Hey All, There are many remarkable books on these sagging faux-wood Ikea shelves behind me, but the one nearest and dearest to my heart is Surfing Guide to Southern California, by David Stern and Bill Cleary—a 1963 self-published gem of a guidebook, researched to a fare-thee-well but cut with humor and flair, that I still turn to for inspiration. Dave Sweet himself gave it to me when he was clear...
Hey All, I spent last week out of town and returned Saturday evening to find out Dale Dobson of San Diego died on Friday, age 78, after a years-long period of failing mental and physical health—ironic in that Dale in his prime was among the fittest, most disciplined, least-vice-ridden surfers of his or any other generation. I only met Dobson a few times; we both competed in the 1982 Op Pro, and h...
Hey All, Two quick comments on last week's Abu Dhabi wavepool Joint. Veteran surf writer Matt Walker—the astronaut's son, our twang-voiced Mark Twain of the Outer Banks—was first to the inbox last Monday and delivered this one-liner: "I find it funny that pools elevated skateboarding and sank surfing." When a mot that bon drops from the sky my impulse is to pocket it, wait a respectful amount of ...
Hey All, Put together a list of every bad decision the WSL has ever made, flow that into the massive list of bad decisions made on behalf of surfing competition in general, flow that list into the cloud of every bad decision made throughout surf history, all the way back to randy Hawaiian royalty of yore doing the dirty after a surf and getting turned to stone—and at the very top of that assembla...
Hey All, Future surf historians, brain-surfing the 4D zettabyte edition of Encyclopedia of Surfing Archive, will at some point come across Lance Carson and marvel at the discovery. They will likely think Carson never made it south of Hermosa or north of Santa Barbara. They will also think he never went left. Heck, I'm not sure if Lance ever went left, and I know this stuff front and back off top ...
Hey All, Andy Warhol and a handful of his brightest Superstars arrived in San Diego in May 1968 to make a film with the working title of "the surfing movie." It was a surfing movie the same way Lonesome Cowboys, Warhol's previous film, was a Western—basically not at all. But the film was indeed set front and center in the surf world. Warhol's crew rented a house at the south end of La Jolla's Mar...
Hey All, The last two Joints were meant to be on the Palisades Fire, but the fire kept growing and the bad news kept coming—not just the headlines but straight to my inbox, from people who live in or near the burn area; no deaths among them, but houses gone, sometimes multiple houses in the same family. Three days into the fire I watched a passenger-side-view YouTube post of a car driving slowly ...
Hey All, Mike Hynson died last week at 82, and somebody had to go first, Mike or Keith Richards; both have been outrunning the death pool odds since the 1970s. Hynson going first seems fair—he's six months older than Richards. Years ago, while I was writing a book on Ron Stoner, boardmaker Steve Kroll told me that Ron had style mostly because "he ran with the style guys," by which he meant Skip ...
Hey All, The last last three Joints are all offshoots from "Kaena Point: the Big-Wave Break that Got Away," which I noodled on for months and finally posted last week. Tarzan Smith began his hallucinatory 90-mile marathon Oahu–Kauai paddle from the tip of Kaena. Jim Neece staked and lost his big-wave career on the Kaena Challenge. Ace Cool, today's subject, also took up the Challenge, but eventua...
Hey All, "Kaena Point: the Big-Wave Break that Got Away" posted on EOS last week, and it is a big sprawling White Album of a page, illustrated to a fare thee well, with lots of embedded ripped-from-the-headlines source material. Kaena was a strange spot (and yes, I think of it in past tense; prove me wrong Kai Lenny!), ridden a couple of times, sort of, but not really. Never at anything close to ...