Grave fears for Hawaiian surf icon reported missing from homeless encampment

"We’re all concerned. Been MIA for one week. Help all of us find him.”

Hawaiian icon, former world tour shredder and wildly influential surfboard shaper, Reno Abellira, has been reported missing from his homeless encampment at Alii Beach, near the boat harbour at Haleiwa there as you swing into the North Shore.

The legendary North Shore lifeguard Darrick Doerner raised the alarm a few hours ago on his Instagram account.

“The community is looking for Reno. LMK If anyone has seen him or been it touch please. We’re all concerned. His home at alii beach. Been MIA for one week. Help all of us find him.”

 

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There were a couple of sightings in the comments. Nathan Fletcher saw Reno at Woodland, another helped him with a phone in Waikiki.

Still, there’s a lot of worried souls out there.

Four years ago, Reno Abellira was put in ICU after a near-fatal attack at the Aloa Moana carpark in town.

Reno was found unresponsive and taken to Queen’s Hospital for emergency brain surgery. 

Abellira, who is seventy-five, has had what you might call a wild, wild life.

His daddy was a middleweight boxer who was shot dead in a Chinatown pool hall where he worked as a “strong arm”; he beat Jeff Hakman at thirty-foot Waimea Bay to win the 1974 Smirnoff (he’d win it again three years later) and his twin-fin design convinced Mark Richards to make a version of it and subsequently dominate the world tour for half a decade.

In 1992, he was indicted, according to a letter to BeachGrit from Abellira “for three counts for the Federal crimes of racketeering (the RICO Act) specifically Possession with Intent to distribute of four kilos of Cocaine and over 27 pounds of marijuana that had been control delivered by the U.S Postal Service and D.E.A agents to an address in suburban Honolulu.”

In a 1979 interview with Surfer, Phil Jarratt wrote, 

You hear Reno described as arrogant, aloof and intense. He’s all of that, but he’s also a warm and genuine human being with a positively wicked sense of humor and a streak of dementia deep within. He is sometimes misunderstood. There are surfers who have associated with him for years but confess they don’t really know or understand him. By his own admission he is “a complex person.” He wondered whether this interviewer knew enough about him to present the big picture. The answer is yes and no. Reno revels in his own complexity, and this much is for sure: any interview that laid him bare, that left no questions unanswered, he would regard as a misrepresentation. 

He also went after Matt Warshaw and your ol pal DR in a couple of blood feuds.