LARRY CAPUNE

He’s 59, and his thatch of blond hair is graying. His sun-damaged skin’s the color of varnished mahogany. He’s weathered and lean. But he still lifeguards three months out of the year, at a private bay beach.  

He survived a recent 18-month battle with cancer, including a year’s worth of chemo-therapy, and somehow managed to do it without missing a day’s work. Or a daily paddleboard workout.

He’s a living expression of the credo and lifestyle pioneered by Tom Blake, and his protégé, Tom Zahn. Perhaps better than any single individual since these two surfing immortals, he continues their lineage.

And you’ve probably never heard of Larry Capune.

Following in the footsteps of Gene “Tarzan” Smith, Larry Capune is without dispute today the greatest ultra-long-distance paddleboarder the world has ever known. Nobody, even Smith, has come remotely close to paddleboarding as far as he has. Many consider him among California’s greatest living watermen.

He’s paddled border-to-border the entire length of both coasts of the United States—without a support boat. And he‘s done some parts more than once.  

SURFING ORIGINS

Larry started out as a ’60s-vintage surfer, a kid like the rest of us who loved the sea. In 1963, he began paddling a stock rescue board when he was lifeguarding at Carpenteria State Beach in the summer.

Thirty years ago, Hobie personally shaped him the board he’s used for most of his adventures, Islander, an 18-footer with a kick-tiller. It weighs 80 lbs. He still has it.

Larry’s a tough minimalist who paddles prone, without a chestpad or chinrest. Using a modified high-arm, chop-stroke, he steadily paces himself at between 60 and 90 strokes a minute. He rarely varies this tempo. When he has to sprint, his pace increases to 120.

FIRST ADVENTURE

Larry chuckles when he recounts a time in the early fall of 1963 when his State of California’s Division of Beaches and Parks District Lifeguard Supervisor Mike Henry didn’t believe he could actually paddle from his lifeguard tower at Carpenteria State Beach to Newport Pier: 146 miles.

Fearing bad publicity if Larry and his lifeguard buddy Merv Larsen didn’t make it, Henry demanded they start at night so that nobody would see them.

Start they did, and a few days later they finished. It was a difficult, uncomfortable trip on less-than-ideal equipment. Still, they both finished and it blazed a watery trail that Larry wanted to continue to explore.

TOTAL MILEAGE

Including an almost never missed daily workout—a minimum of 4 miles—“morning exercise” he calls it—and not including his extra-mileage workouts to prepare him for his extended journeys, Larry has paddled the lifetime equivalent of 16,425 days and covered well over 50,000 workout miles.

Add his 16,063 accumulated trip miles and he’s paddleboarded far more than two-and-a-half times around the world.

Try this on for size the next time you think you've done enough miles. Leaving Portland, Maine, in July of 1975, Larry paddleboarded for 319 days, covering 4,255 miles. He paddled around the tip of Florida, skirting the Gulf of Mexico, to end up in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Except for storms where he couldn’t put out, most of these days were consecutive.

PADDLEBOARDER’S CIVIL RIGHTS

He has encountered the best of people—most of the time—and the worst, now and then. Just for paddling, he has been verbally and physically threatened, injured, even shot at, harassed, persecuted, arrested, jailed and prosecuted as a criminal for the crime of—paddleboarding.

In New Jersey he survived a head-wound and concussion from a bottle thrown from a pier. Angry at this unconscionable treatment, Larry Capune single-handedly turned the legal tables and became responsible for elevating paddleboarding to a civil rights issue.

Fighting the conviction, he eventually won his claim in Superior Court, and in the process set a legal Riparian Rights precedent that is now part of United States statute law.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

Larry has encountered most of the major species of sea-life, whales, Orcas, dolphins, sharks of every kind, as well as the invertebrates, especially the jellyfish family.

On the immaterial plane he's had a few experiences that are uncanny at best and downright ghost-story spooky on the weirdness scale.

Romance? He’s had his share of unbelievable opportunities, near misses, and potential disasters.  Some have been funny, like the time he found himself being invited to share the bed of the underage daughter of a swampland family who thought he’d been lonely long enough. Yes, he noticed the shotgun behind the door.

Another encounter, with the remarkable daughter of a small island off the Massachusetts coast is so poignant that it can only be described as heart-breaking.

Through it all, the good, the bad, the weird, Larry kept unerringly to his objectives and his mission. He’s doing what he can with what he has, his waterman’s skills, a paddleboard, guts, and the unswerving determination to push himself beyond the normal limits of human endurance.

CATALINA: EVERY DAY FOR 6 MONTHS

On the last of his eight major trips, made in 1987, Larry paddled from Chicago, out across Lake Michigan, through the Great Lakes, up the St. Lawrence Seaway around the tip of Gaspé Penninsula, New Brunswick, down to the Bay of Fundy, past Nova Scotia, and down the Atlantic Coast to Block Island Sound, to the East River and out past that to Cape May, New Jersey, up the Delaware to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to skirt the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, down the Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac to Washington, D.C. He paddled 4,090 miles in 164 days, averaging 25 miles a day. Think about that when you groan about Catalina being tough. Imagine paddleboarding to Catalina every day for six months. Some days Larry pushed himself more than 40 miles. One day he covered 53. That’s a Classic and a Rock-to-Rock in one day!  

Provisions? Ever the budget gourmet, Larry carried little more than peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches and 7-Up.

On his last trip, his brother Marty followed him in Larry’s VW camper.

Consulting charts the night before, Larry and Marty would select a landing spot, hopefully near a town. The next afternoon, Marty would arrive, and put up a big red flag as near as he could to the water. That was Larry’s sign to make a landing. But Larry’s ability to spot the flag from the water, or Marty being able to spot Larry from land was often hit or miss. They had no walkie-talkie radios.

Nights when he couldn’t rendezvous with the camper, he slept wherever he could find shelter.

Accomplishing this required a huge component of guts and determination. Besides his paddleboard, an old World War II UDT waterproof pack with a windbreaker, pair of shorts and a t-shirt, he carried only a simple magnetic compass, an inexpensive transistor radio, and nautical charts. Larry wouldn’t know how to use a GPS. He doesn’t own a computer.

For the most part his adventures were self-funded with money saved from lifeguarding and working on boats. At times his friends would pitch-in whatever dollars they could scrape up. On occasion, during his trips, with his dwindling supply of money needing augmentation he would do day-labor, or some menial chore in trade for food or a few dollars.

Now and then a company would supply him with trunks or a wet-suit, food products, or even a small budget. Ocean Pacific once provided $2,000. Superman Peanut Butter provided 420 pounds of complimentary peanut butter.

Once in a gesture of support for Larry’s efforts to get out an anti-drug message to the nation’s youth, a generous Balboa Island landscape contractor Dick Gebhard of South Coast Landscaping donated $5,000.  

HIS MISSION’S THE MESSAGE

Larry’s never missed a chance to talk to willing listeners about living a good, clean simple life. 

      His philosophy is simple:

• Do what you can with what you have.

• Reduce your overhead, live cleanly, simply.

• Have integrity.

• Be your own man and steer your own course.

• Determination can take you farther than you ever dreamed.

• Maintain your material possessions with care and respect.

• Never turn down the chance to have an adventure, or help a

friend. 

In 1999, at the Froghouse Invitational, the final race of the Hennessy Series, Larry was presented the prestigious Gene “Tarzan” Smith Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in the sport of paddleboarding by Orange County’s Frog House Paddleboard Club members, Kip Kennedy, T. K. Brimer, Mike Harnish and this writer, and Tim Ritter and the members of the renowned Southern California Paddleboard Club.

Larry and I have been good friends more than 40 years. He’s one of the best story tellers I’ve ever known. He can hold an audience from 9 to 90.  

What follows are selected chapters from a huge manuscript, now over 5,000, pages that Larry has compiled and typed on an old-fashioned manual typewriter, from his log notes. This is the first time any of it has ever been published.

Larry’s stories are all true and all his. I’ve edited as needed, supplying a brief introduction, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and proper sentence structure.

So put your favorite board under your arm, and push off through imagination’s surf. Soon you are alone, several miles off-shore railroading the long swells and heading south, on a series of journeys that count among the great solo sea-going adventures of all time.

Craig Lockwood,

May, 2001

Copyright © 2001 Craig Lockwood. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1996-2001 Eaton Enterprises. All rights reserved.
May not be republished without permission.