Bob Pike (1940-May 20, 1999)

The Largest Surfing Encyclopedia

---

A-Z: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

---

Advertisement

Bob Pike was the first and greatest of Australia's big-wave surfers. In the early '60s, he traveled to the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, and rode with the legends -- Hawaii's Jose Angel and Buzzy Trent, California's Pat Curren, Rick Grigg and Greg Noll. These surfers pioneered the monster waves and unknowingly helped create a millions-strong worldwide surfing boom.

Like many great surfers of his time, Pike became dislocated from the surfing community when professional competition arrived through the late '70s and '80s. Perhaps he never knew how venerated he was by the generations of Australian surfers who followed him into the big Hawaiian surf decades later.

An only child, Robert Hughes Pike grew up one street back from the Manly Surf Club on Sydney's northern beaches. He began riding waves in 1955 at Manly and Freshwater Beach just around the headland -- the beach where, in 1914, Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku introduced Australia to the sport of surfing.

Pike was there when Californian lifeguard surfers Noll and Tom Zahn came to demonstrate the first lightweight Malibu-style boards at surf club carnivals in 1956. During their stay, Zahn left a board at the Manly Surf Club, and Pike borrowed it. One afternoon he was coming in from a surf when Zahn angrily confronted him, "What are you doing with my private property?" Pike immediately fibbed and said he was thinking of buying the board. Zahn changed his tune and offered it for sale. Stunned, Pike had to get money from his father to make good on the deal.

American surf moviemaker Bud Browne came to Sydney in 1958 and showed footage of Oahu's amazing surf to Pike and his mates. In 1961, a group of Australian surfers decided it was time to have a go at those Hawaiian monsters. Pike nearly missed the boat -- at the time he was shearing sheep for a living up in Longreach, Queensland. But the temptation was too great, and soon he was sailing into Honolulu. "For the first time I was home," he told a surfing magazine many years later. "I felt like my soul was being hooked. I realized how much it [surfing] was in my blood."

Riding the big waves of Sunset Beach and Waimea Bay in 1961 was a very raw-boned experience compared with today's Hawaiian surf scene, where lifeguards with Wave Runners and helicopters are on-call throughout large swells. Pike, Angel, Curren and Grigg paddled out on huge heavyweight surfboards that took considerable muscle just to carry down the soft Oahu sands. They caught waves a half-mile offshore, and if they fell, it was a long swim in. On a good day, you might expect a dozen such swims.

In these wild conditions, Pike thrived. Riding a surfboard made by Curren that he dubbed "the ultimate gun," he rode immense waves at the famous spots. He stayed on Oahu while his compatriots headed back to the relative calm of Australian waters. Eventually in 1962 the Americans invited him on a trip to Peru, where he won the waveriding division of the Peruvian International Surf Championships -- the first international surfing win by an Australian.

Pike spent two years away, mostly in Hawaii. Back in Australia by early 1965, he shunned the emerging surf industry by working as a fireman and riding the storm surf at North Narrabeen Beach, several miles north of Manly. He then married Jane Farrelly, sister of Bernard "Midget" Farrelly, and had a daughter, Tara, before divorcing in 1972.

Pike remained fit and strong well into his 50s, surfing a modern style of board at his beloved Narrabeen. But an accident in 1997 left him badly injured and unable to stand up on a board. A year later he moved from Sydney to the north NSW coast with his second wife, Phillipa.

Bob Pike died by his own hand on May 20, 1999. He is survived by Phillipa and daughter Tara. -- Nick Carroll, August 2000