Lately |

Jan 11

big thursday

I cruise down the beach and pass through a parking lot littered with sand and kelp, the sure signs of a high tide and a big swell. Normally, there aren’t really even waves on this part of the beach. I look out to overhead sets, brown with churned up sand. Even from the beach, I can see how the long period swell is moving water deep beneath the surface. It’s anything but playful.

A pair of guys walk down the beach carrying Wavestorms under their arms. I laugh. Where there’s a wave, there’s a Wavestorm. They look excited and optimistic. The Harvest buoy off Point Conception reads 23.3ft, 18 seconds, 283 degrees. The ocean laughs at your optimism.

“We are all the idiots,” my friend writes in a text. “We just don’t know it until our luck runs out.”

emocean: matt warshaw profile

Sometime last summer, an email appeared in my inbox. Would you like to write a profile of Matt Warshaw for Emocean magazine? It took me exactly five seconds to reply. Yes, of course, I would like to write a profile of Matt. The story is available now in Devotion, Emocean’s fourth issue.

It has been a joy to work with the crew at Emocean, who love surfing and making print media as much as anyone I’ve ever met. I’d love to see the magazine thrive. If you’d like to buy a copy, and I feel like you most definitely do, you can purchase it at emocean.surf. (For Australia and New Zealand, check the instructions.)

Matt Warshaw is surfing’s devoted historian and spends his days in Seattle sifting through the ruins of our strange and beautiful past time. He says he’s motivated by an effort to assign meaning to his own story and to understand why he’s spent so many hours of life obsessed with riding waves.

How did he arrive here? Matt’s life has intersected so many interesting characters and places in surfing. Matt learned to surf in Venice Beach with Jay Adams, competed in the first Katin Pro/Am, edited Surfer Magazine — and that was just the beginning. Here’s a short excerpt from the longer profile.

When Warshaw went to work for Surfer in 1985, he arrived during a surf media golden age. “It was a really wild and fun period,” says Jamie Brisick, who was a pro surfer at the time. “This was the period of Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, and Mark Occhilupo — the surfers were still characters.” Advertising money flowed, and the magazine was fat with the work of writers such as Derek Hynd and Dave Parmenter and photographers such as Jeff Divine and Art Brewer. “Had he been the editor at a different time, he might have come out of it a different person,” says Brisick.

Nov 8

southern california surfing

“In this crowded world the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day, the perfect wave, and be alone with the surf and his thoughts,” John Severson wrote in 1960 in The Surfer, a scrappy, home-made publication that eventually became Surfer Magazine. Solitude was more easily found in Southern California in 1960 than it is today, but driving the coast in pursuit of the perfect wave remains a rite of passage. While much has changed on land, out in the lineup, today’s surfers still ride the same waves and chase the same feelings of escape, freedom, and joy.

I was super stoked to work as a contributing writer on this fun guide book from Wildsam. Read it for information about where to eat, stay, and surf in Southern California. Or, browse for essays from people like Matt Warshaw and interviews with coastal conservation specialists and surfboard shapers. See the book at Wildsam.

Oct 11

the fabulous and ridiculous adventures of surfline man

Hapless yet determined, annoying yet impossible to hate, Surfline Man loves surfing more than anything else in life. He reads every last forecast like it’s truth and he spends so many hours thinking about surfing. More, in fact, than he spends actually doing it. Surfline Man knows what’s up, and has many opinions which he’ll share with you at length. But he’s also the most stoked guy you’ll ever meet. Surfing, it’s like his favorite thing!

Yes, of course he drives a Sprinter van. And yes, he bought the red fins, because the looked cool, not because they would actually work with his board. He can’t help but buy every latest and greatest piece of gear in the hope that somehow this one thing will make his life complete. You see how it is.

Here is the full archive of Surfline Man’s fabulous and ridiculous adventures over at Beachgrit, where he was born and continues to live out his days.

***

It all began one fateful day: I did not know it was a Surfline Day, when untold hordes come crawling out from every nook and cranny. There is surf today! Everyone go surfing! Omg! And, obediently, Surfline Man and all his besties go surfing. — Surfline Man: An Anthropological Study

Oct 8

sharron weber: the secret surfer

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there came a significant shift in surfing from the stylish noseriding of classic longboarding to the more slashing, vertical turns of the shortboard era. Easily making the transition from longboards to the new, shorter boards, Sharron Weber was one of the stand-out surfers of her era. She won two world championship titles before largely disappearing from view. This is the mostly forgotten story of two-time world surfing champion Sharron Weber. A slightly different version of this story originally ran in The Surfer’s Journal 29.4. I am grateful to Sharron for sharing her story with me in a series of early morning interviews before she headed off to work at The Tire Warehouse in Lihue.

***

On a Sunday afternoon in the early fall of 1972, Sharron Weber won her second world title in San Diego, California. Small lefts rolled through the lineup at the Ocean Beach pier, where locals had nailed the broken pieces of David Nuuhiwa’s favorite board. It was some kind of protest, whose significance no one quite remembers. A crowd watched from the beach as Weber ripped her way to victory on her red, Gerry Lopez-shaped Lightning Bolt.

The plain-spoken owner of a tire store in Lihue, Kauai, Weber was one of the most brilliant surfers of her era. But you would never know it. Unless, that is, you were there.

“She was a big part of this very special period in surfing where surfing was finding a new identity,” said Gerry Lopez. “She was one of the avante-garde.”

Raised in Hawaii, Weber evolved into one of surfing’s innovators, pushing the sport in ever more radical directions. As much as her better-known male peers, Weber embodied the shift from the longboard surfing of the 1960s to the dynamic style of the shortboard era.

In her brief contest career, Weber won six Hawaiian state titles, the 1969 U.S. Championship at Huntington Beach, and the world championships in 1970 and 1972. But by the time Margo Oberg won the first women’s professional world title in 1977, Weber was changing tires at her warehouse. Her time in competitive surfing had already ended.

She is one of the pioneers of women’s surfing. “I’m a secret surfer,” Weber said with her characteristic dry humor. “I’m known in your magazines as not being known.” She shined briefly and brightly. Then she disappeared back into her life, leaving only ripples behind.