Reno Abellira, Hawaiian surfing legend and master shaper, has been missing for at least a week. Photo: Reno Abellira//Instagram
Reno Abellira, the Hawaiian surfing legend and master shaper who has fallen on hard times, is missing. According to Darrick Doerner, a big wave icon who helped usher in the tow-surfing movement, Abellira has “been MIA for one week.”
After Doerner posted about Reno’s whereabouts on April 2, there appears to have been a few sightings. “He’s by Foodland (grocery store) the last few days!!” Nathan Fletcher wrote. Another commenter said that Reno told him that he was staying “on the beach in Waikiki for a while,” but that was in February.
During the 1970s and early ’80s, Abillera cemented himself as one of the best surfers to ever do it. Small and wiry, he rode everything well, from 10-foot Brewer monsters to Pipeline pintails. He played a starring role in the shortboard revolution, too, proving to onlookers that surfing didn’t require huge, heavy surfboards.
In the 1990s, things began to slide downhill for Abillera. He was involved in drugs. He lived on the streets, and, in 2021, ended up in the ICU after an attack at the Aloa Moana carpark. When he was released, he returned to various homeless encampments, but his friends and family still keep an eye on him. Friends like Darrick Doerner.
In 1952, Abellira began surfing at the age of two when his uncle, a Waikiki beach boy, paddled out with him for the first time. His father was a boxer, a man eventually killed by a bullet in the back of a pool hall. Abellira, along with legendary surfer “Buttons” Kaluhiokalani, grew up in the Hānai system, a sort of “it takes a village” way of child rearing involving aunties and uncles — related or otherwise — and spent most of his time on the beach on Oahu’s southern shores. Waikiki was his “surfing universe” and it quickly became apparent Abellira had something special.
Like many great surfers of that era, shaping was part and parcel of the game. He learned under the tutelage of Dick Brewer and surfed alongside people like Jeff Hakman and Gerry Lopez.
“At the time, the best young surfers in Hawai’i were riding Bing’s Pipeliner models shaped by Dick Brewer,” Gerry Lopez wrote for The Inertia. “The top guy in our little world was Jackie Eberle, but other skillful surfers like Roy Mesker, Jock Sutherland, Jeff Hakman, Jimmy Lucas, Kiki Spangler, Michael McPherson, and Reno Abellira, were all Brewer team riders.”
Abellira was a Hawaiian state junior champion and winner of the 1974 Smirnoff Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay, but despite his standing in surfing’s history books, he never chased the spotlight. In doing so, he fell slightly from the rungs of the ladder occupied by people like Gerry Lopez. Not for lack of talent, but simply because he shied away from attention. It’s been said that he’s a complicated person, a man of many layers. Aloof. Intense. Warm and genuine to those who know him well. A line from a Walt Whitman poem springs to mind when thinking of Reno: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
With any luck, Reno is just fine, moving through life quietly, trying his best to stay afloat. Thankfully, the surfing community is there to look out for him.
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