Even where I live in the subtropics it can get a bit nippy come June, which is why the other morning, eager for an early on the lower tide, I jumped out of bed shortly after dawn and dived into the middle drawer for my favourite grey woolen socks.

I found them in the half-light and pulled them on in a shiver frenzy. Rrriiiip! There’s my big toe looking at me. I threw them back in the drawer in disgust, switched on the bedroom light and searched for another pair. There was no other pair. After sixteen years, my precious stash of Miki Dora’s Quiksilver socks was done and dusted.

I felt strangely emotional about this, and not just because my feet would have to freeze until I pushed out into the waves – yes, that’s the way it works in winter where I live, wet is better. I guess the emotion was because I’d always regarded Miki’s socks as a kind of inheritance, bequeathed to me by the Black Prince of Malibu, even though he knew nothing about it.

The sad fact was that I kind of stole them, but I can’t leave it there. I have to explain myself.

Jack McCoy introduced me to Miki in Bali and 1975 when we visited him at the Legian Beach Hotel and requested an interview. Although he was happy enough to talk story for a couple of hours, sprawled on his bed in the darkened room, he refused the interview request - no notes, no tape. When we were done I got Jack to drop me at Pranotu’s cane juice bar in Kuta where I sat in a corner and juiced up while I wrote down everything that I could remember that Dora had said.

That season I surfed with Miki a few times on the Bukit, and he was friendly enough, but once “A Conversation With Miki Dora” appeared in Tracks, he brushed me for more than twenty years, until we found ourselves neighbours in the same small apartment block in Guethary, France. We were both on the Quiksilver Europe payroll, and against all odds, we became friends. That friendship was tested at times, most notably when I negotiated his guest appearance at the Noosa Festival of Surfing in 2001.

Having paid for his airline tickets, accommodation and quite a bit else, I wasn’t expecting to get stung for his international phone calls or his shopping spree at the pro shop at the Noosa Springs Golf Club, nor was I ready for his freak-out at Brisbane Airport when he discovered that my Quiksilver-paid ticket meant I was flying business class and the ticket I had bought him meant that he wasn’t. But we laughed about it over a bottle of good red in Singapore.

Phil with Billy Hamilton and Miki Dora, Guethary, France, 1998

Soon after his return to France, Miki was diagnosed with cancer, and it was tragic to watch his deterioration over the next few months. He still tried to surf Guethary but it was a struggle for him to get back up the stairs to his oxygen tank. We said our farewells in early December when I went home for Christmas and he went home to die, passing at his father’s Santa Barbara home just after New Year.

When my wife and I returned to France in mid-January, Quiksilver boss Harry Hodge enlisted our help in packing up Miki’s possessions to be sent to his father. It was an interesting task. Among boxes full of uncashed Screen Guild royalty cheques for his bit parts in the Gidget movies forty years earlier, we found evidence of bitter fax battles over alleged business improprieties and petty arguments, as well as several documents that had been carefully burnt around the edges with a cigarette lighter and filed as “saved from SA house fire”, a reference to a fire at Jeffreys Bay that claimed his beloved dog Scooterboy.

And then I looked in Miki’s wardrobe and found just about every garment shown at the last dozen or so Quiksilver range releases, never worn of course. Nothing that would fit me, but in a chest of drawers I hit the motherlode. Scores of pairs of socks, still with their tags on. Enough to keep you going for, oh, about sixteen years.  

I didn’t chuck them out, Miki’s last socks with the big hole in the toe. I just re-tasked them to indoor duties. In fact I’m wearing them now. And when I look down at my toes, as you do when you’re experiencing writer’s block, I see them, holes and all, and I think of Miki, who’d be over eighty now if he were with us, but is probably agelessly conning his way through some ethereal afterlife.

The thought makes me smile.

// PHIL JARRATT