We called him “The Bolt” and he was the best surfer I have ever witnessed in person. Though I’ve had opportunity to be in the water with a few pros over the years, he was better than all of them, and he was from Maine.
We didn’t know his name at first so we christened him with our own nickname, after the surfboard he usually rode. A deep purple tinted “Lightning Bolt.” Single fin, rounded-pintail, about 7′. The logo, made famous by Gerry Lopez, a bold yellow lightning bolt that stretched 1/3 of both the deck and bottom. No words, no names, just that yellow bolt. We’d all seen those Lightning Bolt surfboards under the feet of Gerry Lopez and a few of his team riders, Rory Russell most prominent, blasting out of Banzai Pipeline barrel after Banzai Pipeline barrel in both Surfer and Surfing magazines and the few movies you could view at high school auditoriums and community centers in coastal towns on both coasts and Hawaii. We all coveted those boards and dreamed of owning one. In our area though, there was only him.
Lithe and lean, with cat-like agility, he possessed every bit of relaxed grace as Lopez himself; he even had the same mustache! We would sit in awe of not only his rides but his unfathomable attunement to the ocean and its rhythms. So often he would sit there, casually conversing with one of his buddies, only to spin without warning and glide into a wave that none of us even saw coming. Though he was goofy-foot (like Lopez!) and our home break was a long walled right, he took off backside deeper than any of the regular footed surfers, both then and to this day. High and tight, feet close together and angled so sharply that his body was nearly facing straight ahead to the nose, he made sections that nobody could, closeout sections. Everybody deferred to him, even the older guys. They were his peers and would never let on to him how good they knew he was (lest his head swell as one told me once,) but they always would back off, sit up, and let him have any wave he wanted, just so they could watch.
He wasn’t flashy or radical like today’s surfers. In fact, as I got into photography and started shooting surfing on occasion, I tried to get some good shots of him. I always failed. Somehow, his surfing just didn’t translate to still frame. The few shots I snapped, always looked flat and unspectacular. He didn’t whack or gouge his board like everyone else; spray didn’t fly. More of a glider, a hawk soaring the thermals rather than flapping wings to keep aloft. Only his medium was water and waves rather than air. He sensed the wave’s energy in a way I’ve never seen since in another surfer. A dance spare of movement, his flow had to be witnessed in person to fully grasp his mastery.
It took a whole summer to learn his name, Ronnie, and three summers before he said a word to me out in the water. But as I developed as a surfer, he started noticing me a little bit, talked to me some, and in time, we became, if not close friends, at least surfing friends. We both seemed to sense each others’ passion for surfing and photography and he offered me tidbits of advice on both. He even invited me into his family’s home (a hundred yards up the street from our spot; how cool that he could stroll down the hill to check the surf?) Knowing that I was just beginning to dabble with shaping, he’d show me his surf boards and we’d talk design. Though I most remember him on that purple Lightning Bolt, he was always experimenting and rode fish designs way back when nobody else, at least on the East Coast had even heard of them. He wintered each year in Florida and he had his own personal shaper there who gave him boards to test. He made trips to California to surf and check the latest trends in board design. He lived the lifestyle better than anyone else in our locale, and he never, ever hung around to suffer through blizzard nor’easters and 35 degree water winters!
Being underground, from Maine and Florida, he never made a splash in the surfing world, not that he was even interested in that, but he did brush occasional shoulders with the famous. There’s an old issue of Surfer magazine with a photo of he and Australian legend, Terry Fitzgerald, on the North Shore, holding a board and talking design. Terry frikkin Fitzgerald, and Ronnie from Maine, talking board design! He also published a couple of photos and articles in Surfer. And this back in the day when not anyone with a fully automatic, PHd (Push Here Dummy) digital camera and their own little website could make a name for themselves. Perhaps his most infamous brush with notoriety was when he was wintering in Hawaii one season and paddled out at Pipeline. For hours he tried catching a good clean wave to himself. Frustrated and pissed (totally out of character for him, normally all about casual style and understated grace) he made it up in his mind that the next surfer to cut him off would simply be…run over. And who just happened to be the next surfer to do drop in on his wave? Gerry Lopez himself. Mr. Pipeline. Zen master. Lopez owned that break. But not on this wave… Lopez’ doppelganger, Ronnie from east nowhere Maine…ran him over! Now you can call bullshit on this story, and for all I know Ronnie could have been BS’ing me, (in fact, when he told this story, he did deliver the punchline with an eye twinkle,) but Ronnie was my surf hero and if he said he ran over Gerry Lopez, I believe him.
I haven’t seen Ronnie in years. He used to come back to Maine each year after Labor Day to hopefully catch a hurricane swell at his old home break. But after working in gemstones in the family business for so many years down in Florida, he acquired enough of a stake to purchase a piece of property out in California at the old Hollister Ranch. Now he has access to world-class waves in a region that remains largely pristine of development and more importantly, hordes of other surfers. Frikkin Ronnie, soaring across his own special waves in his own special way, in utter anonymity…stylin’ as always.
