On The Edge: Hampton Bays Native Penny Posthumously Inducted Into East Coast Surfing Hall Of Fame

Surfing in the 1970s required a certain kind of approach to life. A thirst for adventure; a willingness to forgo creature comforts; an absence of fear and, beyond that, an intoxication with the unknown.

These were traits Eric Penny possessed in spades.

Friends like Michael Schermeyer remember him as someone who didn’t think twice when it came to chasing waves, whether that meant quite literally taking the road less — or perhaps, never — traveled in pursuit of an unspoiled break, or charging down the face of a wall of water that might give most other surfers pause.

Penny, a Hampton Bays resident, died in 1989 at the age of 39 after a battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But his legacy has lived on through his surfing. On January 5, Penny was part of a class inducted into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame, alongside big names like C.J. Hobgood. The East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame was founded in 1996, and inducts a new class of honorees every two years.

Penny’s younger sister, Hampton Bays resident Diana Dargan, accepted the award on his behalf at the induction ceremony in Florida last month. In her speech, she described her brother as “handsome, brawny and a little crazy,” and “a rebel.” She spoke about how he overcame hearing problems as a child, and how he translated his skills as a high school gymnast onto the surfboard. She also pointed out that Penny was responsible for giving the nickname “Threes” to the popular Hampton Bays surf spot where the ocean and bay meet at Shinnecock Inlet. It’s a nickname still used to this day.

Penny won the East Coast Surfing Championship in 1977 at Gilgo Beach, a victory Dargan said helped put him on the map. He surfed in Florida, near Sebastian Inlet, when he (briefly) enrolled in college down there, but before long moved to Southern California and then, for a period of time in the 1980s, lived in Hawaii.

There has always been a vibrant surf scene on the East End of Long Island, and while the action in Montauk gets much of the attention, a few surfers west of the Shinnecock Canal in the Hampton Bays, East Quogue and Westhampton Beach area managed to make a name for themselves. To prove their mettle, of course, they had to leave the area, and show they could hang with the big boys on the West Coast, in Hawaii, and throughout South and Central America.

That’s precisely what Penny did.

Schermeyer, another Hampton Bays surfer of that era, remembered traveling to Hawaii in the 1970s with Rick Rasmussen, perhaps the most famous East End-born surfer. Rasmussen was battling drug addiction at that time, and Schermeyer, who was just 16, was dismayed when he realized, upon their arrival in Hawaii, that Rasmussen was probably not going to spend much time in the water. Penny essentially rescued Schermeyer on what was Schermeyer’s first trip to the North Shore, dropping by their place one morning and promising to take Schermeyer out surfing each day.

“It made the whole trip,” Schermeyer said. “That was before cell phones of course, and Eric dropped by on the second day I was there, and I had already sat around one day because I had no car, and it was driving me crazy.”

That trip solidified their friendship, Schermeyer said, and they surfed together in plenty of different places, both home and abroad, for years after that.

Both Schermeyer and Joe Borenstein, another local surfer who was good friends with Penny, said that Penny made a name for himself as a hard-charger, not afraid to take on an intimidating wave or back away from conflict.

It was noted at the induction ceremony that, a year before he died, Penny had written a letter to Surfer Magazine, saying that he purposefully searched out “the biggest and gnarliest” waves he could find, specifically to show that East Coast surfers shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Penny gained almost as much notoriety for the way he surfed as he did for his commitment to finding new, off-the-grid locations where the waves were breaking and no one was around.

“He loved to travel, and it wasn’t the easy type of traveling,” Schermeyer said. “He’d pack up in a four-wheel drive vehicle in Mexico or Peru or Central America, and just read a map. If he saw a dirt road, he’d go down it, in the middle of nowhere. He was extremely adventurous in that way, and found all sorts of new breaks.”

Penny earned the kind of national notoriety many surfers dream of when he was featured on the cover of Surfer Magazine in 1973. He is standing on the beach at Petacalco, Mexico, at a break he discovered while on a trip with another legend of that era, Bob Rotherham. Photographers Craig Petersen and Kevin Naughton documented that trip, and included part of it in their photo book, “Search For The Perfect Wave.” The Petacalco trip was also featured in the popular surf book, “In Search of Captain Zero,” by Allan Weisbecker, a true story based on the author’s surf road trip through Mexico and Central America in search of his friend.

Photos from Penny and Rotherham’s trip were featured in the 1973 Surfer Magazine cover story, and Borenstein remembers that cover shot and story vividly, a memory that is bittersweet, because Borenstein was friends with both men — Rotherham, originally from Florida, would often visit Hampton Bays in the summer — and Borenstein had hoped to be on that trip, too.

“The joke with that photo is that Bob was the one walking toward the surf, and to the right, there’s open space, and that’s the space where I was supposed to be,” Borenstein said with a laugh. “They discovered a bunch of other breaks on the way down there. Nobody else was doing it.”

In the surfing world, there can sometimes be a price to pay for discovering a new break, especially if that discovery is publicized on the cover of a nationally-renowned surf publication. Penny suffered backlash for sharing the “secret spot” of Petacalco with the rest of the surfing world, even though it was not necessarily Penny’s idea to blow it up on the cover of the magazine.

“He got beat up, and couldn’t go back there,” Schermeyer said.

Blazing trails and pushing limits was a theme in Penny’s life. Schermeyer recalled another trip to Hawaii, to a spot that Schermeyer described as “one of the heaviest rights on the North Shore when it breaks.”

“It was a 200-yard freight train of a wave, 10 to 12 feet, and he’s just charging it,” Schermeyer said. “I got plenty of good waves, but he was just crazy.”

Schermeyer said Penny stayed that way until the day he died, even as his body was ravaged by cancer and put limits on what he could do, physically. In her speech at the induction, Dargan said that Penny was in the water surfing just four days before he died.

“He was kind of like Charles Bronson,” Schermeyer said. “And he sort of looked like him too. He was tough as anything, and people always underestimated him. He always lived life on the edge.”

Borenstein said he always admired Penny’s bold approach to life. They met in 1966, while surfing at the spot near the canal known as The Bowl, at the eastern side of Ponquogue Beach in Hampton Bays.

“Eric was fearless. There was nothing that could stop him,” Borenstein, an East Quogue resident, said. “He was quite a motivator in that sense.”

Borenstein made trips to Hawaii with Penny as well. He said that jumping into the surf there required some initial mental preparation, coming from the East Coast, a step that Penny never seemed to need.

“Waimea came up and it was huge, and I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna watch from the beach to figure it out,’” Borenstein said. “Not Eric. He just jumped in and paddled out and got in the lineup, and in the Hawaiian pecking order. He was never intimidated. Just because he was in other people’s areas, that didn’t stop him. I’m sure the old order wasn’t happy at the moment, but as time went on, people got to know Eric, that’s for sure.”

In the world of big wave surfing, especially in popular spots like Waimea and other Hawaiian locales, earning respect from locals requires not only proving your skills in the water, but proving you won’t back away from a fight on the shore as well. Penny wasn’t a big guy, but he checked both of those boxes.

“I never saw him get beat down,” Borenstein said. “He wasn’t overly big, but he was wiry and all muscle. Like Bruce Lee in his prime. He just knew how to defend himself.”

Borenstein splits his time now between East Quogue and Florida, but at the age of 74, he still surfs on a regular basis. And while it’s been decades since his friend died, it’s clear he still recalls, with clarity, the time they spent together and the impact Penny had on his life, particularly the way he taught him to live in the moment. He recalled how they had a summer job at Foxy’s, the bar/restaurant that was the predecessor of the Boardy Barn in Hampton Bays. It was Fourth of July weekend, and they were supposed to work a double. But in between shifts, they got the report that the waves were really good.

“We looked at each other, and he said, ‘I’m not going back to work,’ and I said, ‘I guess I’m not going either,’” he recalled. “That ended our career there. But Eric never really worried about the ramifications.”

Living with that kind of caution-to-the-wind spontaneity was part of the deal when it came to being friends with Penny, and it’s clear in listening to Borenstein that he viewed that trait not as something to put up with, but rather as a positive quality.

“I remember one day waking up at 1 a.m. because he was banging on my front door, and when I opened the door he just said, ‘We gotta go,’” Borenstein said. “He had done the surf report and Montauk was going off, and he wanted to drive out and be the first ones there.

“Time was not a constraint for him,” Borenstein added. “There were times we’d go surfing on a full moon down at The Bowl, with no wind, at midnight. He kind of pulled me along, so to speak.”