As published in Surfer Magazine...

Surfer magazine's Chris Mauro talks with hip-cat surfer Allan Weisbecker

Most surfers have never heard of Allan Weisbecker. He's not a surfing legend. Never been pro. Never appeared in any ads. But through classic stories from surfing's colorful past we've all become aware of surfers like him. The image of swashbuckling pioneers risking life and limb for the perfect wave has almost become a stereotype, but never have they been captured with the romance and eloquent detail found in Weisbecker's 2000 autobiographical novel Searching For Captain Zero.

Weisbecker's evolution from Montauk hippy-surfer to shortboard revolutionist to big-time dope smuggler to screen-writer and back to hippy surfer had more than its share of dramatic peaks and valleys. Those adventures became the basis of Captain Zero, and today, the story is working its way towards the silver screen; among those spearheading the development process is acclaimed actor/producer Sean Penn. Yet there's more to Weisbecker than just his adventurous episodes. At the heart of it all lies a surfing commitment that's lasted 35 years, and his universal law: "Never betray the faith." Translation: take care of your surfing and it will take care of you. But, as his cautionary tale attest, that's easier said than done.

I met up with Allan at his new home, a hidden jungle outpost in Southern Costa Rica. There, amid waving palms, chirping locusts and singing toucans he's cranking away on the screen adaptation of his book.--Chris Mauro

SURFER Magazine: Allan, How in the world did you get hooked into surfing, and the whole little secret society, while living in New York in the mid '60s?

Business associate. photo: acw archives

Allan Weisbecker: Well, the short answer is The Endless Summer. In '65 I started surfing. In '66 it came to the theatres in Manhattan and played every night for a whole year. We're talking about Manhattan-ites going to see this movie about two guys looking fo the perfect wave. These people would never surf in their lives but they loved it. It grossed something like 30 million in 1966, which is equivalent to a 200-million dollar flick today. It was a phenomenon. People have largely forgotten that. It's the most successful documentary film ever. For me, well, that's when I realized there was more to this whole surfing thing than the tiny surf of Long Island*it was like suddenly the whole world was my oyster. I remember seeing it again and again. I immediately moved to Montauk from Westchester so I could surf regularly.

But Montauk was still a far cry from Malibu.

Well, it's funny, I had a job as a garbage man in Westchester right after High School, so by 8 a.m., I was off work. Then I got a job life guarding in Montauk. It was a cool scene. I was kind of on the periphery then, but Long Island was much more the center of East Coast surfing than Florida at the time. It resembled the scene in Malibu, just a little behind. But remember we're talking about New York here. Say what you want about it but the place produces some real characters. Florida would soon take over with the quality of surfers, but the characters? Nahh.

And so that sense of character led you to the North Shore of Oahu?

Well, I moved to Miami to go to college and quickly learned there was no surf there. So I told my parents they'd save lots of money by sending me to the University of Hawaii. The tuition was only $125 per semester. I was like, "You know how much money we'll save Mahhm?"

And when you arrived in 1967 it was just in time for both the shortboard revolution, not to mention the social one. That must've been s stimulating time for a kid from Long Island.

Yeah, I thought I was going to be quite the hot shot at first, then I saw what Jock [Sutherland] and those guys were doing and I knew I wasn't at that level. At 20-years old, it was like, well, I'm a good surfer but I'll never be great. I think people know right away how good they are. I was hard ired with a decent style though so I had that going for me.

Was there a status attached to the best surfers that appealed to you?

If you ask anyone who was there in 1969 I think they would say so. There was an elitism over and above the hippie subculture that came out of the accomplishments being made in the water. You had Hamilton, Hakman, Lopez, Barry K...you know the list. But it wasn't like any of those guys were making money. It was just a respect among peers thing.

But even then, there had to be some sort of benefit from being the best surfer in the water.

Allan in Hawaii 1968. Photo: Chuck.

Oh, sure, everyone went to the best guys to buy pot. That was it. That's what it got them. That's how it worked. The North Shore was this little haven for outlaws within the bigger secret society. It's no secret guys like Hakman got busted smuggling weed back from Thailand but everyone was doing something. Everyone was out of their minds. Brewer had the best sunshine, which is the stuff Jock Sutherland surfed Waimea on that one night. There was a little cocaine, but most of it was psychedelics--mushrooms and acid. I remember washing things down with mushroom tea and sitting around going, "Oohh, I can hear the earth singing, mannnn." All that hippy shit. It was the '60s. There are large parts of '69 I don't even remember. But I do remember buying blanks from a guy living in a tree house for a baggy of pot, then I'd give Brewer another little baggy to shape it, take it to this guy Wolfman to finish. The whole thing would cost me like 80 bucks. For a Brewer man! The Holy Grail of boards back then.

Do you believe there is a correlation between the experimentation with psychedelics and the whole design revolution.

Oh yeah, c'mon. It's not a coincidence that the acid movement and the revolution in surfing came at the same time. Anyone that tells you differently--please...we were so high we would have tried riding a barn door. Every month things were changing drastically. Things on the North Shore were revolutionar. Not just within surfing. We were living in the country, and it was an enclave in the middle of nowhere where this amazing stuff was going on. The boards got ridiculous. Guys like Reno were riding 16-inch wide pocket rockets. Drugs are the only explanation for stuff like that. (Laughs)

How did the North Shore effect you philosophically?

It changed my entire attitude. In the book, I wrote about how there really was a saying on the North Shore in 1969 that "surfers can do anything." And I sincerely believed it. Later, when I went to Morocco and all that, dealing with these...well, cutthroat types, I really was like, "Well, these guys have never surfed Sunset." So I wasn't afraid. Truth is we--my buddy and I--we were out of our minds. They could have easily killed us. But our attitude was in some ways a self-fulfilling prophecy. We had no hesitation. Just like taking a big wave--you can't back down.

O.K. but how do you go from committed surfer living on the North Shore into full-blown smuggler? What were the outside forces involved in that transition?

Well, I had a house on Ke Iki Road, near Log Cabins, when that famous swell of '69 hit. The firefighters came to evacuate us, and my buddy and I were like, "Yeah, we're on our way." But our real plan was to smoke some hash on the roof later and watch the show (laughs). This part is in the book too. So we started smoking inside and at one point, my buddy Christopher goes to check the surf. He opens the door looks outside, freaks out, runs back in yelling something and then WHAM! A huge wave just disintegrated the house. It washed us all the way across the street. There was nothing left. No surfboards. Nothing over a foot long. Our cat was killed but somehow we survived without a scratch. We were on the front page of the paper the next day and everything. But to get to the point that whole thing really freaked us out. We were hippies, so our theory was, "Whoa, man, Mother Nature's trying to tell us something. We need to bail."

So that epic swell is what sent you to Morocco?

Yeah, we'd been smoking Moroccan hash that night, so we figured there was some symmetry in that. We'd take our student loan money and go over there and see what we could do. We knew we could get stuff cheap there and we could ride some waves.

But was smuggling pot really your primary mission?

Living large. Photo: acw archives.

Well, when we got there we realized just how cheap cheap was. You could buy 40 bucks worth and sell it for $1000 stateside. You didn't have to have an MBA to figure out you could make some serious money doing that. So that's what we did. I mean, we became criminals then and there. We launched ourselves into a lifestyle without hesitation, because the alternative was to go home and get a job. There was no choice as far as we were concerned.

So you became a criminal just to keep surfing?

Yeah, the dream was to make a bunch of money and do The Endless Summer one better. Remember this was around 1970. The world was a blank slate as far as surfing was concerned. Indo was still a rumor. We figured we'd find the perfect wave, the perfect place, whatever, and just buy it. Hey, I'm 21-years old and coming off the North Shore--anything is possible. Surfers can do anything.

Did this part of the dream ever happen?

No! That's the sad part. I mean, aside from finding a few spots in Morocco and in the Caribbean. I definitely wasn't the first guy in Morocco but I surfed it more than anyone else at the time. But the point is my greed got the better of me and I missed out on that Golden Era.

"Betraying the faith" as you say in Captain Zero.

Exactly. Meanwhile my cohorts from the East Coast like Ricky Rasmussen and Tony Caramanico were exploring Indo with Lopez and that gang. There will never be another time like that.

The fact that you were bringing in huge loads bring any consolation?

AW getting five-to-ten...toes that is. Photo: Nick Bothma

Well, yeah, maybe at the time, but certainly not looking back on it now. We started out making some smaller scores with some scms in Morocco, and we'd make about $50,000. So then Christopher and I had planned to buy a boat and sail it back with a million bucks worth of hash. So we nabbed the boat down in Florida and got distracted by the scene there, y'know running bales from the Bahamas. Anyway, the point being, Columbia was a lot closer than Morocco. We'd run into guys like us all over the Caribbean and because we had a boat, pretty soon we had our own Colombian connection. So that quickly led to the episode in the book called The Fucking Boat, where we brought in 20,000 pounds and basically made a million dollars. We owed a lot because we were fronted everything. But after paying our Colombian connection, our crew, the off loaders, we had a million between us.

This was the boat you described as a complete piece of crap, but you somehow managed to get it all the way from Columbia to New York.

Yup, it was a total miracle that The Fucking Boat made it. The thing was a complete piece of shit. None of the navigation equipment or radios worked. It was like "Laurel and Hardy Go Smuggling." Yet somehow we brought in the load. That should have been the key, after how close we were to getting busted on that one we should have just said enough and walked away, but we didn't.

You tried to double down.

Exactly. Suddenly the idea of retiring to surf paradise took a back seat to getting really rich. We were making money by the suitcase. We'd just weigh the things because it would take way too long to count. So here we were a couple of surfers in the late 70s with a million bucks, you'd think that would've been enough for us to go surfing on but looking back, we'd been seriously betraying the faith, and we weren't seeing straight. We wanted to make 10 million. We were buying boats, flying Lear jets. We'd forget to load our boards on the plane sometimes, spending months out of the water. That's betraying the faith.

Some things never change. Photo: acw archives

And the dream died soon after?

It sure did. The great irony is we had the most modrn piece of equipment we could get our hands on loaded up with 100,000 pounds of pot and we managed to sink that boat in a storm. We basically had our entire nut invested in that load, so we lost everything. We tried to make it up with another one, but the Coast Guard tailed us through the Mona Passage for two days and we had to scuttle the ship with an entire load in the belly.

But even though you were criminals, you claim you had a moral code, of sorts.

Yeah, keep in mind smuggling in those days wasn't the great evil it is today*

How do you figure?

Look, the 70's was a different era. There was almost an innocence to what we were doing because the only thing we were smuggling was pot. That's it. Anyone who wants to tell me pot is an evil drug compared to alcohol or even cigarettes, well...they have their head up their ass. I'd much rather run into a guy in a dark alley who's smoked a joint than some drunk. Back then, the whole smuggling thing was just a bunch of long hairs, mostly surfers, throwing bales to their buddies and it was sort of fun...Jimmy Buffet was singing about us so we thought we were pretty cool. A 20 something guy flying around in a Lear jets with a surfboards in the back? C'mon, It was cool. But we did have a moral code, and some people may think that's bullshit, but it's true. We had the choice of running guns and cocaine and we never did.

So it was a moral choice to get out or were you forced to go legit?

Well, after we lost the load scuttling the ship I told Christopher I was done. Unfortunately he stayed in. But that's when it finally hit me: we were supposed to be surfers. Also, one of the main reasons I got out was because around 1980 the pot lords on the North Coast of Columbia were giving way to cocaine guys, and I could see that the new guys were different. I mean, it's not like the pot lords were mellow guys. They were fucking crazy. They would kill. But the pot lords weren't terrorists, which is what the coke guys are.

From the junles of Columbia to Hollywood and Vine. What a long, strange trip it's been.