Gerry Lopez and Jack Shipley started Lightning Bolt Surfboards in the summer of 1972 in Honolulu. According to Jerry it was just a stupid name they came up with but it made a nice symbol on the deck of a surfboard. This was when Gerry Lopez and Rory Russell were ruling Pipeline on Lightning Bolt surfboards. Also in the Summer of 1972, Jack’s friend Nino Baltar went to Maui and started the Lightning Bolt Maui store in the same building it is today. In 1974 Gerry Lopez moved over from Oahu and took over Lightning Bolt Maui. He ran the shop and shaped the surfboards and had all the kids from the area hanging out. Being the only surf shop on Maui, it was a convenient hangout. Lightning Bolt surfboards were being ridden by most of the best surfers in the world when they came to Hawaii for the winter and the pictures and footage were all over the surf magazines and surf movies. The Lightning Bolt became the most widely known icon in surfing up till then. In the early seventies, when legendary Gerry Lopez was busy turning the Lightning Bolt logo into the most powerful symbol of the surfing world, he had started, at the same time, the “short board revolution” in Hawaii. The huge 12-foot boards, inspired by the ancestral Polynesian wooden flat planks, were then replaced by boards with shapes suited to the various wave sizes and types. His 9’ Guns and 7‘or 8’ Mini-Guns, which had won so many times at Pipeline for Gerry.