OUR COMMUNITY

Hawaiian cultural practitioner Tom Pōhaku Stone shared how he and other Hawaiian keiki capitalized on standing waves that they discovered in rivers and streams to he’e pu’ewai on their “papa uma” (board used under the chest) or papa pāhā (a small board that could be used kneeling or prone and standing on Oahu rivers and streams throughout his childhood in the 1950s.

Legendary Hawaiian big wave surfer, assiduous life saver, and heroic Polynesian voyager Eddie Aikau, and his accomplished younger brother Clyde Aikau were avid river surfers on Oʻahu’s Waimea River in the early 1970s and possibly earlier, as were other North Shore Water Safety Officers (aka. Lifeguards).  Legendary lifeguard Mark Dombroski tells of bodysurfing the draining Waimea River with Eddie Aikau as early as 1972 or ʻ73.

We may never know when river surfing outside Hawaiʻi began. Surfers are by nature an inventive lot, particularly when they happen upon surfable waves in their travels. The prevailing global narrative has been that river surfing started in Germany  when Arthur Pauli first stood unsupported on a surfboard on Flosslände, a river wave on the Isar River in Munich on September 5, 1972. Around that same time, fellow Bavarian adventurers were “Brettlrutschn” (board-sliding) on small bodyboard-sized wooden boards tied with ropes to the bridge at the Eisbach, a famed river wave in downtown Munich. They soon discovered they too could surf the wave without need of a rope. According to urban lore, people have been stand-up surfing there since the city dropped concrete in the channelized waterway in 1972, and they say that city residents were Brettlrutschn there well  before that, but without the bottom contours created by the concrete, it was a fickle wave. In fact, the Pauli brothers were first to ride unsupported, without aid of a rope, on Flosslände, a completely separate wave on the Isar River some miles away from the Eisbach in Munich!  Brettlrutschn had uncertain origins, but it has been practiced on Bavarian rivers since the mid to late-1960s, pretty much anywhere a suitable bridge or tree was available to tie a rope off too. Now this man-made river feature is famous worldwide, and surfers wait in line to surf it one at a time!

It appears that the German and North American origins of the sport arose separately, as neither had any knowledge that river surfing had arisen elsewhere. North American river surfing history traces through Mike “Fitz” FitzPatrick, Steve Osman and Steve Hahn, who first surfed the Lunch Counter Wave on the Snake River in 1978. Fitz learned to surf on the East Coast, then lived and surfed in California, and later got pretty good in Tahiti.  River guides Fitz and Osman had talked about the Lunch Counter primary wave’s surf potential in 1976 and 1977, but they lacked a surfboard.  In 1978 they discovered that a fellow guide, Hahn, had a board and had tried surfing it without success.  They convinced him to share, and all three met at the Lunch Counter one day after work in 1978.  Being the most experienced, Fitz was the first to get to his feet.  It took the others multiple sessions, but eventually they too figured it out.

Devotees to this new adventure sport began to spread throughout North America. As their stories and commentary began to appear in surfing and sports media, North American river surfers began to expand their river surfing experiences. New waves were discovered, new rivers were surfed, and small communities of surfers began to coalesce around better river waves. In the early 1980s, Ron Orton rode the Jordan River in Northern Utah, and later he competed and took first place in a contest at the Jordan River Hole in 1983. Notably, two unnamed Hawaiian surfers were regulars at the Jordan River Hole in Northern Utah in 1983, rolling up in their bright green & gold ‘57 Cadillac.

In 1985 and 1986, the Meistrell family of Body Glove International were invited to bring members of their team of professional surfers and bodyboarders to surf the Lunch Counter wave by way of longstanding business relationships and personal friendships with John Krisik and John Scott of Jackson, Wyoming. Snake River guides and practiced river runners – like Krisik, Scott, and first-ever North American river surfer Mike FitzPatrick – ensured there was river safety for professional surfers like Allen Sarlo, Brian McNulty, Jim Hogan Ted Robinson, and Scott Daley and professional bodyboarders Danny Kim and Ben Severson, raising the bar for all.

Seal Morgan and Don Piburn were the first to board-surf the Big Kahuna Wave on the Snake River in 1989. Tony Jovanovic was a BC-born Canadian and Snake River Wyoming local beginning in 1992. Jovanovic, pioneered multiple waves on the Snake River, the Loscha Pipeline on the Loscha River in 1996, and Upper and Lower Rock Island on the Columbia River in 1995. In 1999 river surfing crossed the Canadian border when Tony was the first to board-surf Skookumchuk Narrows in British Columbia, the most extreme tidal rapid wave yet discovered, and one of the most dangerous. Whirlpools and undercurrents abound in river rapids, thus these surfers that spread river surfing deserve due credit for developing water safety protocols, just as surfers and lifeguards did upon oceanic shorelines the world over.