Ever seen that famous picture of Greg Noll standing on the beach at Pipeline!? Well Don Hansen was there that day, and this video along with archival Bruce Brown footage is his story about trying to paddle out 3 times and getting drilled in the shorebreak! What a Legend! Can you imagine if he had caught a couple out there too!? Below is Greg Nolls story from that day..

""It happened on a day in November 1964," Noll began the details of that historic surf session. "Waimea was breaking straight across, Sunset was unsurfable and Inside Pipeline was a mess. There's a picture from that day that shows me standing on shore, with my arm around my board, watching Pipeline break. It was used as a poster for the movie Big Wednesday. What many people don't realize is that the wave in the picture is just shorebreak."


"It took Mike and me over an hour just to get out. When we were down near the water, we couldn't see what was going on outside because the shorebreak was so big. So Ricky Grigg spotted for us, up on the beach. I knew I could trust Ricky's judgement. He stayed up high and gave us a sign whenever he thought we should go for it.

"To get out, we had to get past this bitch of a shorebreak and through a strong lateral current. After watching it for a while, we noticed that there was one spot where an incoming current hit the lateral current and formed a saddle, a slot where we might be able to take advantage of the current and shoot through the shorebreak. Trouble was, we had to start about three hundred yards up from this spot and drift along with the current, timing it just right so that we'd be sucked out through the slot rather than dumped back on the sand."

"We got dumped at least four times before we made it out," continued Noll. "We had started fairly early in the morning and ended up spending over eight hours in the water.

"When we got outside to that far reef, there were no lineups, nothing to indicate what our position should be. Only four sets broke out there all day. We'd watch a wave break, then paddle like hell to get as close to the whitewater as possible, to determine our lineups. The next wave would break maybe a quarter of a mile away, so we'd paddle hard to get there before the whitewater subsided and establish another point of reference. Then we'd sit there for a couple of hours until another set came along and we'd go through the same routine until we felt we'd tightened up on the lineups.


Fortunately for Noll, a portion of his ride at Outside Pipeline was filmed by Bruce Brown. Even today, the preserved portion is exciting to look at."-- Bruce Brown Films /theSuperstonesurf