Check out some 70's Pipe footage from Stylemasters, courtesy of Greg Weaver/Spyder Wills. Available here.

During the late 60’s there was a rapid transition from longboards to shortboards. Since the shortboard was evolving so quickly, you couldn’t build boards 6 months in advance. The big companies were producing and stockpiling boards that were already obsolete when they came to market so they took a dive. The Hobie shop in Honolulu withered. The shortboard revolution gave local shapers an opportunity. “Hey, why don’t we open our
own shop?” Gerry Lopez and Jack Shipley started Lightning Bolt Surfboards in the summer of 1972 in Honolulu. According to Jerry it was just a stupid name they came up with but it made a nice symbol on the
deck of a surfboard. A lot more than a nice symbol: this was when Gerry Lopez and Rory Russell were ruling Pipeline on Lightning Bolt surfboards.

Also in the Summer of 1972, Jack’s friend Nino Baltar went to Maui and started the Lightning Bolt Maui store in the same building we are now in. In 1974 Gerry Lopez moved over from Oahu and took over Lightning Bolt Maui. He ran the shop and shaped the surfboards and had all the kids from the area hanging out. Being the only surf shop on Maui, it was a convenient hangout.

Photo: Tom Parrish. Circa 1977. The backyard of Tom Parrish’s house on Oahu. Tom Parrish used to shape and store many of the contest guys' boards (Rabbit Bartholomew, Peter Townend, Shaun and Micheal Tomson, Mark Richards, Ian Cairns and others).

In the meantime the Australians showed up on the North Shore to prove themselves. Rabbit Bartholomew, Peter Townend, Shawn Tomson, Mark Richards, Ian Cairns and others received free boards built for the big
surf of the North Shore from Jack Shipley to Gerry Lopez’s dismay. Why do something
like that? It’s called advertising and Jack Shipley was right. It became one of the biggest underground ad campaigns in surfing history. Lightning Bolt surfboards were being ridden by most of the best surfers in the world when they came to Hawaii for the winter and the pictures and footage were all over the surf magazines and surf movies. The Lightning Bolt became the most widely known icon in surfing up till then.

This is a brief and evolving history. If you have anything to add please contact us at howzit@lightningboltmaui.com or go to our Talk Story page and post your story. We are especially interested in Lightning Bolt images from the 70s. Aloha.