Interview: Phil Edwards On His First Time Surfing Trestles With Miki Dora

With a general aversion to the general public, Phil Edwards is relatively tight lipped when it comes to sharing surf stories. But he’s got them in spades. “The Guayule Kid” as they called him when he first showed up on the scene at Trestles, at the height of his surfing powers in the first half of the 1960s, when his signature Hobie models was flying off surf shop racks, he was voted Surfer of the Year at the annual SURFER Poll and he landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Edwards stepped out of the spotlight. Content to surf and sail in his local waters around Dana Point, over the years he’d show up at various “legends” surf events, but he definitely didn’t pursue the life of an aging surf star. A few years ago I had the opportunity to sit with Edwards at his house and talk story. Over an IPA and some chips and salsa, he shared an incredible array of stories, among them his relationship with Miki Dora. The White Knight to Dora’s Dark Prince, they were both rivals and friends. Here’s how Edwards remembers it:

In “Ride The Wild Surf” I was “Tab Hunter,” Micky Munoz was Sandra Dee, and Miki was Fabian. Miki got forced into some big waves at Waimea one time for the movie, and he wasn’t known for big waves, and he did great. He got some good rides.

Miki and I spent one summer together at San Onofre, and we’d look up at the point and ask these old guys, what it was like up there. “Oh, well we went back up there in ’38 and Peanuts Larson got this big wave…blah, blah, blah.” Anyway. Miki was 16 and I was 13. He had a car, so we drove the car up there and walked through the railroad tracks and around the swamp, and that’s how we started surfing The Trestle. And we didn’t tell anybody for awhile. So we had it all to ourselves for awhile, it was kind of neat. I graduated high school in ’56, so it would have been before that.

Later, Miki wrote some letters to me. It looked like calligraphy. And he was also artistic, and he would draw on the letters. He had this thing about him, orientals, and he’d draw kamikaze surfers. So he’d do these little drawings and write letters to me, I wish I would have kept them. On the address he’d write “Phillip Edwards,” then my address, then “North American Continent, Planet Earth” on the envelop. He was a crazy guy.