Hey All, It took years, nearly a decade in fact, but I finally cycled through all the stages of grief regarding Kelly Slater's Westworld-lite wavepool—only to end up, surprisingly, more or less back where I started. Nonplussed. Cool. Maybe a bit arch. I could ignore Surf Ranch or laugh at it, whichever suited. Not laugh hahaha, like Raglan Surf Report, but I can eye-roll Surf Ranch and judge it d...
Hey All, David Nuuhiwa's rank and standing as a benchmark surfer for the ages needs adjusting on both ends of his career. As a longboarder, peaking in 1966, he was even better than we remember—and there's not much room to move there, he's already rightfully thought of as among two or three best performance surfers of the pre-shortboard age. But still, yes, nudge him even further up. The long beau...
Hey All, As full and rich and abounding as my three-score and four years have been, I am still looking at some real gaps here on the life-experience resume, and the biggest gap of all might be that I've never visited Great Britain. This isn't a fluke, exactly. In my hardcore wave-chasing past, the UK never made the cut as a destination. The pull was always west by southwest: Hawaii, Australia, In...
Hey All, Big thanks to New Jersey surfer-historian Mike May who led me down this week's Edwardian Age rabbit hole, which ended up being way more twisty-turny than I bargained for. Short version: that grinning black-lipped tux-wearing Bela Lugosi-looking ukulele player you see above is Alvin D. Keech, and it looks like he is your new Father of East Coast surfing. We mostly all thought that Duke Ka...
Hey All, I will fascinate you in a moment with context and analysis and whatnot, but let's not bury the lede: the four-shot screen-grab sequence you see above, of Santa Monica's Les "Birdman" Williams, filmed in 1950 or '51, is the closest we'll ever get to pinpointing the start of high-performance surfing. Not trick riding, which was already in play, or high-and-tight trim, which Hawaiian surfer...
Hey All, We're doing another Sunday Joint graveyard today—a little of this, some of the other, stir and serve, bottoms up. First things first, I owe Corky Carroll an apology and a correction. For 20 years now, EOS has noted (a bit smugly, maybe) that Carroll was gonged during his 1976 Gong Show appearance. Not so. In fact, Corky Carroll and his super-tight matching-outfitted Funk Dog Surf Band e...
Hey All, Surf media in the '60s and '70s was like a middle school dance, with boys on one side of the crepe-paper-bedazzled gym, girls on the other. Except the boys got 98% of the dance floor, and the yearbook photographers were all boys, along with the principal, the band, the yearbook staff—in fact, gals, would you mind running out to pick us up some more refreshments? I can't think of any othe...
Hey All, Jen See of Santa Barbara, BeachGrit's least-trolling and sole PhD-holding writer, said last week she was "pretty sure the curve of a woman’s hip off the end of a longboard, that dance, that swing, is the most beautiful thing in surfing." Jen was inspired after seeing Lauren Hill's new documentary film The Physics of Noseriding, which looks slow-mo and groovy in the trailer but apparentl...
Hey All, I'm in Baywood Park this weekend, at a memorial get-together for Daniel Blau, my uncle, the person who got me started surfing and is therefore the flapping butterfly wings that gets us to EOS, the Sunday Joint, the whole thing. Dan was a happy accident. He was born 15 years after my mom, who for the rest of her life maintained a lightly held resentment because he was basically the favor...
Hey All, Thanks to everybody who reached out after last week's famille c’est une grande table Sunday Joint on the de Rosnay brothers. Apart from Joel and Arnaud, of course, I didn't get much into the specifics of this storied and accomplished clan, but I should have at least pointed out that for 15 or so years now the family headliner has been Joel's firstborn, Tatiana de Rosnay, a novelist and s...