Surf’s down: Legendary ‘The Endless Summer’ surfer Mike Hynson, of Encinitas and La Jolla, dies at age 82

The Endless Summer officially ended on Jan. 10 for legendary Encinitas surfer Mike Hynson who epitomized the image of the bronzed surf god as a star of the hit 1966 surfing documentary “The Endless Summer”and, with his outlaw instincts, embodied the rebel ethos of the sport on his way to being hailed a colossus of the curl, according to The New York Times.

They say the ocean knows its own, and so it was that Mike Hynson slipped away, not in the salt spray and thundering reef breaks, but in the still sterility of a hospital room. His passing was confirmed by Donna Klaasen Jost, his collaborator on the 2009 autobiography Transcendental Memories of a Surf Rebel. The cause, she said, was still unknown. Maybe it was the sea finally calling him home. Maybe it was something else.

Hynson came up in an era when surfing was still a rogue gospel, practiced in the dawn patrol quiet and written off by the landlocked masses as a teenage frolic, a Beach Blanket Bingo sideshow. But he was never just another kid with a board under his arm. He was a wave warrior, a craftsman, a rebel, a shaper of fiberglass and foam and fate. His Red Fin longboard, birthed in 1965 for Gordon & Smith, became an altar to the faithful, an extension of the soul, a bridge between man and motion.

Jake Howard, writing in Surfer magazine, called Hynson’s journey “one of the greatest surf lives ever lived.” A hot-dog performer, a shaping savant, a cosmic explorer. He didn’t just ride waves—he rewrote the sport, bent it, stretched it, carved it into something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Mike Hynson in 1964 on Salt Creek Beach in Orange County, Calif. His was “one of the greatest surf lives ever lived,” Jake Howard wrote in Surfing magazine.Credit…Bob Bagley, via Bruce Brown Films, LLC

The myth of Hynson took shape in 1963, when Bruce Brown tapped him and Robert August for a pilgrimage across the blue planet in search of the unbroken, uncharted, untamed wave. From Senegal to Ghana, South Africa to Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii—always chasing that liquid cathedral, forever slipping over the equator to avoid the bite of winter.

At only 21, he already carried the quiet arrogance of a man who knew his own gravity. He had danced with Pipeline when few outsiders dared. He had earned his salt, his stripes, his scars. He looked the part too—bronzed and bright-haired, a prowling pirate with his Dracula-slicked locks, setting the template for the next wave of imitators.

Bruce Brown’s film budget was a paltry $50,000, leaving the golden boys to scrape together their own passage. Hynson, ever the hustler, turned to Hobie Alter for the $1,400 he needed, despite having previously lifted nine boards from the man. “Even though I’d stolen from him, he still gave me the money,” Hynson later admitted. That was Hynson—grinning, slippery, impossible to pin down.

And then, of course, there were the drugs. The amphetamines, the Tijuana stash, the secret fuel of the voyage. He was young, he was wild, he was burning at both ends and calling it enlightenment.

In Senegal, they found the locals belly-riding on wooden planks, their eyes widening when they saw Hynson and August rise to their feet, gods walking on water. But it was Cape St. Francis that seared itself into history—the perfect right-hander, mechanical in its rhythm, divine in its execution. “On Mike’s first ride,” Brown narrated in The Endless Summer,“the first five seconds, he knew he’d finally found that perfect wave.”

It was an electric moment, Hynson later recalled. A jolt straight through the spine. A reminder that sometimes the universe does, in fact, conspire to grant you perfection.

Surfing through life’s good and bad

Catching a wave circa 1964 with Mike Hynson/California Surf Museum

Michael Lear Hynson was born on June 28, 1942, in Crescent City, Calif., near the Oregon border, the elder of two sons of Robert Hynson, an engineer who worked for the Navy, and Grace (Wheaton) Hynson. In his early years, the family divided its time between Hawaii and San Diego, finally settling in Southern California when he was 10. As a teenager, he took up surfing with a crew called the Sultans.

After graduating from La Jolla High School in San Diego, Hynson found himself dodging letters from the draft board in the early years of the Vietnam conflict. “I’d been sidestepping them for three years,” he wrote in his book. The around-the-world trip for the film, he added, “was the miracle I needed.”

The road, man, it was never smooth, never straight. More of a serpentine dance through customs checkpoints and cosmic doorways. Take Mumbai, for instance—just a pit stop between South Africa and Oz, but even a pit stop can turn into a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.

Hynson, ever the trickster, found himself strapping five sacred canisters of 16-millimeter gold—footage from Cape St. Francis—right up against his ribs under a billowy Hawaiian shirt, sweating bullets while Indian customs agents cracked down on rogue photographers like holy warriors on a mission from bureaucracy. But the film, the film had to survive. The dream depended on it.

The suits weren’t feeling the dream, though. Warner Bros. sniffed at it, said it wouldn’t travel further than a stone’s throw from the shoreline. But the tide, as it always does, rolled in differently. Mr. Brown, the true believer, took it to Wichita, Kan., where, in the middle of a blizzard, landlocked dreamers wrapped in wool and wonder lined up around the block to taste summer eternal. Thirty million bucks later, those same suits probably wished they’d packed a pair of trunks.

Hynson masterminded “Rainbow Bridge” (1972), which he originally conceived as a surfing film but which evolved into a quasi documentary about mysticism, surfing and drugs, climaxing with a Jimi Hendrix concert at the base of a volcano.Credit…Transvue Pictures Corp, via LMPC

By the time the ‘60s were winding down, Hynson had already slipped the leash of convention again, this time in search of higher frequencies. He fell in with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love—a swirling, tie-dyed symphony of mystics, acid prophets, and enterprising smugglers in Laguna Beach.

They peddled enlightenment wholesale, dosed up and wide-eyed, dealing psychedelics in such Herculean quantities that the feds dubbed them the “hippie mafia.”

LSD became as regular as waxing a board, and in between astral travel, Hynson hatched another film: Rainbow Bridge(1972). Originally envisioned as a surf flick, it morphed into something looser, wilder—a celluloid fever dream weaving mysticism, waves, and a Jimi Hendrix explosion at the foot of Maui’s Haleakala volcano. One scene had Hynson cracking open a surfboard like a pirate’s treasure chest, unveiling a stash of hash (really just Ovaltine, reflecting a smuggling tactic he had employed with the Brotherhood.

Despite the film’s giddy portrayal of drug use, Hynson’s dependence on drugs, particularly cocaine and methamphetamine, eventually led to a precipitous slide, including time behind bars for drug possession. “I hit rock bottom,” he told OC Weekly, “and then stayed there for a while.”

He eventually pulled out of his spiral and began crafting surfboards again. He credited his ex-wife, Melinda Merryweather, a former model for the Ford Agency, and his longtime partner, Carol Hannigan, as his “angels.”

Ms. Hannigan survives him, as does Michael Hynson Jr., his son from his first marriage.

In a 1986 video interview, Hynson looked back on his perfect ride in South Africa and wondered whether he and his companions had invented a surfing fantasy with it or simply reflected one already embedded in the surfer consciousness. “If we wouldn’t have had ‘Endless Summer,’” he asked, “you think there would still be this quest of a perfect wave? Think anybody would even care?”

“I didn’t particularly care,” he said. “But when I saw it, I knew exactly then that we had popped a bubble and made a dream.”