The Hobie Memorial Foundation is raising funds to construct a memorial honoring Hobie Alter’s life and his many contributions to the surfing, boating, and skateboarding industries. The 501( c )3 non-profit organization has received nearly half of the needed funding. The Hobie Memorial Foundation Newsletter publishes fascinating historical accounts such as this one in every issue.
Newsletter editor Donna Jost recently sat down with the Hobie Cat Six to explore the development of the prototype that became the Hobie Cat 14. The Hobie Cat Six are Sandy Banks, Phil and Mary Edwards, Paul Collins, Wayne Schafer, and Robbie Roberson. This is a portion of their wide-ranging conversation.
Robbie: Sandy, how did your little catamaran come into play? Where did you build it?
Sandy: We shaped the hull right there in the shaping room, didn’t we?
Phil: The foam blank for the surfboard comes in two pieces. Sandy cut it down the middle to put in the stringer, so you have a right side and a left side. What he did was he turned them up on edge, and then I guess you have to swap them out so that the flat side is on the outside, and we decked it out. But it was kind of a brilliant idea.
Sandy: I was gluing surfboards then and I was screwing around with this foam I got up in San Pedro. I noticed one day when I pinched the two ends together, it had a flat side and a round side. It had kind of a radius on it. Then we put six-inch wide stringers down the center of those big tandem blanks, cut them in half, added a foot to the length, then made them about six inches wider with big balsa stringers. So I took the balsa stringer and I put that in the center on edge. I put them in there so it was two halves like that with the balsa stringer in the center and then clamped the heads off. Phil was in the back shaping surfboards and I said, “Come here and look at this. What do you think? You think we can make a boat out of this?” So from there, we built one.
Paul: And that’s where it was patentable. They were able to patent the idea with the flat sides and the round sides inside. That was a big thing. It really was a big deal.
Robbie: What a neat little boat. I ended up with that catamaran. I rented a house down here, Princeton by the Sea, and I had it all to myself. I had Sandy’s little catamaran on the patio here. It was a pretty cool deal. I remember sailing up to Dana Harbor where they just had the breakwaters built. That was a neat little beachable boat.
Mary: What year was that? Cause we lived down at the end.
Robbie: That was uh, 68? Yeah.
Phil: Hobie made a rudder that really worked.
Sandy: He did. My boat was all one piece so you couldn’t take it apart. It was a Hobie Cat, but it wasn’t. The concept was a Hobie Cat, but he came along and took a little boat, and he made it so you could take it apart. You put it in a couple of boxes and you had the mast separate, and you could put it on an airplane and ship it anywhere in the world. 747’s were just coming out about that time and actually we got them into 707’s.
I actually remember the story as Art Hendrickson renting a house down here on Beach Road one summer with his family. As renters do, he comes moseying down here and my little boat was on the beach, which was being used all the time. Wayne may have rented him the house, I don’t know, but he met Wayne, and through Wayne, he met Hobie.
One day, Art asked Hobie, “Do you think you could take a little boat like this and design another one and make it so you could take it apart and put it into a box and ship it around?” So basically, it was kind of like Hendrickson was the one that I recall who inspired Hobie to start thinking in terms of making it a marketable deal. Cause at the time, all there was, was Sandy’s boat.
Phil: When was the Life Magazine Cover? That’s what really launched it. “The Cat That Flies”
Paul: Probably 70.
Wayne: Even with the cover, you still had people trying to figure out what to do, so this film was it. I still have a copy around here. It showed us on the beach, our way of life. But when these people came by and watched that film a little bit, and then they left, we thought we’d bombed again.
About 10 minutes later, we hear the darnedest commotion and we looked around and the aisles are all filled, people coming down towards us. And what we heard as they got closer was, “You gotta see this!” We were sitting there and going, “What do you mean?” And they watched that film from beginning to end and we couldn’t write the orders fast enough. Then we knew we had something.
After that, Hobie went on the road for about the next two years with the 14 and that film, back and around to all the boat shows in the interior of the United States, where the lakes were. He already had dealers on the East Coast. But he took that film and he’d go to a boat show and set up, and the same thing happened. The dealers would come around and say, “Gee, I’d like to sell that boat.” They had totake three boats and that film and they did. That’s how it started.
