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...
Hey All, The History of Surfing chapter on surf shops is called “Houses of the Holy,” which I stole from a SURFER article title, and SURFER of course stole it from Led Zeppelin—and apologies, folks, but we’re going straight to sidebars. First, my opinion of Led Zeppelin is a tiny bit lower for the fact that the song “Houses of the Holy” is not on the Houses of the Holy album—at some tender bong-w...
Hey All, The 2021 EOS fundraiser was a middling success right up until Christmas Eve, when Surfing Heritage and Culture Center cofounder Dick Metz dropped ten large into the pot, pushing the total north of $45K, at which point the drive cross-stepped from middling to excellent. Folks, 2022 is funded. Operation Headless is taking place as we speak. To all the EOS donors and subscribers—thank you...
Hey All, Circling back to that teasing “Pipeline Pioneers” clip of Nancy Nelson and a dark-haired regularfooter (either Martha or Anella Sunn; more on that in an upcoming Joint), I was reminded that Candy Calhoun, our broad-shouldered Athena of Laguna Beach, had bodysurfed Pipe even earlier—way back in 1963, and here is Candy’s first-person account of that experience. “My last ride was the best,”...