“Oh yeah, Michoacan,” Curtice laughs. “His real name was Mike Harris. He was into surfing all the huge mysto breaks. He was like a lysergic Jeff Clark, just nutty as a fruitcake. I remember watching him take off on big, perfect rights at Carmel and go left into these gaping close-out barrels.” “The first time I saw Pescadero break was in the mid-’70s,” remembers Frank Ono, one of the few surfers to ever make a habit of paddling into the spot. “I just saw this…BIG TUBE. It was so heavy. This big west swell had just created this huge hole. I’d heard stories of people surfing it. Michoacan surfed it and then Robin Jeffers was surfing it.” “It’s amazing that people should remember that,” laughs Robin Jeffers, the grandson of the great poet and a world-class sailor. “The wave is big and round, but it broke way too close
to the rocks for me. I paddled out when it was huge in ’77 and went for it, but never caught anything. I was only 18 and my skill level was never up to that wave.” Then, in the ’80s, a crew of young Pacific Grove surfers began to lay the groundwork for Monterey Peninsula rock surfing by seriously campaigning some of the hairier breaks around Point Piños such as Freights, Boneyards, Ulus, and Cats. “Mike Bauer was definitely a major impact on his generation,” Don Curry explains. “A really hard-charging guy. Super comfortable at the rock breaks—a lot of those PG guys were—they grew up dodging rocks.” Mike Bauer, generally regarded as the finest wave rider in a group that included Bo Hickman, Brent Bispo, Scott Vucina, Billy Brewer, Rick Firpo, Jimmy Schallerer, and John “DeFlo”