I can’t remember if Joe Engel surfed coolites down at North Bondi with us, but I certainly remember him surfing fibreglass surfboards at South. We were the same age and spent quite a bit of time together. Initially, he was just one of the many grommets learning to surf; I even beat him in the first surfing contest we went in, in 1974.

Joe was a natural-footer with a barrel chest and surfed with his arms stuck out like a telegraph pole. He was a mischievous kid who could regurgitate his food and often played tricks on people by pretending to vomit. He and my brother, Greg, and I caught the Manly ferry over to see a surfing film at the Manly Silver Screen once. The swell was quite big, and the boat was rocking, and Joe kept walking past people and chucking up in front of them, like he was seasick. We cracked up laughing.

Joe started to improve as a surfer when he began hanging out with Cheyne Horan. They went to Dover Heights High School together and were in the same year. They told me that they sat next to each other and compared drawings of waves and surf-boards. After an afternoon surf we had together, Joe said to me: “We will think of you at 10 o’clock in the morning during our science class, you think of us then and we’ll see if we have telepathy.” We were 14 years old.

For a while back then, Joe and Cheyne were joined at the hip. This is when I noticed Joe’s surfing improve dramatically. Like all of us grommets back then, Joe idolised Cheyne. We saw Cheyne tear a wave apart one day and Joe said: “We can surf like that.” Neither of us could surf as well as Cheyne. I knew that I never would. Joe didn’t doubt himself at all.

After I defeated Joe in the final of the Zephyr contest, I saw another side to him. He was angry and frustrated at himself for not beating me. Cheyne had come first, and I was third. Joe was disgusted to have come fourth. I sensed that he wanted the adoration Cheyne was getting. I suppose all of us did. But I was never that interested in surfing contests and knew I was lucky to have done so well. Joe became really competitive and told me he had a plan for winning the next contest he entered: “You have to beat the other guys like you’re in a fight.”

Cheyne took Joe up to Avoca to surf in front of Geoff McCoy. A few weeks later Joe paddled out on his brand new 5’8”,blue, single fin double-ender. Joe ripped on that board. Suddenly, my much-loved little yellow Midget Farrelly pop out seemed light years behind their ultra-modern McCoys. I borrowed Joe’s and Cheyne’s boards often, until they told me they wouldn’t lend them to me anymore. “Get your brothers to make you one.” But I wanted a McCoy, like them.

One evening, Joe and Cheyne arrived a tour place in Rose Bay with a few rolls of Super 8 film. They told us that a friend of theirs had shot them surfing at Crackneck Point, on the Central Coast. They asked if they could watch them at our place. I don’t know what became of those three rolls of home movie, but they would be worth a pretty penny now. Wave for wave, Joe and Cheyne pushed themselves beyond what we thought was possible on surfboards. It was like they were caught together in a whirlwind of progression. They were co-creating the future of backhand surfing. A few weeks later, Joe told me he was moving with his family to Southport, in Surfers Paradise, Queensland. I asked him if I could buy his blue McCoy and he sold it to me for $40. I was stoked.

The next time I saw Joe was out in the surf it was at Southport. John, Greg and I were up the coast at Surfers Paradise. It was ‘Schoolies Week’ of ‘75, and we stayed in a motel on the beach with some girls from Sydney we knew. As I was paddling out into the surf one morning someone behind me grabbed the tail of my surfboard and said: “Give us back me board ya thief!” I turned around and saw it was Joe and we had a mock underwater wrestle. After our surf together Greg and I were standing on the sand and saw Joe do the most radical upside-down backhand re-entry we’d ever seen. “Oh my God!” Greg groaned. “I think the move to Queensland has improved his surfing,” I observed.

Greg and I went over to North Narrabeen to surf in the 1977 Pepsi Pro Junior. I was overwhelmed by the competition, particularly Tommy Carroll, who did a cutback in my first-round heat that destroyed my fantasy of becoming a professional surfer. I saw Joe, but he wasn’t his old playful self. He told me he was concentrating on the competition. As a kind of formal sign of respect, he showed me his new Dick Van Straalen. It was a 5’11” round tail with quite boxy rails. He surfed brilliantly on it and came 6th. I was stoked for him.

At the 1978 Pepsi Pro Junior it was apparent that Joe had completely transformed himself as a surfer. He focused all the mad energy he was famous for into winning every heat. He hardly acknowledged us. In the final, on the Alley rights, Joe blew everyone away. It was the most extra-ordinary surfboard riding I’d ever seen in a competition. He had mastered the lay-back snap and did them repeatedly on every wave; sometimes more than once. It was a move we’d only seen performed in a surfing movie, by the Hawaiian, Larry Bertleman. In my mind, that day, Joe elevated himself to being the best junior surfer in Australia. And that’s saying something.

By the time the 1979 Pepsi Pro Junior rolled around he seemed a bit self-conscious. It was like he knew people were looking at him and talking about him. I believed this to be what he wanted, but it seemed to trigger an ego problem. He was acting aloof. I had no idea what it was like to draw that kind of attention, so forgave him. I couldn’t help but recognise that Cheyne was more able to cope with public attention than Joe. Joe once again did the impossible. He ricocheted through the opening rounds with a riveting display of Australian power surfing. The final was held in pumping North Narrabeen lefts. It was inconceivable that anyone could beat Tom Carroll out there, but Joe went absolutely nuts and claimed first place for the second year running. I realised that he’d once again employed the technique he’d described to me years before when he said: “…beat the other guys like you’re in a fight.” A surfing magazine at the time referred to him on the cover as; “Two in a Row Joe.” He’d made it.

The photos I saw of Joe in magazines surfing at Sunset Beach in Hawaii that season sent chills down my spine. He was standing up to the wave like he was picking a fight with it, charging across the steep face, like a crouched boxer, rushing eagerly into a brawl. He employed the front foot near the nose wide stance that no-one else I saw ever mastered. I think it was a Burleigh Heads thing. It may have been appropriated from the surfing of Wayne McKewn, who I’d seen doing it in a magazine. But that was on a smallish Gold Coast wave. It was a gutsy move in solid surf and required incredible confidence, as it made spinning out much more likely. But it also made for extraordinary photographs. I wondered whether this was the purpose of it. It didn’t seem particularly functional, and Joe was struggling to get into the top16. Was he doing it for the photographers? Giving us something to talk about? It just seemed like such a dangerous way to approach a wave like Sunset. Joe finished17th on the pro tour twice. Tracks named him “Best Surfer to Never Make the Top16.” Then came Storm Riders.

It was an impossibly long wait for the premiere of the last great theatrical release surfing movie, Storm Riders (1982). We knew Joe was in it, surfing Nias, with Thornton Fallander. What we didn’t know was that the film was going to deify them both. In time it became Joe’s cinematic eulogy. We all went and saw it at the Opera House, and I was envious of my old friend, who had secured himself a place in surfing history. But I wondered how it might affect him to be placed on such a high pedestal.

In Easter of 1983, Joe had his only World Tour win, Bells. In typical Joe fashion, the troubled battler, he won every heat, right through the trials and the main event. The final was held in scrappy little waves at Rincon. He bounced American Wes Laine right out of the state of Victoria. After the final, in an interview he was asked: “Are you tired after surfing so many heats in a row?” He simultaneously nodded and shook his head. “Yeah, but naa.”

After his Bells win, Joe didn’t succeed in the fashion everyone was expecting. I wondered if his faltering on the tour was the harbinger for what was to come. I began to hear crazy stories about him. It sounded like he was trying to emulate everyone’s favourite anti-hero, Michael Peterson. I wondered whether moving to Queensland had been good for him, after all. MP was considered a God up there and his story provided a potential plot twist to a budding superstar. Particularly one who was sick of trying so hard and not coming up with the results. At least it would keep him newsworthy.

When I was in Bali, in August 1983, I heard he was staying in Legian. I tried to find him but Made Kasim told me: “He’s not really surfing, just smoking lots of hash and taking mushies with some Kiwi guy.” Over the next few winter seasons in Bali, I heard of rare sightings, but they were laced with reports of increasingly bizarre behaviour. I wondered whether he might be bunging it on. I know it’s cynical, but I’d seen it before. A punk musician friend of mine had pretended to be crazy a few years earlier. Sadly, he eventually became what he was pretending to be. I’d heard about a mate of Joe’s named Col, who was a karate black belt. Apparently, he rebuked Joe: “Don’t give me your bullshit Engel, I know what you’re trying to pull.” Supposedly, this snapped Joe out of it. For a while anyway Joe turned up to our flat at the Britannic Mansions when the OP Pro was on at Bondi in 1984. He seemed okay, but when Occy arrived at our flat to order a board from my brother Greg, it got too intense for Joe, and he went into my bedroom. I followed him there to see if he was alright. He was looking at a brass bell that was mounted on a varnished piece of wood. It was something I’d kept from a rubbish removal job. “It’s the only time I ever won Bells.” I joked. “Did you win Bells too?” He asked earnestly. I laughed and he walked out of my room and left the flat.

In the mid-80s, Joe stayed with us at Angourie for a couple of weeks. My brother Greg made him a few surfboards and he surfed them like he was trying to snap them in two. Outrageous turns, king hits, like he was punching out whoever it was that had prevented him from making it as a pro-surfer. By then the legend of Joe Engel stalked him like a neurotic shadow. He said lots of strange things. Sometimes I was convinced he was trying to say quoteworthy madisms. Something that might hopefully make it into Tracks. Other times it broke my heart. His brain was broken. One night, while we were looking at the Southern Cross constellation together, he asked: “Do you realise that all of those stars are aliens in spaceships and during the day they all hide inside the earth?” I looked at him to see if he was serious and saw the little boy I’d got to know in the shore break at South Bondi; 10 long years earlier. He looked like he’d travelled too far from the well-trodden path and got lost. I asked him if he was being serious. He answered, sounding concerned: “Yeah, don’t you believe me?” When anyone else spun out on drugs after that, us Bondi guys referred to them as being: “On planet Joe.”

A year later, Joe turned up unexpectedly at an ITN surfing contest at South Bondi and stuck to me like velcro. He was bearded and wearing an old straw hat and seemed some-what deranged. Everyone else there was well aware of who he was but had never met him as they were much younger. He sheepishly acknowledged them as they introduced themselves, one by one, and told him how much they respected him. I knew it wasn’t helping him to have his ego stroked like that. After the contest, we had a BBQ on the top of the three-storey high Breakers at South Bondi. There were 10 boxes of VB ‘throwdowns’. After finishing his last beer Joe threw his empty bottle at the street below. Far from triggering admonishments from the Bondi boys, they all started throwing their empties at the streets and roofs below. It was a crazy demonstration of devotion to him. An acknowledgement of his intertwined brilliance and madness, all wrapped up into one psychotic episode. It was how we told him we still loved him. No matter what. Everyone was drunk on beer, but even more so, we were intoxicated by Joe’s presence. We fled after we’d run out of bottles and the police arrived shortly there after.

In ‘86, I read a story in Surfing World by Derek Hynd. He’d visited Joe in a ramshackle old shack in Surfers Paradise and seen shoe scuff marks going up the walls of the lounge room and onto the ceiling. When quizzed about it Joe said: “I’ve been trying to run around the place upside down.” I wondered whether it was just another quotable quote or the truth. It could well have been either, or both. Overtime we’d learnt that with Joe, anything was possible. The last time I heard about Joe he was trying to surf Burleigh Heads switch foot. He told his friends that he wanted to win a World Title as a goofy-footer. He got smashed on a few six footers in a row, and then, true to form, made an impossibly long barrel on his backside. And that was it. I never really heard of him again. Other than the constant recycling of the same old stories. Joe died of a heart attack in the lounge room of his flat in Katherine, Northern Territory, on September 26, 2006. He was46. What he was doing living in Katherine? I could only guess.