Posts tagged ‘surf’

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.

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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

Feb 27

surfing, a love story

I originally wrote this story for The Toast, which was one of my favorite sites in the era of The Awl and The Hairpin, among others, when there remained space online for weird, funny things that weren’t really relevent at all. They were just fun to read. Anyway, I wrote this for an audience of women who didn’t surf. It’s about surfing, California, the miracles nature creates, and how our illusions stay with us, despite or maybe because of their distance from reality.

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The clutch pedal feels cold under my bare foot, and there’s sand lodged in deep between my toes. I’m pretty sure I have ten of them, but I can only feel two or three. Sky, air, sea, they’re all grey, so much so that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The heater in my VW is episodic. It works, but never until it’s good and ready. My hair smells like kelp. My feet are so cold. I pull my beanie down lower and drive faster.

The surf is best in the winter here, when the winds in the North Pacific whip up storms that hurtle toward the coast. That’s where the waves come from; they come from the spinning winds and they come from a long way out to sea. Sometimes the storms make a wrong turn and tuck up into the armpit of Alaska never to be seen again. That’s good for Alaska’s massive snow-fed rivers and mighty salmon runs, but not especially good for surfing in California.

The best storms for surf hang out around Hawaii — because why wouldn’t they? — or they crash into the coast somewhere north of San Francisco. If the storms are too close, the surf is wrecked. If they’re too far away, the waves are too small by the time they arrive at the beach. To make good surf, the storms have to be just the right size in just the right place. It’s a miracle we ever surf at all.

But surf we do. We surf when it’s clean and perfect. We surf when it’s big and we surf when it’s small. It’s best on the low tide, but we surf the high tide, too. We have boards of every size and shape for every possible occasion — long boards, short boards, boards with wide tails, boards with pin tails, boards with a little more foam, boards with a lot more foam. They come in every shape you can imagine and some you can’t. Blown out, knee-high slop or head-high, reeling perfection — We surf it all.