My family and Hobie Alter

Hobie Alter

by Leigh Pomeroy

Living in Minnesota, it shows you how much I'm up on the West Coast news. While they're bathing in sunshine, I was out snowblowing my driveway at 7:00 a.m. this morning.

And I guess that's why I missed the news of Hobie Alter's passing last Saturday. Hobie Alter? You know, the guy that developed the modern surfboard and affordable-to-all catamaran.

While I didn't know Hobie Alter, I did meet him once or twice because my father, Harold H. Pomeroy, known to his friends as Hal or simply "H", was instrumental in helping Hobie find the right plastics he needed to make his surfboards.

The revolution in surfboard making came in the late 1950s when Hobie and Gordon "Grubby" Clark figured out they could make lightweight but still strong surfboards using polyurethane cores (or "blanks" as they are called in the industry) instead of balsa wood, which was heavier, expensive and hard to come by. As with the balsa wood, they would cover the polyurethane blank with fiberglass and polyester resin.

This is where my father came in. At the time he worked for a small chemical company in Redwood City, California, which made both the resin and the foam that Hobie and Grubby needed. It was my father's job to find out what the two boardmakers wanted in a raw product, then take those specifications back to his employer to fashion custom-made resin and foam that would meet Hobie and Grubby's needs.

While I don't remember Hobie that well, I do recall visiting Grubby at his shop in Orange County. I remember him shaping a blank wearing only Hawaiian print shorts, sunglasses and flip-flops — not a particularly safe uniform for manufacturing anything made of plastic with electrical tools. As I recall, polyurethane dust was everywhere.

Hobie was also a friend of my uncle William D. "Tuck" Rabbitt, one of California's early surfers. In the 1960s my uncle Tuck had one of the first popular catamarans, called a Pacific Catamaran or "P-Cat". For some reason he wanted to sell it, and Hobie became the buyer. It was partly from Hobie's experience and frustrations with the P-Cat that he reasoned he could develop a shorter, lighter, more nimble catamaran that sold for a much cheaper price. Thus came about the now ubiquitous Hobie Cat.

My father passed away in 2000 and my uncle Tuck in 2013. And now Hobie is gone as well. In his biography on the Hobie Company website Hobie is quoted, "A lot of people helped me along the way, I’m just trying to return the favor." Fortunately, Hobie "returned the favor" to a lot of outdoor and water enthusiasts, and I know my father and uncle were proud to have helped him do that "along the way."