As a shaper, writer, surfer and forecasting pioneer, Mike Perry had a major impact on surf culture. In this personal tribute, Peter Maguire reflects on a charismatic, renaissance figure who grew up in California, but was ultimately much happier to call Australia home.  

After valiant battles with leukemia and bowel cancer, surfboard shaper, writer, magazine editor, and meteorologist, Mike Perry, has left for greener pastures.  I feel very fortunate to have been one of ‘Perry’s Kids’.  When the affluenza epidemic hit West LA during the 1980s, I caught a nearly fatal case that he and Australia helped cure.  Perry saw past my flaws, took me (and many others) under his wing, and guided me back to the angels of my better nature in a way that my teachers and parents could not. During our 40-year friendship, we saw each other through triumphs, tragedies, marriages, lawsuits, death threats, and divorce. In addition to being one of my most trusted and tight-lipped friends, Mike Perry taught me by quiet example what it meant to be a friend, a good son, a loyal husband, and an engaged father. In short, a man.

Perry died with the same humility and dignity that he lived.  After years dominated by surgery and chemo, doctors told him that there was still cancer in his body and suggested more of the same.  “Eight months and a month of radio not enough?” he wrote me in a 2022 email, “I’ve got a little thinking to do. Anyway, onward into the fog.”  In the end, Mike Perry chose ‘to hang in and not hang on’. “I reckon I’ll live until I die. Seems better than dying while I yo-yo between treatments!” he wrote ‘White Horses’ Magazine editor and fellow Perry Kid, Gra Murdoch.  “That’s it. How long? It’s the old ...