Believe It or Surf! No. 1: The Record-Setting Dog, the Four-Hour Wave and Other Strange-but-True Surf Facts

Grab a towel and pull up some sand. Welcome to Believe It or Surf!, our new recurring stash of surf oddities so strange you’ll want to check them twice. Good news: we already did. Every item stamped ✔ TRUE below has been checked against record books, archives and solid reporting. And because the ocean loves a tall tale, each edition also throws in a legend or two, clearly flagged with ⚠, so you always know which is which. Ready? Paddle out.

1. The Duke paddled into a shipwreck and came back with eight men

✔ TRUE. Early on Sunday, June 14, 1925, the 40-foot fishing boat Thelma tried to punch out of Newport Harbor, California, with 17 people aboard. A huge set rolled through, swamped her near the end of the jetty and flipped her, throwing everyone into heavy surf. Camped on the beach that morning was Duke Kahanamoku, Olympic swimming champion and the father of modern surfing. He grabbed his board and went straight out.

Using his surfboard as a rescue sled, Duke shuttled back and forth through the breakers and is credited with bringing eight men to shore himself. His friends Gerald Vultee, Owen Hale and Bill Herwig paddled out on their boards too, others swam or rowed out, and together they saved four more. Sadly, five people died. Newspapers of the day tallied it a little differently (a New York Times headline counted 13 saved), but the Newport Beach Historical Society’s count is 12 survivors, eight of them Duke’s. A plaque at Vista Point now honors the rescuers, unveiled in September 2025, a hundred years after the rescue. Takeaway: a surfboard is a lifesaving tool, and the Duke proved it decades before rescue boards were standard on every beach.

2. For centuries, surfboards had no fins at all

✔ TRUE. Picture riding a wave on a big plank of wood with nothing underneath to grip the water. That was surfing until 1935, when Wisconsin-born waterman Tom Blake bolted a small keel to the underside of his board, near the tail. “Never before had I experienced such control and stability,” he later wrote. Surfers were slow to catch on, but the fin went on to become the standard, and you’ll find one or more under the tail of almost every board in the lineup today.

Blake was a one-man idea factory. He built hollow, lightweight boards that lifeguard and Red Cross programs adopted as rescue gear, and in 1929 he built the first waterproof camera housing so he could shoot surfing from in the water. In 2025, more than 30 years after his death, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Not bad for a guy who just wanted his board to turn.

3. A sheepdog holds a world surfing record

✔ TRUE. On October 18, 2011, an Australian kelpie named Abbie Girl rode a wave 107.2 meters (351.7 feet) at Ocean Beach Dog Beach in San Diego. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest wave surfed by a dog in open water. She was beating her own earlier record of 60 meters, set earlier in 2011. For that first record, her owner Michael Uy strapped a GPS tracker to her, set her on the board, waited for a wave and let go, and she rode it all the way to shore. For the record (ha), the kelpie is an Australian herding breed, so this is a sheepdog who decided waves were more fun than sheep. Nobody has topped her since.

4. One wave, almost four hours, through the Panama Canal

✔ TRUE. Your best ride lasted, what, 20 seconds? On March 19, 2011, Panamanian surfer Gary Saavedra rode a single wave for 3 hours, 55 minutes and 2 seconds. The catch: it was a wake from a boat built to make surfable waves, and the boat led him along the Panama Canal. He covered about 66.5 kilometers (roughly 41 miles). Guinness World Records lists it as the longest open-water wave surfed, and the time also set the record for the longest ride on a moving wave. Saavedra, a 13-time Panamanian national champion, was the first person the Panama Canal Authority ever allowed to surf the canal. Picture container ships on one side and a surfer on the other, in the middle of the jungle.

5. Some rivers send a wave upstream, and people ride it for miles

✔ TRUE. A tidal bore happens where a strong incoming tide pushes up a river and stacks into a wave that travels against the current, sometimes for many miles. Find the right one, and you get a ride that just keeps going. In 2003 Brazilian surfer Picuruta Salazar rode the Amazon’s famous bore, the Pororoca, for 37 minutes and about 12.5 kilometers. At the time that was billed as the longest ride on Earth. It also meant surfing a muddy brown wave through rainforest, past floating debris.

The river record has been broken since then. According to Guinness World Records, Australian James Cotton rode the Bono, a tidal bore on the Kampar River in Sumatra, Indonesia, for 17.2 kilometers (10.6 miles) on March 10, 2016. The wave face reached about 8 feet and moved at roughly 20 km/h. Fun bonus: the attempt raised money for a genetics research project. So yes, the longest rides in surfing happen on rivers, nowhere near the beach.

6. The biggest wave ever surfed was 86 feet tall

✔ TRUE. On October 29, 2020, German big-wave surfer Sebastian Steudtner was towed into a monster at Praia do Norte in Nazaré, Portugal. The World Surf League measured it at 26.21 meters, or 86 feet, from trough to crest, which is taller than an eight-story building. In May 2022 Guinness World Records certified it as the largest wave ever surfed by a man, at a ceremony beside the famous Nazaré lighthouse. It beat Brazilian Rodrigo Koxa’s 80-footer, ridden at the same break in 2017, by six feet. Why Nazaré? A deep submarine canyon runs right up to the coast there, and it bends and focuses incoming Atlantic swell toward Praia do Norte, where the waves stack up into giants. Bring a jet ski and a very brave friend.

7. The story goes… surfing was invented in Peru

⚠ LEGEND, UNCONFIRMED. Everyone knows surfing comes from Polynesia, especially Hawaiʻi. But down in Huanchaco, on Peru’s north coast, locals have a different story, and they’ve got props. Fishermen there still ride caballitos de totora (“little reed horses”): slim, upturned craft about 4 meters long, made from bundled reeds. They paddle out through the surf with a split bamboo pole, set their nets, then ride the waves back to the beach, usually sitting or kneeling. Ancient Moche pottery from roughly the 1st to 8th centuries CE shows people riding these craft, and a bioarchaeologist who studies the area says the design is essentially unchanged over about 3,500 years. Hawaiian petroglyphs of wave riders go back at least to the 12th century, which helps explain why Peruvian surfer Felipe Pomar walked into Surfer magazine’s offices in 1987 to argue that Peru got there first.

Our verdict: the reed boats are real and very old, and so is the wave-riding. Whether that makes Peru the birthplace of surfing depends on what you count as surfing (fishing on a reed boat, or riding a board for fun), and historians still argue about it. Unconfirmed, but Huanchaco locals swear by it.

8. Unconfirmed, but old salts swear… every seventh wave is the biggest

⚠ BEACH MYTH, MOSTLY BUSTED. Every beach has a guy who counts the waves out loud and says to wait for number seven. Here’s the real story. Ocean swell does travel in groups, or sets. Inside a set, the waves usually build to a peak in the middle and then fade. But NOAA says the number of waves in a group can be just a few or a dozen or more, depending on the mix of swells reaching the shore. A University of Delaware ocean scientist told Live Science that fair-weather swell often comes in groups of 12 to 16. If a set happens to have 14 waves, the biggest one in the middle really is number seven.

Our verdict: seven is a decent average guess and a terrible rule. Watch the sets, not your fingers.

That’s a wrap, beach buddies

Six true stories, one maybe and one mostly myth. Next time someone at the fire pit says a dog can’t surf, or that rivers don’t make waves, you know better. Got a strange-but-true surf story you want us to check? Send it in, and it might make the next Believe It or Surf!

The featured illustration is original art for Surfing Fukcs, showing an invented dog and anonymous figures rather than real people or animals, with no logos. The video is embedded from the official YouTube channel named in its caption.