Hey All, Wave-wise, Santa Monica is not even in the conversation as a great surfing town. You can scrape together a decent surf life here, but only by commuting up and down the coast. I learned to surf in Santa Monica at age nine, and by ten I’d already learned to call Bay Street “Bay Slop.” Zero local pride, wave-wise, except maybe for the Cove, but that’s another story. Nobody lives in Santa M...
Hey All, I’ve said Laura Blears was the most famous surfer of the mid-’70s, and stand by that claim, but you’d want to make room up there for Kim McKenzie. The two had a lot in common. Like Laura, Kim was a first-rate surf jock, with a matching set of Australian National Titles (1973 and ’74) to go with her two Queensland States Titles. And, again like Blears, surfing was more or less incidental ...
Hey All, Johnny Fain died last weekend, at 78, after years of failing health. Fain was a high-performance surfer for the ages, an updated and improved version of Dewey Weber, built like a gymnast, with hummingbird feet and a set of whipturn variations that defied physics, given the deadass 30-pound boards he was wrangling. Fortune smiled on young Johnny Fain. He was handsome and well-connected a...
Hey All, Gerry Lopez and I talked in 2014 about the origins of Lightning Bolt, which opened in the just-shuttered Honolulu Hobie shop during the summer of ’70, and the Bolt logo itself (“the result of me doodling while talking on the telephone”), and at the very end of the conversation, unbidden, Gerry said, “One of these days, Shipley and I”—Bolt cofounder Jack Shipley—“will tell the whole story...
Hey All, Gary Elkerton got name-checked in the Sunset Beach Joint two weeks ago, but I was too caught up in the Michael Tomson vs Sam George drama to give Gary his due. We can fix that. All four minutes of this new Elkerton edit are great, but obviously I was building up to the big Sunset finale, and while every wave in that series is amazing—and a hard rebuke to the grievous shoulder-riding di...
Hey All, James Brown will always be my Mr. Dynamite, but after three days archive-diving into the life and career of Ron DiMenna, the surf shop founder has become the seedy Four Loko-soaked dynamite Yin to Brown’s euphoric dynamite Yang. I am not speaking metaphorically. DiMenna blew shit up for fun. A New Jersey-born ex-Marine who began surfing at age 22, under the guidance of a local Baptist p...
Hey All, Michael Tomson never raved at me directly, and for that I am grateful because he’d pretty regularly go full Sam Kinison, and maybe it was performative but maybe not, and either way I didn’t want to be on the receiving end. Tomson occasionally raved to me, however, about other people, and the time I remember best happened in 1992 when he tore into Sam George, not long after Sam, in print,...
Hey All, Canoe surfing doesn’t have much middle ground, in terms of how it is performed. Easy and safe on one side. Reckless and horrifying on the other. This wasn’t always the case. Back when we wore coonskin caps and hummed Patti Page songs while walking uphill to and from school, Ron Drummond was canoe surfing on the regular at Dana Point, in waves from two- to 12-feet, having a great time whi...
Hey All, I’m firing this Joint up on Saturday, mid-afternoon, during John Florence’s Round One heat at Pipeline, and while my feelings for the WSL remain as Pushme-Pullyu as ever, my God it feels great to again be CT live-streaming. Professional surfing is radically, stupidly untrue to the surfing experience I’ve been living for the past three-plus decades. But along with Mason Ho clips, CT event...
Hey All, New Jersey surf-world godfather Cecil Lear died last month at 91. Lear cofounded the Eastern Surfing Association, which from the jump was a better-organized, more popular, higher-functioning version of the better-known Western Surfing Association—or any other surfing organization, pro or amateur, worldwide. This had a lot to do with Lear himself. He was a surfing late-comer (much to be s...