 

 guy. I was learning board design, shaping—it was just a killer time for me.

“After the Aussie titles came and went, I split and went up north to see McTavish at Byron Bay. George Greenough was staying with Bob, and I wanted to see exactly what those guys were up to. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t long before I had to leave. They were getting so stoned, I couldn’t handle it. I mean, nine in the morning, right off the bat, they’re stoned. Greenough was obviously a driving force behind this revolutionary design, but he was an eccentric, a pretty reclusive guy, and I didn’t get to know him too well. I hung out a while and said, nah, this isn’t my trip. I don’t want to escape reality, I want to 

“I know that for some people, getting stoned makes the creative juices flow. I know a lot of great surfers who get high all the time. And McTavish was the most bitchin guy in the world, and still is. But for me—no way. So I went farther north to Noosa, on the Sunshine Coast. They were about three months behind the McTavish crew, but I fell into a crowd of more traditional, hard-drinking Aussie guys, and I spent about five months there. Shaped a lot of boards and got to be really good friends with Peter Drouyn. He got picked to go to Puerto Rico for the ’68 World Contest, and I knew if I’d stayed in Hawaii, I would have made the team. I wrote George Downing, the team captain, and he wrote back to inform me I hadn’t qualified. I was out of the picture. So I wound up staying in Australia for almost a year, and I couldn’t have picked a better time.”

In 1969, back in Hawaii, Rarick decided to sever his connections with Surf Line and open the first Dewey Weber outlet in Honolulu. “It was perfect,” he says. “Shortboards were in, Dewey had just signed up Nat Young, and more than anything, Dewey was my early hero. In the old Bud Browne movies, Phil Edwards was always the smooth, cool guy. Dewey was radical, the ‘little man on wheels,’ the greatest hot-dogger ever. I always identified with Dewey. So opening the Weber shop was a perfect idea. While I was still working at the Surf Line shop, fixing dings, I designed and built the Weber shop on Ward Avenue, without any fanfare.”

Hal Wood, the longtime sports editor of the 

, was obviously impressed by the 19-year-old haole local who had studied accounting in Australia. “One of those hippies? A pot man? Long hair? Forget it,” Wood wrote in March of ’69 as Rarick opened the Weber shop. But it wasn’t all good times and glad-handing. “I had to tell the Surf Line guys I was quitting,” says Rarick. “And it was heavy. First week we opened the Weber shop, somebody threw bricks through my window. I knew it was the Surf Line guys. I remember my friend, big Charlie Galento, was really pissed. But the shop totally took off. In a year-and-a-half, I’d sold 400 surfboards. The round-tail Weber ski was built around Nat, and Jock had just bailed Hawaii for the Army, so the field was pretty clear. And we killed it. Suddenly I had all this money, I had chicks around, I’m surfing every day with new boards, we had 25 team riders, everyone from Rell Sunn to Jimmy Blears, and I was shaping boards for Buzzy Trent. It was bitchin’. I was in heaven.”

The big swell of December ’69 arrived in darkness, without warning. There were no surf faxes back then, no forecast number to call. Rarick and Keith Paull, his Australian mate, were staying at a house on the point at Laniakea and had drifted off to sleep when a Civil Defense crew arrived, ordering residents to evacuate.

“It’s one in the morning and I’m out on the point, peering into the darkness,” Rarick recalls. “I could see a heavy mist in the air as I looked back to the Kam Highway street lights, and I watched a six-foot wave rush across the road at full force. Then I turned back. There’s about 15 feet of whitewater coming at me. The rocks broke it up, but it came right through our seawall and filled up the yard. I was freaked! Somehow, Keith slept through it, but I just sat there thinking about what we'd see in the morning.

“We woke up at dawn and drove up to Waimea. It's breaking two miles out to sea, nothing but whitewater. I've never seen it like that, before or since. Just whitewater, as far as you could see. I drove around to Ki Iki Road, and this house had literally been moved across the highway. It was just debris, coconuts, fallen trees, stuff everywhere, cars underwater. Sunset was just—fifth reef, maybe. You didn't even know what you were looking at.”

For most surfers, this would be a sign to retreat. To the refrigerator, to higher ground, maybe to Florida or Carpinteria. Rarick could only think of one thing: Makaha.

“We couldn't get over how glassy it was,” he says. “So we jumped in this old bomber wagon and got down there. It was sunny. Not a cloud in the sky. And we’re watching this wave start peeling off the point and it looks like Malibu. Look how perfect it is! Then I see a guy drop in, and he’s like a pea on this wave. Oh, God, it’s giant. This was the Tuesday of that swell, and there were a few guys out already. Keith and I paddled out to find Jimmy Blears, Rolf Aumess, Greg Noll, Hemmings, Galento, Bobby Cloutier. I don’t know where Buzzy was. But it was like a dozen guys, that was it.

“I don’t know if people can imagine this at Makaha, but the small waves were 15–18 feet—just way past the regular lineup. Any time you can see Kaena Point and the big, domed-shaped radar tower, you know you’re really far out. If you see white water up there, you just start scratching. It’s dead calm, but you’re scratching for the horizon. Maybe two or three minutes later, a 25-foot set comes in. Imagine Waimea at 25 feet, but with a wall. It was insane.

“Your first reaction to a wave like that is to just get over it—at least for me, on my 8'6" [borrowed from Nat Young], which seemed big to me at the time. Fred and those guys had their 10'6" guns, and I’m sure Greg had an 11-footer or something. I was 19 years old and riding the ‘little’ ones, the 15–18 footers. I got maybe 10 waves. Rolf was just a kid back then, but he wasn’t just out in the lineup. He was 

“It was only good for about three hours before the midday breeze came up, and there’s no way you want to be out there when it’s choppy. The next day, Wednesday, the surf went down, but it pumped back up on Thursday, and that’s the day Greg went out and caught the biggest wave in recorded history for a guy paddling in under his own power.

“The weather had turned ugly, kind of a stormy, with kona winds. The North Shore was still out of control. Makaha was bigger than ever, but as I stood there on the beach, it looked onshore and out of the question. There was another guy out with Greg. Nobody seems to know who that guy was. He never caught a wave and finally just paddled in, but Greg—it’s still difficult to believe what I saw. This massive, 35-foot-plus wave came in, the biggest we’d seen the entire swell. So big, it was already feathering on the bowl. We stood up on the roof of the old bomber wagon. We saw Greg stroking for it. He stands up, gets some momentum going, kind of angles in, the thing jacks up, and when he gets down to the bottom, the thing’s already pitching in the bowl. Just an unbelievably hideous thing. Greg got down there and kind of goes, ‘Well, that’s it.’ Just stepped right off the rail. There were maybe 10 of us on the beach, the only people to witness this, and we just went Oh . . . my . . . God!

“Later that day, we saw some amazing things. We saw a wave at Kaena Point that had to be, I swear, at least 75 feet. We saw a wave bend around the point and break perfectly, at maybe 40 feet, about halfway between Kaena and Yokahama. But that wave of Greg’s is still etched in my mind. I mean, I’d seen Buzzy and Dick Brewer and Pat Curren, seen ’em all ride Waimea, and Eddie was just coming on at that stage, but this was without a doubt the biggest wave ever ridden. And there was no hope of him making it.

“I didn’t realize it then, but this was history in the making. Since then I’ve seen Doerner’s wave on Super Bowl Sunday (1988), which I m calling the biggest wave ever ridden at Waimea. I saw Brock take off in the ’90 Aikau and the wave that pitched Mark Foo in ’86, but I put Darrick’s at the top because he got to the bottom and made that wave. Whatever’s happening with the tow-in guys over on Maui, I put that in a separate category. The photos say it all, but those guys get an early start, with footstraps, on shorter boards. But if you’re talking about paddling into a wave under your own steam, I feel pretty privileged, ’cause I’ve seen the two biggest waves ever ridden. And for sheer mass, Darrick’s wave didn’t compare, at all, to Greg’s Makaha wave.”

Rarick shook his head at the memory. “That was Greg's swan song. What else could he do? He was like the old gunslinger who finally realizes there’s gonna be a faster gun in the West. He saw the whole shortboard thing coming. The traditional surf shops were already dying. So this was his statement. ‘I’m going for this, I’m gonna drop in, and then I’m exiting stage right.’ Did he ever.”

Except for Randy, of course. He lived somewhere else.

Everybody around him was in the submarine. Randy was doing the books, or shaping boards, or riding big Sunset. Totally up-to-date and completely out of step.

“I came back from Australia and, man, psychedelia was in full flow on the North Shore. Flower power, acid trips, the whole shot. I was living in town, running the shop, coming out for a late surf session if I was lucky, and falling out of the media limelight. I wasn’t hanging with the groovy crowd that had time to get stoned and hang out.

“By that time, Drew Kampion had come to the fore at SURFER. He was smoking joints with guys during interviews, and I wasn’t into that at all. I was just the opposite. At times I thought, whoa, I’m really missing the boat. But I’m glad I did.

“The experimentation going on in 1968 and ’69 was really wild. The new thing was Brewer, Lopez, and Reno on Kauai with the Hanapepe surf shop, really short boards, and everybody was getting so stoned, it was crazy. Top riders, top shapers, everybody. It was great in a sense because guys were pushing design to the max: down-railers, V-bottoms, round-tails, Aussies leading the way. Then came Rolf Aurness in 1970, and a whole new era was ushered in. Nat and Wayne had taken boards down to 5'6". They were riding these stubby little things when the World Championships came around to Australia that year. Rolf was riding a 7-foot Bing Foil, down-railed with kind of a narrowish nose, and he had the best equipment for the conditions at Johanna. The Aussies had no rail on their boards. They’d turn and get no projection. They had gone too short. They’d taken it to the extreme, and they were really kind of humiliated by Rolf's performance.”

The Hawaiian team for the 1970 world titles was stellar, and included Lopez, Reno Abellira, Keone Downing, Paul Strauch, Ben Aipa, and Rarick. Using a 6'6", he made the semis, a result that would characterize the rest of his competitive career. “I made the semis of the 1970 Smirnoff, the first one they had in Hawaii. Then I got invited into the Duke that year, and I got through the first round when they cut the field from 24 to 12. Then they held the finals in 15-foot Sunset, and I didn’t have the experience of guys like Mike Doyle, Ricky Grigg, and Felipe Pomar. They got the bigger waves. That was my one and only chance to surf in the Duke as it turned out. You had to prove yourself or you didn't get invited back. That stuff kept happening to me my whole career. I’d get right up to the edge, but I couldn’t get to the next level. I admit now that I was kind of a B-level guy. It was always ‘close, but not quite,’ and maybe it takes a few years, but eventually you kind of get the message.”

Meanwhile, Rarick’s presence on the contest scene was costing him at the Weber shop. He fell nearly $25,000 in debt—out of “pure mismanagement”—and lost control to the creditors. “I should have declared bankruptcy, but it wasn’t in my nature to do that,” he said. “I decided to pay Dewey and everyone else back.”

It took more than two years. Dead broke, Rarick moved into a seedy $75-a-month tenement house in the South Street section of Honolulu. He went back to work for Surf Line, shaping boards at a furious pace, and took a night job running a fiberglass-chopper gun at Pearl Harbor. He divided an already small living space into four rooms—shaping and sanding, fin lay-up and ding repair, laminating and glossing, and a place for his bunk bed.

It was a difficult time. “I went from being somebody, a surfing notable, to a down-and-out guy in debt,” he recalls. “I’m living in this hovel with a bunch of old Filipino guys and no hot water. I became a vegetarian because I couldn’t cook anything. And just worked my butt off, day and night.” Rarick kept his sanity at nearby Point Panic, a cemetery for lost boards in the pre-leash days. He became a bit of a legend at the South Shore break, mostly for his limitless supply of eclectic surfboards.

“Because of the breakwater, the only people who surfed Point Panic were bodysurfers and paipo boarders,” says Rarick. “I knew everybody in the water and had sort of a love-hate relationship with them. It was like [grumbling], ‘Here comes Rarick on his frickin’ board.’ But I never dropped in on anybody. I’d see a set, let these guys take all the waves, then ride the last one myself. I was riding 5'6"s, all complete pieces of junk. What I’d do was cut three feet off the end of my 8'6" blanks and glue two of those leftover pieces together, covering up the seam with solid color pigmentation. I called ’em Bilbo Baggins boards, literally made from leftovers. Crappy glass, leftover fin panels, it was nuts. I sold hundreds of those things for $99. I’d love to see one of ’em around today.

“So one day, it’s a pumping south swell, 6-8 foot, and I roll up to Point Panic in my van. I go out, get a couple, lose my board, the thing smashes to pieces on the rocks, and everyone’s going, ‘Yeah! Rarick’s outta here!’ But I’d go up to the van and pull another one out. This went on all morning. I went through five boards that session. To this day, guys tell me, ‘I remember when you showed up and had a zillion boards—we couldn’t get rid of you!’ But that was a great wave. Best short right break on the South Shore. What ruined that spot was leashes (Point Panic is now restricted to bodysurfing). But I had a good, long run there.”

It‘s hard to imagine Randy Rarick living a bum’s life, groveling in squalor, riding boards glued together from the scrap heap. But the bottoming-out process was crucial to his maturity and perspective. After that, nobody had to show him the other side—he’d been there. He became an expert on deflated ego and the appreciation of simplicity. And then, one June afternoon in 1971, came a miracle. “A gift from heaven,” he said. “A big, fat envelope that said, ‘You are cordially invited to come to South Africa.’”

The organizers of the Gunston 500 contest in Durban were looking for some international names that might spice the flavor of their event. Rarick, still deeply in debt, was being offered an all-expenses-paid trip. “I had about three weeks to get it together,” he says. “I went to Surf Line, said I’d load ’em up with boards if they’d front me the money. I just powered, made like 50 boards. I shaped, glassed, sanded, pin-lined, hot-coated, with one other guy helping me. I paid all my debts for two months in advance, so I could leave the island, and I got on that airplane with $50 in my pocket. That was all I had to my name.”

There were dancing girls at Durban International when Rarick arrived. Ernie Tomson, Shaun’s father, was there to meet the incoming stars. People wanted autographs. “I was treated like royalty the whole time,” he remembers. “They had the contest at a place called East London, halfway between Durban and Jeffreys, and Brad McCaul won it. I got seventh. Typical—got to the semis, then missed the cut. These were the days of Jonathan Paarman, Peers Pittard, and Gavin Rudolph. Shaun Tomson was about 17, and already red hot.

“The best part was, they gave us a van to go touring the rest of the country. Like every other kid who saw 

, I wanted to surf Cape St. Francis. The all-time perfect right point. We showed up on this cold, freezing, rainy night, the wind just whipping offshore, and when we woke up the next day it was like 10 feet. Cape St. Francis going off, coming from way out on the second point, but so big it was almost impossible to get out. We surfed it for two or three hours when the tide was right, before the swell started to drop, and the next morning we got it again. Not as classic as 

, but really long, fast walls. I was riding a 7'6" and got one wave from the second point all the way through, maybe the highlight wave of my life. It was Brad, myself, Peter Drouyn, and a guy named JP, who later turned up in Hawaii, one of those mysterious guys who lived by dubious means. Guys there said they’d never seen it ridden that big.”

Rarick may not have realized it at the time, but he was hooked on travel—for life. The next stop would obviously be Jeffreys Bay, and when Rarick’s crew arrived, the place was raging out of control. “It was 8–12 feet, just huge lines coming in. We walked out to that little jump-off point at Supertubes and stood there for an hour. We watched 50-wave sets go by, nobody out, just no way to get out there. We walked all the way down to the end, where it gets slow and soft, and we still couldn’t get through. We finally went around the comer to the Beach Hotel at Impossibles, threw ourselves into the rip and swung into the lineup that way. All these people on the beach, and it’s just me and Brad and Peers Pittard at big, insane Jeffreys. I caught a couple of smaller ones, then got caught inside, lost my board and watched it get shattered on the rocks. I remember Brad was just tearing it up. And Peers said he got one of the biggest waves he’d ever ridden there, like this giant 12-footer. I went to South Africa 18 times after that summer, but I never saw it quite like that.”

Rarick was about to become legitimized again. He shaped the board Gavin Rudolph used to win the 1971 Smirnoff Pro-Am at Sunset Beach. He began turning up in surf films: A

shows Rarick riding perfect, medium-sized Jeffreys Bay, while 

 captures Rarick’s first trip to Cape St. Francis. The film’s signature moment is its final ride, showing Rarick streaking for 200 yards across the bay in gorgeous late afternoon light.

Rarick used the 1972 Gunston 500 contest as the jump-off point for his next South African adventure. He made the semifinals, a result now as predictable as the sunrise. He bought a Land Rover and decked it out in full safari style. And then, in the company of accomplished photographer-filmmaker Peter French, Rarick embarked on the longest and wildest trip of his life.

The idea was to explore the west coast of Africa, and as Rarick later wrote in SURFER, they made some remarkable discoveries in Angola, which was then a Portuguese colony. The piece was typical Rarick: a clear-headed account free of jargon or rambling sidetracks. He wrote of south swells and left point breaks and “a wave like Velzyland at low tide, but four times as long.” They pioneered many more spots in Angola and what is now known as Namibia, showing French’s film 

 to make money along the way. Rarick detailed landscapes “completely bleak, just miles of nothing but sand and rock,” and told of seeing a dead body floating down a river.

What he didn’t mention was the smuggling.

It seems that French, like so many other adventurous surf travelers of the early ’70s, had the notion of scoring some contraband—weed and raw diamonds, in this case—which he’d then sell at great profit in Europe. Rarick was reluctant but agreed. “We pooled our cash and set out to make the buys, but it turned into a comedy of errors,” Rarick recalls. “We’re going deeper and deeper into the jungle. Peter's into it, while I’m just freaking out about getting arrested. Eventually, we’re checking out these uncut diamonds but of course we have no idea what we’re looking at. We do the deal anyway, arrive safely in Europe, and we’re in Paris, trying to make a sale and this guy goes into a room with our some of our stuff and just disappears. Gone. Ripped us off. We move on to Amsterdam, where a guy seems interested in the diamonds. Checks ’em out and says, ‘What did you pay for this?’ Turns out they're worth like 15 bucks. We were so demoralized. We’ve still got a big load of weed, but in Amsterdam, everyone’s into something else. So Peter gets this idea, we’ll trade our stuff for some other stuff, which turns out to be cow shit. I’m like, ‘That’s it? You traded all our stash for cow shit?’ Again, we just got totally ripped off. This whole insane adventure takes a year out of my life. I’ve sold my plane ticket home, and I’ve made zilch.”

Rarick spent another five months in Europe, surfing in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, even Yugoslavia. It was now the spring of ’74, and he had discovered his life’s mission. Most people would have been begging and pleading for a way back home—on horseback, if necessary. On a barge. Rarick wanted more. With exactly $20 to spare, he bought a plane ticket for Durban, spent six months in South Africa, surfed in the Gunston 500 (semifinals; need you ask?) and camped out in East London, where he shaped 300 or so boards and eventually had the whole town riding his equipment. “At that point, I just decided the heck with it, I might as well see the rest of the world.” He pressed on to Brazil, Venezuela, Trinidad-Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and some spots in the Caribbean, surfing the whole way.

It was early 1975 before Rarick finally returned to Hawaii, and he’d missed a few things, like the epic “Huge Monday” swell with Sam Hawk, Owl Chapman, Jose Angel and friends at giant Pipeline, and the 25-foot surf at Waimea during the 1974 Smirnoff contest. But Rarick was a changed man. At any given moment, half of his mind was back in South Africa. He got the idea of running a tour to South Africa, to coincide with the Gunston and, of course, featuring a long side-trip to Jeffreys. He got Owl, BK, Rory Russell, and a few other pros to sign up, and that became an annual event.

“That’s how I was able to go to South Africa 18 times,” he says. “It was a free ticket for me, since I organized the tour, and I was incredibly lucky. I’d roll into town sometime in July, and Jeffreys was always firing when I showed up. I remember in 1977, we had eight straight days of perfect offshore four- to eight-foot surf. Terry Fitzgerald got a wave at Supertubes and connected all the way through, as far as you can ride it; Fitzy and I were the first two guys to do that. And I was always impressed with the contest organization down there.”

Rarick still dreams of Jeffreys Bay, the staggering perfection of the place, the stark setting and the endless rides, but he no longer goes back. “It’s the best pointbreak in the world, without a doubt,” he says. “But I’ve surfed it as big and as good as it can get. What can I do to top that? I’d rather spend my time going other places. It’s sort of like Maui for me. I was there in the early ’60s, when Honolua Bay was empty and you rode a bike down Main Street in Lahaina. Those days are gone, too. I’d rather not have those memories tarnished.”

“MR. CLEAN: THE EXTRAORDINARY SURFING LIFE OF RANDY RARICK,” BY BRUCE JENKINS (1998)

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