Trying to Catch a Wave

What stops passersby is the odd vision of a stocky man strolling on the surface of the water.

The upright figure, wielding a 12-foot paddle through the reflected glare, moves through shoulder-high surf as he heads into an ocean glassed off by Santa Ana winds.

Witness Leon Halfon’s offbeat sales method.

Every Sunday morning, he removes his hybrid of a surfboard, kayak and sail board from the chicken coop in his Silver Lake backyard and heads to Santa Monica to promote his dream.

A block south of Pico Boulevard, he unloads his invention from the rusted bed of his pickup truck and heads to sea. Sometimes he ambles north around the pier, or farther up the coast toward the reefs near Malibu.

“I go to the rocks and see the garibaldi and the seals,” said Halfon, 55. “When you stand up, you see a lot more.”

Onlookers squint to see him, as they undoubtedly did 90 years ago to watch Hawaiian George Freeth glide across the waves at Redondo. Billed as “the man who could walk on water,” Freeth introduced surfing to California on his 200-pound solid wood board.

Halfon is trying to introduce his 72-pound fiberglass board--with an optional sail--in much the same way. But unlike Freeth, who was funded by the Los Angeles-Redondo Railway and industrialist Henry Huntington, Halfon works all week as a general contractor.

He has only three years of formal education but has invented things his entire life. He came up with the idea for this hybrid board while working as a commercial fisherman in Israel. The idea was to slide fully loaded fishing nets onto a floating board first instead of hauling the catch all the way up into the boat.

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As a former lifeguard, Halfon also saw the merits of a board as a rescue device that could be maneuvered through the surf and used as a platform to perform CPR. But a county lifeguard who has seen the board says it moves too slowly for rescues.

To get a surfboard through surf, one has to go through a sometimes-jolting process called duck-diving. Halfon just aims his board, bends his knees and plows through.

“When a big wave comes, it’s difficult,” Halfon said. “But I’ve crashed through waves over my head.”

If he’s riding in and he wants to paddle back out, he doesn’t have to turn the board, he just spins around. “You’ve got to think quick in the surf,” he said. “So I made it [symmetrical] so you just jump around.”

Halfon first promoted his 12-foot banana-shaped board more than 15 years ago, christening it a “sailsurfer.” He tried to sell it to lifeguards and says he entered a competition and beat dories and paddleboards.

“He was a renowned figure at Malibu because of that board,” said his longtime friend Jack Brady, a retired documentary filmmaker. “He was also an Israeli and a Jew who worked at Our Lady of Malibu Church and everyone loved him.”

Then Halfon broke his back in a construction accident. He couldn’t find anyone else to promote his board, so he let it fall by the wayside. “Everyone said, ‘But Leon, you’re the only guy who can do it,’ ” he said.

Now he’s back, drifting like a gondolier on the rolling depths or riding waves as he heads into shore.

His house, a rambling patchwork of add-ons and original rooms, is a museum of his disjointed creativity.

There’s the 300-gallon goldfish aquarium he built on his front porch. There’s the driveway that looks like tile but is actually his own mixture of plastic and concrete. And, covered in chicken waste, there are the canoes, boats and surfboards that he once built for a living.

Halfon’s most lucrative invention is a medallion-like necklace called the Solar Energizer, which he says generates low-voltage electricity that helps stimulate the nervous system. He came up with the idea in Israel while working as a physical therapist.

“It lays on your neck and stimulates the ganglia,” says Dave Carey, who marketed the invention and says he has sold more than 100,000 of them. “Some people say it’s miraculous, but I’m aware of the placebo effect.”

Halfon was born in Marseilles, France, but shortly thereafter his family fled to an island off Tunisia to escape the Nazis. A car accident left him paralyzed for two years as a child.

His family eventually made it to Israel. Halfon worked in a variety of jobs before he got his physical therapist’s license. He then moved to the United States.

Of his board, Halfon said: “When I came to this country, it’s all I dreamed about.”

But Halfon had a problem devoting his energy to marketing his inventions, he said. “After I build it and it works, I start on another idea instead of pursuing it and trying to make it work,” he said.

“His mind tends to race,” Carey said. “He’s always doing something and his ideas seem to be rather unique.”

Among the knickknacks around his home is a wooden statuette of Halfon’s hero--Don Quixote. He says he can relate to the misguided dreamer.

“He believed in making the world a better place no matter how hopeless it looked,” Halfon said.

Though he has yet to sell a board, Halfon hopes his invention will be used by lifeguards, divers, fishermen, and the general public to enjoy the outdoors. He teaches interested onlookers how to use it--some even manage to get through the surf on their first try. Halfon makes it look easy.

“He could do anything with it,” Brady said. “He could surf Waimea Bay with it and they’d get out of his way. It’s like a locomotive.”