“A little ditty about Jack and Charmian. . . .” Hey All, In the Spring of 1907, writer Jack London, along with a crew of five, including his cheerful free-loving socialist wife Charmian, set forth out of San Francisco bound for Hawaii on the Snark, Jack’s leaky DIY yacht. A few hours out of port somebody asked “Who’s navigating?” and they looked at each other for a few moments before slapping th...
Hey All, Remember that uptempo Joint a few weeks back where Bo Diddley, Henry Mancini, Chubby Checker and others jumped on the surf music bandwagon and, to one degree or another, rocked? Afterward, some of you sent me links to other kindred salty-sweet tracks, and sweetest by far was “Surfer Boy,” by the Supremes, which I'd managed to never hear even once in my entire Motown-loving life. First of...
Hey All, I don’t know if Australian Surfing Hall of Fame photographer-kneeboarder-whirling dervish Peter Crawford really was a genius, as his aging but enthusiastic supporters claim, but he for sure had a formidable talent for head-fuckery. Which was annoying as hell to anyone on the receiving end of a Crawford verbal barrage of jabs, japes, cackles, and non-sequiturs. I met Peter in Hawaii in De...
Hey All, Rumble at the Ranch is GO, and today’s pizza-oven forecast in Lemoore—102 degrees, no wind to speak of—has me feeling like the biggest, proudest snowflake in all of surfing. Yes, I may tune into the Rumble now and then as the day passes. But it will be from two states away, in my leaf-shaded Queen Anne backyard, where it is clear, mild, and 100% sweat-free. I will not prose on here about...
Hey All, The self-justifying shit we’ve said and done over the years to make surfing grander than it is, am I right? All the energy we’ve spent pulling our beautiful blue sport this way and that, stretching and tugging till we can rub it against the hem of religion or the Olympics or all manner of personal affirmation. I’m not entirely against this. (Mostly I am. Blame atheism and Steve Pezman.) ...
Hey All, Massive size and scale are baked into the Encyclopedia of Surfing. I speak often about how EOS’ eternally unfinished and forever-scrolling surf-history canvas is an exciting rather than daunting task, how the journey is the destination, about process over product, etc etc and you get the idea. Matt Barr and I talked about this recently on Matt’s excellent Looking Sideways podcast (click ...
Hey All, At the end of 1992, when Derek Hynd wrote his annual Top 44 assessment of the just-completed ASP season, here’s what he said about #30 finisher Derek Ho: “He survived, [and] undoubtedly is set to hit top form early this year.” At the bottom of Ho’s paragraph, same as for all the other Top 44 surfers, Hynd dropped his famously curt "World Title" prediction for the year ahead: “Reasonable ...
Hey All, I have no doctor’s note to prove it, but at the south end of my duodenal bulb, hard against the superior flexure, is a nubbin of scar tissue marking the place where an ulcer sprouted and flourished over a six-month period in 1986 when I dated Michael Tomson’s not-quite-ex-girlfriend. Just an extended summer romance. Nothing at the outset, flirty and harmless, haha, nobody even knew! Then...
Hey All, Panic moments are sprinkled across my timeline like Carolina Reaper pepper flakes—Highway One spinout, big Ocean Beach, the Northridge earthquake, cuckoldry exposed, Ocean Beach again, preschool treehouse fail, and really big Ocean Beach. Each episode blindsided me. By nature, I do not seek thrills. Yet looking back now, all snuggled up into a risk-managed late-middle-age, I am proud and...
Hey All, Company policy here at Encyclopedia of Surfing states that we almost never promote on behalf of other entities, profit or nonprofit. Dance on the edge of corporate financial ruin long enough, and you learn to put your hand out rarely and selectively, and yes that is a subtle heads-up for the Fall 2020 EOS Fundraiser. But today I make an exception. Today I ask you, Bob Hurley, or you, Fe...