Hobie Alter has passed away and we are all the poorer for it.
Victoria Skimboards’ first customer was Hobie Sports in Dana Point.
ALL my life I had been going there with my family on our way to San Onofre. The smell of resin was fresh, foam was on the floor, and the boards were treasures we drooled over.
We always bought from the used section, as we were a large family. My mom had grown up in Hawaii, surfing with Duke as a young girl hanging out at the Outrigger Club. My dad, as a teenager, had seen the Duke after the ’32 Olympics in LA, when after a swim meet, the Duke had sauntered back out from the locker rooms with a surfboard under his arm that he threw into the pool. My dad was hooked as was the entire stadium that collectively sucked in all the air. He said you could hear it. He started cruising to San O as a very young man.
So, my acquaintance with Hobie Sports began very young.
I was first exposed to skimboarding, at Victoria Beach back about 1960. My parents decided to share an apartment with some other families, so we could surf San O without having to make the long drive from Pasadena each time. Having exited college, and bailing out on becoming a veterinarian, I was now employed in construction and painting, and ended up working at Rainbow sandals with Peter Prietto, one of my oldest friends from the Victoria Beach crew. After a year of sandal glueing and sanding, Peter and I decided to make good on our teenage talk of building skimboards. We bought a couple sheets of plywood from Laguna Lumber, downtown on Forest opposite City Hall. We drove up to Costa Mesa to Crystaliner to buy resin and fiberglass and then we commenced to building boards in Peter’s apartment living room in N. Laguna, which was carpeted! The fumes drove the tenant out into the street screaming at us. We quickly moved on.
Having built a half a dozen wood boards, we trucked on down to Hobie’s shop in Dana Point, where the manager ? promptly took them from us and asked us to return in a few weeks to see about a reorder. We were in! We were started! We had Hobie Sports as our first base and the world was looking pretty good.
Thank you Hobie for all the great things you invented. You made life so much more fun for so many people, that I am sure St Peter is waving you thru the door.
Surfboards, catamarans, Hobie Hawk gliders, monohull sail and power boats, pedal powered kayaks for fishing, and the list goes on and on, as will your name and our memory.
Thank you Hobie, for giving Victoria Skimboards a start. Kids, of all ages, are sliding into shorebreak, or off of rails on the inland waterways, or skimming behind boats and kites, in at least 23 countries around the world.
Tex Haines
