![]() ![]() His family moved to Manhattan Beach when he was 3. ![]() But more than anything, he was a goodwill ambassador for the sport and a near mythical figure to those who sought out waves the size of freight trains. Gregarious with an outsize personality and salty sense of humor, Noll was also an entrepreneur who helped transform the sport with his own line of surfboards and was among the first to shape boards from balsa wood, making them lighter and easier to maneuver. He was 84 and had been living in Crescent City in Northern California. ![]() Noll, a legendary big-wave rider known for his ferocious and fearless style of challenging the sheer violence of the ocean, died Monday of natural causes, his family announced on Twitter. "When I caught that wave, I was not the same person when I walked up the beach as when I walked in the water," he told The Times years later. He was airborne, on what would become known - and forever debated - as the largest wave ridden at the time. Noll paddled into the monster wave, his surfboard clattering as it sliced across the face of the beast, and then, suddenly, there was silence. ![]()
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