Jack O’Neill’s Sailing Odysseys
If you’ve ever worn a wetsuit, then you know Jack O’Neill. Any surfer (or dinghy sailor) staying warm in frigid water owes their comfort to the pioneering O’Neill. But the pirate-looking, swashbuckling Santa Cruz icon — who passed away on Friday at the age of 94 — was a sailor, too.
Born in Colorado, raised in Portland, Oregon, and eventually settling in San Francisco, O’Neill loved the ocean. But for a bodysurfer in the 1950s, the only protection against the icy ocean was a healthy bonfire on the beach. O’Neill’s quest for comfort became surf-industry history: O’Neill eventually sewed neoprene and nylon together, opened a surf shop, and built one of the first international surfing mega-companies.
But the wetsuit was actually just a small part of O’Neill’s history with the ocean. In the 1970s, after his first wife Marjorie passed away, O’Neill went cruising to Mexico with three of his six children on the 60-ft, gaff-rigged schooner Marie Celine, according to Santa Cruz Waves. The O’Neill family also raced in Wednesday night beer cans in Santa Cruz — Pat O’Neill said the family’s full-keeled boat was especially adept at slicing through the kelp beds.
Jack eventually established O’Neill Yacht Sales and Brokerage and O’Neill Yacht Charters. In 1996, he founded O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a living classroom on board a 65-ft catamaran that sails the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. "Grade school students throughout Central California receive hands-on lessons about the marine habitat and the importance of the relationship between the living sea and the environment," the Odyssey website said. A nonprofit, the program is free of charge, but students earn their way into the program by "designing and performing a project to benefit their community."
O’Neill called Sea Odyssey — which has taught over 100,000 kids in its 21 years of service — one of his proudest achievements. “The ocean is alive and we’ve got to take care of it,” O’Neill told The Guardian. “There is no doubt in my mind that the O’Neill Sea Odyssey is the best thing I’ve ever done.”
One of Jack O’Neill’s most famous sails came in 1964, when he was 41. A huge earthquake hit Alaska in March that year, sending a tsunami toward California. O’Neill and his friend Dave Wahle were sailing a 19-ft P-Cat, when they saw lines of earthquake swell stack up at Lighthouse Point off Santa Cruz’s famed Steamer Lane. Yes, O’Neill wanted to sail into the waves, and surf them.
“We could see that wave up over the top of the mast, and the P-Cat has an 18-foot mast,” O’Neill told Santa Cruz Waves. “You need to have that wind coming out of the Northwest, from the outside, and get the wind in the sail, and that’ll get you on the big waves at Third Reef. And as you come into the lee of the cliff, you lose that wind, but you generate your own wind from surfing the wave.”
O’Neill and Wahle ate it. The rudders snapped, but the two men reportedly filled the P-Cat’s stern compartments with water, pushing the stern into the water and giving them enough steerage to sail back in.
Wahle said he lit a candle for O’Neill when he heard of his passing. "Jack was a just a good guy, a pioneer and real ocean keeper. He always appreciated and understood the value and threats to the oceans. He always tried to share ocean sustainability with kids in his Sea Odyssey program and all the guests on O’Neill charter boats."