The surfer solution
Six months ago, during a dinner at Café Pierre in Manhattan Beach with his longtime friend Jim Miller and with Miller’s longtime friend Body Glove president Russ Lesser, Cousteau had an epiphany.
Miller met Cousteau in the early 1990s when the two became founding members of SeaKeepers, a University of Miami program that equipped open ocean cruisers with computers to monitor ocean environmental conditions.
Jim Miller’s wife Nancy subsequently helped Cousteau with fundraisers, including the California Science Center premier of his “Call of the Killer Whales,” which documented the release of Keiko of “Free Willie” fame.
Cousteau, his wife Nan, and the Millers spent the end of the second and start of the third millennium underwater at the International Date Line in Fiji, swimming back and forth across the centuries.
Ten years ago, Miller drafted an agreement for Body Glove to provide custom designed wetsuits for Cousteau’s dive teams, in exchange for the publicity and prestige that came with being associated with the Cousteau name. Body Glove has a long history of making wetsuits for filmmakers. In the late 1950s, Body Glove owners Bob and Bill Meistrell made the dive suits for “Sea Hunt” star Lloyd Bridges, and then taught him to dive.
That agreement brought together two of the diving world’s most prominent families.
Body Glove’s parent company is Dive N’ Surf, which is owned by the Meistrell family. Its office, like Cousteau’s office, showcases three generations of watermen, and waterwomen.
A 1953 neoprene “shortie,” the first wetsuit made for surfing, is on display in the Body Glove lobby, alongside a 1957 “beaver tail” wetsuit. The first neoprene wetsuits, invented by twins Bob and Bill Meistrell and hand cut and glued together by them in the back of the original Dive N’ Surf shop on the Redondo waterfront, did for surfing what the aqualung, invented by Jacques Cousteau just 10 years earlier, did for diving. The neoprene wetsuits, which “fit like a body glove,” enabled surfers to explore waves throughout the year, throughout the world.
Three generations of Meistrell surfboards hang from the walls and ceiling and are stashed in every corner — big wave guns, little potato chips, broken trophy boards and Bill Meistrell’s 1950s Bob Simmons balsa slot board, arguably the most historically significant surfboard in existence.
Cousteau’s conversation with Miller and Lesser at that Café Pierre dinner six months ago drifted back and forth between business and their mutual love of all things related to the ocean, especially diving and surfing.
“That’s when it clicked. I needed to connect with their clients,” Cousteau recalled.
By Body Glove’s clients he meant surfers.
Surfers are protective of the ocean to a fault. Their numbers are estimated at five to 20 million. All are prospective divers, while few divers are prospective surfers. And they skew young, promising Cousteau and the oceans what they need most — time.
Before the dishes were cleared, Cousteau, Lesser and Miller had a handshake agreement to produce a Jean-Michel Cousteau/Body Glove line of wetsuits and accessories. Every wetsuit, rash guard, T-shirt, cap, fin, mask, and snorkel would carry hang tags educating its buyer on ocean conservation. Every buyer would become an ambassador and walking billboard for ocean conservation.
“I don’t surf, so it just never occurred to me before to enlist surfers,” Cousteau said.
