Barca during his 2014 mayoral race in Kauai. Photo: Instagram
Dustin Barca, as you might know, is a pretty talented fella. As a surfer he competed on both the QS and Championship Tour. And as a Pipe regular he was one of the notorious Wolfpak’s young soldiers. Now an MMA fighter, Barca joined The Quiver Cast recently – and it was one entertaining listen.
Barca told the podcast he was one of the Wolfpak’s “Whipping Boys” as its youngest member (“I f****** loved it,” he said). He related some colorful anecdotes about his time on the North Shore, including how the ‘Pak would send him out to beat people up who messed up in the surf. “If somebody burned one of the boys, Kaiborg (Kai Garcia) would be like, ‘bro, you better go pound that guy right now or I’m going to pound you. I’d have to go down and f****** smoke the guy on the beach or wait for him to come up…And that’s how the Wolfpak thing got started. Everybody was there regulating a lot and so yeah, I was like their little hitman (laughs).”
Barca talks extensively about how unruly Pipeline became during his youth and how the Wolfpak simply organized the lineup a bit. “We kind of created a rule system almost,” Barca says. “It made everybody realize that they were at someone else’s home and they should take off their shoes in their home.” So the heavy-handed rule ensued, and Barca says many locals appreciated it.
The group of course featured a number of Pipeline regulars like Kala Alexander, Kai Garcia, and even Andy and Bruce Irons. Barca talks extensively about how the Wolfpak created order for years. But then the interviewer asks when it all ended: “Probably as soon as OxyContin came into the picture. A large number of my friends got hooked on drugs and they had a pharmacist living in the house with them giving everybody huge prescriptions of OxyContin. It was a bad scene. I never did drugs since I was young cause I almost died. All my friends who (did) coke or whatever, they all started snorting OxyContins and it turned everybody against each other, turned the most solid friend group ever in surfing into a shitshow. It went from everybody concentrating on surfing and having a good time together, to all anybody cared about is finding a f****** pill.”
Indeed the opioid pandemic killed nearly 650,000 between 1999 and 2021. Barca goes into further detail on the messy trail the drug left behind for the people he knew. His tales are captivating for anyone who’s plied fiberglass and foam. Listen here.
