Mike Hynson, who embodied the image of the bronze god of surfing as the star of the hit 1966 surf documentary. “Endless Summer” and, with his outlaw instincts, he embodied the rebellious ethos of the sport on his way to being named the colossus of curling, died on January 10 in Encinitas, California. He was 82 years old.

His death, in hospital, was confirmed by Donna Klaasen Jost, who collaborated with Hynson on his 2009 autobiography, Transcendental Memories of a Surf Rebel. She said the cause is not yet known.

Hynson was born in an era when surfing was often marginalized as an odd ritual of West Coast teenage culture, thanks to frothy matinees like “Bingo of beach blankets” (1965) and swelled from Beach Boys hits. He was praised not only for his skills on the waves, but also as a famous builder of boards, especially popular ones Red fin longboard, which he designed for the manufacturer Gordon & Smith in 1965.

His was “one of the greatest of surfing’s lives ever lived,” Jake Howard wrote in Surfer magazine after Hynson’s death, describing him as a “hot dog maker, styling genius, cosmic adventurer” who “changed the sport and culture of surfing in untold ways.”

Hynson’s life became a story starting in 1963, when a director called him Bruce Brown to join him and Robert Augusto, another young surfer from Southern California, on a trip that will take them through Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand and Hawaii, hopping the equator to avoid the slightest chill of winter while searching for the perfect wave.

Hynson was only 21 years old, but he had already built a reputation as an experienced surfer on the beaches around San Diego. He could be confident and reserved, friends recalled — but not without reason: He had already proven his mettle as one of the first non-native Hawaiians to ride the Pipeline, on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, sometimes called the largest dangerous wave in the world, 1961.

He certainly looked camera-ready, with his caramel tan and sun-bleached hair slicked back in Dracula style, a hairstyle soon to be emulated by surfers the world over.

Mr. Brown had only $50,000 for his project, leaving his stars to pay for their own tickets around the world. To finance his trip, Hynson turned to a renowned record producer Hobby Alterfor which he worked, to provide him $1,400 for plane tickets“even though I stole nine of his surfboards a few years ago,” he said in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian in 2017.

Unbeknownst to his close associates, Hynson brought with him a stash of amphetamines and a three-month supply of marijuana to Tijuana. “I was young, stupid and loaded,” he said in a 2009 interview with OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California.

The first stop was Senegal, where the locals “were using wooden boards for belly-boards in the waves,” Hynson told The Guardian, “so when they saw Robert and I surfing upright, they were thrilled.”

A bigger game was waiting for them. Hynson finally spotted their quarry at Cape St. Francis, on the south coast of South Africa—“perfect reeling right handedwithout a surfer in sight,” as Surfer magazine once described it.

“On Mike’s first ride,” said Mr. Brown in his account of “Endless Summer,” “for the first five seconds, he knew he had finally found that perfect wave.” The waves, he added, “looked like they were made by some kind of machine.” The rides were so long that I couldn’t capture them on one film.”

In his autobiography, Hynson recalled that experience: “In my life, I have never had too many such rushes of adrenaline, a pure and natural phenomenon. It was electric. The hair on my neck stood up.”

Michael Lear Hynson was born on June 28, 1942, in Crescent City, California, near the Oregon border, the older of two sons of Robert Hynson, an engineer who worked for the Navy, and Grace (Wheaton) Hynson. In his early years, the family split their time between Hawaii and San Diego, before finally settling in Southern California when he was 10 years old. As a teenager he started surfing with a team called the Sultans.

After graduating from La Jolla High School in San Diego, Hynson found himself dodging military commission letters in the early years of the Vietnam conflict. “I bypassed them for three years,” he wrote in his book. Traveling around the world for the film, he added, “was the miracle I needed.”

The trip did not bring any challenges. At a stopover in Mumbai en route from South Africa to Australia, Hynson had to tape five 16mm film canisters containing precious footage of Cape St. under a baggy Hawaiian shirt. and a film in action against unauthorized photography.

Distributors initially showed little interest. Warner Bros., Hynson wrote, “predicted it would never go more than 10 miles from the beach.” Mr. Brown eventually proved them wrong, drawing lines around a screening block in Wichita, Kan., during a heavy snowstorm. “The Endless Summer” grossed more than $30 million.

By the late 1960s, Hynson embarked on another quest, this time to find enlightenment with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of psychonauts and drug smugglers in the Laguna Beach area. The brotherhood mixed elements of Eastern religion with a belief in the transformative powers of psychedelic drugs, which they dealt in such incredible quantities that the authorities declared them a “hippie mafia”.

Hynson soon began taking LSD regularly, but avoided arrest long enough to make another cinematic foray: He was the mastermind. “Rainbow Bridge” (1972), which he originally envisioned as a surfing film. Directed by Andy Warhol protégé Chuck Wein, the film develops into a quasi-documentary about mysticism, surfing and drugs, culminating in a Jimi Hendrix concert at the foot of Maui’s Haleakala volcano.

In one scene, Hynson readily breaks a surfboard and pulls out a hidden bag of hashish (actually Ovaltine), mirroring the smuggling tactics he employed with the Brotherhood.

Despite the film’s dizzying portrayal of drug use, Hynson’s addiction to drugs, particularly cocaine and methamphetamine, eventually led to a precipitous decline, including time behind bars for drug possession. “I hit rock bottom,” he told OC Weekly, “and then I stayed there for a while.”

He eventually pulled out of his spiral and started making surfboards again. He considers his ex-wife, Melinda Merryweather, a former Ford model, and his longtime partner, Carol Hannigan, his “angels.”

Mrs. Hannigan survived him, as did Michael Hynson Jr., his son from his first marriage.

In a 1986 video interview, Hynson reflected on his perfect ride in South Africa and wondered whether he and his fellow surfers had invented a surfing fantasy or simply reflected one already embedded in the surfer’s mind. “If we hadn’t had ‘Endless Summer’,” he asked, “do you think this would still be around searching for the perfect wave? Do you think anyone would even care?”

“I didn’t particularly care,” he said. “But when I saw it, I knew right then that we had popped the bubble and made the dream come true.”