I feel blessed to have called Woody Brown my friend, since he was the most influential surfer of our time and the most inventive person I have ever known.

Woody wrote me a letter once, in 1999. He was 87 years old at the time, and recently married to a woman nearly half his age. It is said she had trouble keeping up with him. He spent his time with his 12-year-old son, surfing the local breaks near his home in Kahului, Maui, and volunteering at a local convalescent hospital, where he tended to people more than a decade younger than him. His letter begins: “My name is Woodbridge Parker Brown. I was born on January 5, 1912, in New York City. As a child I wanted to fly, but not with power planes. I wanted to fly with nature, where my head was the motor (like the birds).”

Woody took up the story of his life in the early 1930s, when he moved to La Jolla. There, he built the sailplanes he had been dreaming of, his wife towing him off the steep cliffs at Torrey Pines with a shock cord stretched between her bumper and his glider.

At the base of that cliff is the famed surf spot, Black’s, and it was there that Woody fell in love forever with another type of gliding. Initially he would bodysurf to shore. Then he found a piece of driftwood that he launched in the whitewater. This gave him the idea to build a hollow surfboard, something that he rode alone until discovering other breaks like Windansea, which he was apparently the first to ever ride.

He had never seen a surfboard prior to building one and by the time he met other surfers in the area, they found that Woody’s board was the best they had ever seen, and that he was the best and gutsiest surfer among them.

Woody returned to gliding and set a world’s record. He didn’t explain how, but only briefly mentioned that the day of his record, his wife died, followed by what he describes as a “mental crackup.” In a depressed daze, Woody drifted to Hawaii, where he would quickly become recognized as one of the island’s top surfers while working on a new type of outrigger he had invented, something the world now knows as the catamaran.

He had gone to the top of three sports, and yet was one of the most humble men I had ever encountered, taking time with anyone he met to talk about surfing, or sailing or the Christian-based faith he practiced, concentrating less on doctrine, more on the basics, like loving his neighbor as himself.

I think that Woody was 92 years old when I saw him surf, riding a replica of his first surfboard on a head-high wave at Windansea, without a wetsuit, taking great interest in the boards ridden by surfers a fraction of his age as they flew past him. Of course, few of these kids realized that without Woody their boards would not have been as advanced as they were, no doubt thinking that he was some far-out old man out for a final ride.

It is said that Woody died near his Maui home in late April of this year, but I don’t really believe it.

To me he is sailing through the heavens, banking off galaxies and doing maneuvers that the rest of us won’t comprehend for millennia.