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, died on Jan. 10 in Encinitas, Calif. He was 82.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Donna Klaasen Jost, who collaborated with Hynson on his 2009 autobiography, “Transcendental Memories of a Surf Rebel.” She said the cause was not yet known.
Hynson arose in an era when surfing was often marginalized as a curious ritual of West Coast teenage culture, thanks to frothy matinee fare like “Beach Blanket Bingo” (1965) and a swell of Beach Boys hits. He was hailed not only for his skills on the waves, but also as a noted builder of boards, particularly the popular Red Fin longboard, which he designed for the manufacturer Gordon & Smith in 1965.
His was “one of the greatest surf lives ever lived,” Jake Howard wrote in Surfer magazine after Hynson’s death, describing him as “a hot-dog performer, a shaping genius, a cosmic adventurer” who “altered the sport and culture of surfing in an untold number of ways.”
Hynson’s life became the stuff of lore starting in 1963, when he was invited by the filmmaker Bruce Brown to join him and Robert August, another young Southern California surfer, on a trek that would lead them through Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand and Hawaii, hopping the Equator to avoid the slightest chill of winter while searching for the perfect wave.
Hynson was only 21 but had already built a reputation as a maverick power surfer on the beaches around San Diego. He could be cocky and aloof, friends recalled — but not without reason: He already proved his mettle as one of the first non-native Hawaiians to ride Pipeline, on the North Shore of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, sometimes called the most dangerous wave in the world, in 1961.
He certainly looked camera ready, with his caramel tan and sun-whitened hair pomaded back in Dracula fashion, a hairstyle soon to be imitated by surfers around the world.
Mr. Brown had only $50,000 for his project, leaving his stars to pay for their own tickets around the world. To finance his trip, Hynson turned to the renowned board maker Hobie Alter, whom he had worked for, to provide him $1,400 for airfare, “even though I’d stolen nine surfboards off him a few years earlier,” he said in a 2017 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian.
Unbeknown to his strait-laced companions, Hynson brought along with him a stash of amphetamines and a three-month supply of Tijuana marijuana. “I was young, stupid and loaded,” he said in a 2009 interview with OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, Calif.
The first stop was Senegal, where the locals “were using wooden planks to belly board around in the waves,” Hynson told The Guardian, “so when they saw Robert and me surfing upright, they were overwhelmed.”
Bigger game awaited them. Hynson finally spotted their quarry at Cape St. Francis, on South Africa’s south coast — a “perfect reeling right-hander, without a surfer in sight,” as Surfer magazine once described it.
“On Mike’s first ride,” Mr. Brown said in his narration of “The Endless Summer,” “the first five seconds, he knew he’d finally found that perfect wave.” The waves, he added, “looked like they had been made by some kind of a machine. The rides were so long I couldn’t get them on one piece of film.”
In his autobiography, Hynson recalled the experience: “I haven’t had too many adrenaline rushes like that in my life, a pure and natural phenomenon. It was electrical. The hair on my neck stood straight up.”
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 journey brought no shortage of challenges. On a layover in Mumbai on the way from South Africa to Australia, Hynson had to tape five 16-millimeter film canisters containing the treasured Cape St. Francis footage under a baggy Hawaiian shirt, to sneak it past Indian customs agents who had been confiscating cameras and film in a crackdown on unauthorized photography.
Distributors initially showed little interest. Warner Bros., Hynson wrote, “predicted it would never go beyond 10 miles from the beach.” Mr. Brown eventually proved them wrong, attracting lines around the block for a screening in Wichita, Kan., during a driving snowstorm. “The Endless Summer” went on to gross more than $30 million.
By the late 1960s, Hynson was off on another quest, this time to find enlightenment with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a band of psychonauts and drug smugglers in the Laguna Beach area. The Brotherhood blended elements of Eastern religion with a faith in the transformative powers of psychedelic drugs, which they dealt in such prodigious quantities that the authorities branded them the “hippie mafia.”
Hynson was soon taking LSD regularly, but he evaded arrest long enough to make another cinematic foray: He masterminded “Rainbow Bridge” (1972), which he originally conceived as a surfing film. The film, directed by Chuck Wein, a protégé of Andy Warhol, evolved into a quasi documentary about mysticism, surfing and drugs, climaxing with a Jimi Hendrix concert at the base of the Haleakala volcano in Maui.
In one scene, Hynson eagerly breaks open a surfboard and produces a hidden bag of hashish (actually 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.”
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