One day in the early ’80s, tuberiding virtuoso Gerry Lopez was out at Pipeline to greet an early-season west swell. Sand had built up on the reef and beach during the off-season, and the backwash was sending a slight warble through the line-up, which threw the Hawaiian off-balance as he descended a wave in his famously serene demeanour. “I was flipped up in the air, upside down and on my board. It was a long walk back to my house.” The single glassed-on fin had sliced into buttocks and actually snapped off inside of him, piercing his colon in the process. Reaching inside his new bunghole he found ample room for all four fingers, and promptly fainted.

First he was taken to the Kahuku hospital, where he remembers letting off a fart only for the wind to escape through the cut. “Rory Russell, who’d taken me there, turned white as a sheet and said, ‘That doesn’t sound too good,’” Lopez later recalled. “Then the people at Kahuku said, ‘We can’t do anything for you here.’” The bleeding — internal as well as external — was so profuse that he was barely conscious by the time he and Russell arrived at Castle Hospital. Two operations were necessary, and for a while he was lumbered with a colostomy bag, but Lopez considers himself lucky that he was in Hawaii at the time and not somewhere more remote: “had this injury occurred at the G-Land camp” — where he used to spend much of the year — “chances are I wouldn’t have made it.”