Wildly influential Hawaiian shaper Dick Brewer dead at eighty-five, “He was the guru, the man on the mountain, the shaper everybody knelt down before. Figuratively, mostly, but maybe literally too!”

“Incredible guns, just Sabrejet-level equipment for North Shore surfers in the ’60s and ’70s.”

A couple of months back came news from Princeville, Kauai, that Dick Brewer, the eighty-five-year-old designer and shaper of “incredible North Shore guns” was facing his last days on earth.

His wife posted, “My baby will not be in this world much longer. He could use all the love and support he can get right now.”

Brewer had been sick as hell, some sorta blood cancer or bone marrow disease, and there were reports suggesting he was refusing treatments but it was “an insurance issue that’s putting them in a tight spot.”

News, now, that Brewer died at his Princeville home today.

“He was the guru, the man on the mountain, the shaper everybody knelt down before. Figuratively, mostly, but I think maybe literally too!” says surf historian Matt Warshaw. “Incredible guns, just Sabrejet-level equipment for North Shore surfers in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Brewer was born in 1936, a few miles west of Lake Superior in Minnesota, to a family of Quakers. At three, his family moved to Long Beach, California, where daddy Charles got a job working on the landing gear of DC-3s as the American war machine slowly groaned to life.

Dick started surfing in 1952, picked up a planer seven years later, and in 1960 moved to the North Shore where he developed a strong rep at big Waimea and Sunset.

A year later he set up a surf shop in Haleiwa and the rest, as they say, is a beautiful and wild history.

“Apart from the boards being gold-standard, and apart from being our first and last and greatest shaping guru,” says Warshaw, “Brewer’s contribution was to look outside of surfing. His engineering background, everything he knew about cars, about machining, about speed and drive and torque—he brought all of that to bear in the shaping room. Lucky for our sport, he wasn’t born and raised on the beach. He loved surfing best of all, but he was smart enough to look beyond surfing. To our great benefit.”

Read the definitive Dick Brewer story, written by Drew Kampion, here.