Better Surfing Through Chemistry 

“Look at the moon for you may live there.”

—Surf Research Waxmate label fortune, c.1968

In Mike Doyle’s 1993 memoir Morning Glass, Doyle recounts how his relationship with his main sponsor Catalina began unraveling on Galveston Beach in the spring of 1965 along with the flimsy stitching of his surf trunks. Doyle, then 24 and a two-time Surfer Poll winner, was arguably the most famous surfer in the world. Trim, blond, and athletic, Doyle racked up an impressive competitive career in small and big surf from the late 50s on. A well-rounded waterman who shaped his own winning boards, Doyle was gifted with a dramatic matador style influenced by years of surfing Malibu with the likes of Miki Dora and Matt Kivlin. He parlayed his friendly on-camera persona into movie extra work, paid endorsements, and announcer gigs to become one of surfing’s first full-time professionals by the mid 1960s. 

Catalina, a venerable swim and cruise-wear company founded at the turn of the century, was looking to capture part of a massive demographic of teenage Baby Boomers flush with disposable cash. Based on the breakout success of Hang Ten, a veneer of authentic surf culture looked to be a turnkey portal to a multimillion-dollar youth market. Doyle was hired for a sizable retainer and sent on a cross-country promotional tour that had him touting Catalina in department stores and giving surfing demos at the nearest body of water (which included wake surfing in the Ohio River). He was feted by local bigwigs and politicos, even gaining the key to New York City from mayor John Lindsay.

Surf conditions at Galveston Beach, however, were less than optimal. In fact, they were nonexistent. Ankle-high wind chop under a broiling Texas sun. But thanks to a nonstop pre-publicity campaign that included radio plugs and billboards, hundreds of curious Galveston locals lined the beach for a glimpse of this California demigod. 

In spite of the conditions Doyle gamely soldiered on. When asked on-camera about the quality of Galveston surf, he spun it masterfully: “Well, the waves are a bit small today. But other than that I’d say the surf conditions are just about ideal.” Then he paddled out.

After 20 minutes sitting in the silty chop, Doyle parsed out a clean 1-footer and began knee-paddling to catch it. As he bent to the task, however, his floral-print “Big Wave Riders” blew out crotch to waistband. Undeterred, Doyle stood, trimmed, and treated the stunned throng to a world-class Trestles B.A., balls and all. Without losing a beat, he ghosted up to the shallows, picked up his board, and swanned through the parting crowd like Moses.

Back in California, Doyle took the president of Catalina, Chuck Trowbridge, to task for producing shoddy goods that no real surfer would want to wear or endorse. At first Trowbridge seemed open to suggestions to improving the line and, for the next year, Doyle huddled with Catalina’s designers to build a better boardshort using beefier cloth, double seams, and improved cut. He crafted a detailed 20-page analysis of the youth movement and how creating quality surf gear would make Catalina an industry leader. But when making his big pitch to the Catalina board in L.A.’s City Of Commerce, his suggestions were met with cow-eyed stares through a pall of cigar smoke. Trowbridge told him: “There’s something you have to understand, Mike…we aren’t really selling to surfers. What we are doing is selling the surfer image.” 

Doyle quit on the spot and took the train back to his pre-garmento life of shaping and lifeguarding in Encinitas. 

Still, as Doyle relates 50 years later, all that research didn’t go to waste. A relentless garage inventor and entrepreneur who was quick to adopt new materials and tech coming out of the booming South Bay aerospace industry, Doyle felt he could create a cottage industry building core products made for and by real surfers. “Surfing has always been my first love and what I really craved was freedom and creativity,” says Doyle. “And I felt an obligation to deliver an honest product to the surf community.”

*

“The art of living is the art of leaving.”

Fast forward to Florida, autumn 1966. Mike Doyle, Rusty Miller, and Garth Murphy—Hansen Surfboards’ elite surf and sales team—are driving to Cocoa Beach in a board-laden van through the miasmal mosquito-ridden swelter. At times they skirt endless stretches of salt marsh and pine barrens. Doyle and Murphy take occasional potshots out the window with a gas-station-bought .22, which infuriates the younger Miller, who threatens to jump ship every time they fire off a volley. The older pair enjoy baiting Miller and they bicker constantly between surf shop demos.

These were flush times for surfboard makers. Following the hit mainstream release of The Endless Summer in 1966, an unprecedented number of teens hit the beaches, and this abrupt bulge of novice surfers all demanded the California name brands seen in Surfer magazine. The East Coast, especially, exploded with new shops, and the large board factories like Hobie, Hansen, and Weber were maxing out production and shipping more than 500 new boards a week back east. The key to board maker loyalty is authentic cool, hence the need to send star riders like Doyle and Miller to demo the latest signature model, and hopefully beat the competition to the racks. While Doyle was a breakout surf celebrity, Miller was a former U.S. champ who gained iconic status when he was featured double-life-size, flying down a massive Sunset Beach cornice in a  national Hamm’s Beer billboard campaign.

In addition to the boards, the Eastern newbies were ravenous for surf accessories and fashion that included surf racks, wax, decals, t-shirts, and jewelry. Even the incredibly dorky Jantzen matching trunks and windbreaker sets being flogged by the likes of Corky Carroll and Ricky Grigg disappeared off the racks. The trio recognized an overlooked opportunity to create and market their own line of non-competing accessories that could be sold freely across the board-making spectrum.

Back in Encinitas, Doyle and Miller consulted with their boss Don Hansen, who immediately saw the value in having his top riders form a separate company to market surf accessories and add longevity to their careers. Hansen, who learned to shape balsa boards in the late 50s from Jack O’Neill, had ridden surfing’s first boom era adroitly to the top through a relentless work ethic learned as a South Dakota farm boy. By age 30 he was a leading board manufacturer, having set up shop in Cardiff-By-The-Sea in 1961, then a sleepy, semi-rural beach town next to Encinitas that featured Swami’s, a powerful right-hand pointbreak located on a sheer bluff directly below Swami Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship ashram. Within a few years Hansen was rivaling Weber Surfboards in sales, running full-page ads in Surfer, and sponsoring hot homegrown talent like Rusty Miller and Linda Benson.

Over the next six months Don Hansen, Mike Doyle, Garth Murphy, and Rusty Miller pooled $10,000 of start-up capital, and leased a small utilitarian storefront on Coast Highway within walking distance of Swami’s and across from Hansen’s new Encinitas store (where it remains as a landmark surf emporium). They named it Surf Research, and crafted up a sans-serif logo of a lab beaker framing a silhouette of a David Nuuhiwa soul arch. 

“My father, a marine ecologist, had spent a life researching marine species populations so I didn’t cringe at the seriousness of the word ‘research,’” says Murphy, who grew up on Oahu’s South Shore and was a Summerland roommate of Doyle’s while attending UCSB. “What we were doing with boards, and then the surf wax we invented was research at its most basic. We were creating surf-culture hard goods.
Surf Research sounded good, almost like ‘surf re-surf’ so that’s what we called ourselves.”

*

“Safety in numbers.”

For their first product they decided to build a better bar of wax. Surf wax at the time was commercial-grade paraffin purchased by the pound in the canning section of the supermarket. It was a bicep-burning effort to rub on evenly. In cold water, paraffin would harden to the consistency of slick glass, leading to banana-peel results. 

“Waxmate was our first product, a surf wax we invented with the help of Steve Knorr, a Del Mar surfer and third-generation candle-maker friend of Rusty’s,” recalls Murphy. “We needed stickiness and Steve provided softeners and wax-making expertise. We researched wax products, mostly from Indonesia, and came up with a three-part formula that really worked for warm, cool, and cold waters. The wax was slow-melted in 44-gallon drums with gas burners used for chocolate and poured into wooden molds we built ourselves. We dyed the bars purple, added a pleasing bayberry scent, and designed the labels with life-instructing sayings on the flip side. We were in business.” 

The pocket-sized wax bar (later immortalized as a glowing psychedelic talisman by Rick Griffin on the Five Summer Stories poster) was an instant hit. Despite the higher cost (retailing at .25 cents a bar), surfers immediately recognized Waxmate’s advantage as a purpose-built surfing tool. The first year, Surf Research grossed $25,000 in wax sales. The second, they rocketed up to $240,000. To keep up with production they hired their first employee, Bill Engler, and jobbed out packaging to Kathy and Cindy Leinhardt, two surfing sisters from Leucadia.

Various Surf Research ads, 1970-1972. Images courtesy of Mary Ryan Collection.

More than anything, Surf Research is remembered for its innovative Surfer ads, starting with a utilitarian quarter-page in early 1967, but skewing increasingly goofball yet ironically cool with each issue. Shot with a secondhand camera and using found props, the ads caught a certain wacky zeitgeist of the late 60s as Doyle hammed it up as a seaweed-draped crazy or an imperious Pharaoh blowing magic smoke over a bar of Waxmate.

“It was kind of shock pop. Like, ‘What the fuck? Nobody does that!’” says Doyle. “People thought we were smoking dope or something. But it caught a lot of attention.”

While Waxmate proved the big earner, the Surf Research team quickly filled out an impressive accessory line, some custom designed by Doyle, while others were adapted and repackaged from existing products. “Mike came up with a non-skid deck spray in a can called Spraymate,” says Murphy. “He designed Nose Lifters, fin attachments that made nose riding easy. He created a surf short of purple stretch nylon we called Baggys. Super comfortable and quick drying, those sold out immediately. We made Locked In, a cable device to keep your board from being stolen from rooftop racks. We distributed Barrecrafters surf racks and O’Neill wetsuits, sold patch kits, surfboard bags, and developed a muesli cereal to power surfers that we called New Food.”

Workdays at Surf Research began early with yoga, granola, and a Swami’s surf session. Back at the shop, they would begin by popping out the previous day’s wax bars and prepping them for wrapping and delivery. A new batch was made up and poured and while that cooled, any additional orders were filled. By the time Don Hansen rolled up to check on his growing empire, his business partners were heading out for a late-morning surf break. 

“Hansen would come out in front of his shop folding his arms and staring at his two pretty boy riders, Doyle and Miller, strapping boards to the
roof and laughing their asses off, probably stoned,” says Rusty.

“Don would look at our business and wonder what in the world held the thing together,” adds Doyle. “But we didn’t want to become surf moguls. We wanted to get our water time, be healthy and happy—running a business had no appeal to us.”

*

“Eat well, live well; surf well, die well.”

Like many manifestations of 60s counterculture, Surf Research was a short-lived venture, lasting a bit over two years with the original partners. But the buzz it generated transformed Doyle’s ramshackle cottage (dubbed “The Soul House”) in Leucadia into a rootsy salon and think-lab among surfing’s most progressive factions during a wholesale reset of surfing’s gestalt.

“Every aspect of surfing and life in general was in a state of rapid change,” says Murphy. “It was a very unified, tight, and supportive enterprise. I was just good enough, smart enough, and wanted it enough to worm my way into the middle of an extremely talented group of surfing performance artists, all of whom had other creative talents to boot. The World Surfing Championships in San Diego in 1966 and Puerto Rico in 1968 made that group international and introduced us to the hard-charging Aussies like Russell Hughes and Nat Young with their experimental short surfboards.”

The Soul House’s proximity to Swami’s and other North County breaks assured a steady stream of top Pacific Rim surfers—Californian, Hawaiian, and Australian—through Encinitas. Most gravitated to Doyle’s house to hang out, play music, eat lentil burgers, get high in the tree house, and shape short, often bizarre “mind machines.” These were immediately flight tested at nearby breaks. The elite crew that gravitated around Surf Research and Encinitas included Joey Cabell, Billy Hamilton, Herbie Fletcher, Barry Kanaiaupuni, Gerry Lopez, Reno Abellira, Russell Hughes, Skip Frye, Mike Hynson, David Nuuhiwa, and Nat Young.

“By 1966 when we hatched the plan, longboards were being chopped in half and reshaped into the new era of performance surfing,” says Murphy. “The leash was about to be invented, which would allow acrobatics to be practiced without losing your board to the rocks.”

The Venn diagram of psychedelics, surfboard design, and the youth mutiny of the 60s proved an accelerant and disrupter on surfing’s co-evolution, which until late 1966 seemed predestined to wholesale corporate mainstreaming. The Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1968, offered a democratized “Access To Tools” ethos that was enthusiastically embraced by surfers, who are DIY tinkerers by economic necessity and inclination. Outlier surfboard designers like George Greenough, Tom Morey, Mike Hynson and Carl Ekstrom were suddenly being featured as oracles of the coming revolution.

*

“Back past the past we could live at last.”

By the end of 1969, however, the band was breaking up. While Surf Research’s growth curve with wax sales was increasing exponentially, the daily grind of production and distribution had turned into what the original partners feared most…a job.

“There were problems collecting debts from East Coast surf shops that closed the first of October and opened again at Easter,” says Murphy. “The clothing business was not satisfying. Making the wax was repetitious. We were bored with the inventions.
We wanted adventure, love, romance. We wanted to go surfing.”

Hansen, the most astute businessman, sold his share early to Newport surfer and businessman Fred Ryan for the rights to use Fred’s surfboard label, Ocean Pacific. Rusty Miller, disillusioned over American geopolitics and the deepening Vietnam morass, went to live in Walden-like seclusion in a small caretaker’s shack at the end of the road on Kauai.

John Baker (later Dahl), a La Jolla surfer and childhood friend of Rusty’s, was hired in late 1969 to run the wax-making operations, which had outgrown the original shop and edged out all the other products. Dahl, who had a background in cement production and sales, took a pay cut for lifestyle. After a one-day workshop, Murphy handed him the keys and never came back.

By the end of the year, Garth and Bill Engler had migrated down to Byron Bay, lured by reports of endless warm-water right points along Australia’s northern NSW coast. Rusty eventually joined them in Australia where they ran an Australian version of Surf Research for a couple years until the logistics of shipping by rail proved unprofitable. Mike went north to Oregon where he worked as a lumberjack, surfed empty cold-water lineups, and learned wooden boat building. 

“The smell of melted wax eventually washed from our skin and psyches,” says Murphy.

[Feature image: Fred Ryan, Surf Research wax factory, Encinitas, 1967. Photo courtesy of Mary Ryan Collection.]