SUNDAY JOINT, 6-8-2025: MORE SHIPWRECKS AND NUDITY BUT WITH IAMBIC PENTAMETER

Hey All,

A Sunday Joint will usually march off to quietly but proudly fall in with its EOS comrades. Another citizen-soldier in the Phalanx of Joints. But some will U-turn back to me, asking—nay, demanding—for an extension or coda or add-on of some kind. I will then bang a postscript into the next Joint. Or I will save a few up and fasten them together into a Rauschenberg-like Sunday Joint Combine, and that is what we have here today.

First, I'm going to once and for all close out the shipwreck series we began a few months back with the the Dominator grounding at Lunada Bay and continued with the Palm Beach-Amaryllis business—the latter being the most cheerful and surfer-beneficial of all shipwrecks. Today's maritime failure is older and grimmer than the those two. In 60-seconds or less: the Morro Castle, sailing up-coast from Havana to New York City in late summer 1934, caught fire and hit a nor-easter—three days after, the captain died onboard from a heart attack—just off Long Beach Island, New Jersey. The alarm went off at 3:00 AM. The acting captain aimed for shore but things quickly went from bad to worse, power lost, no steering, no radio, heavy surf, confusion about the lifeboats (half were never even launched), and in the pre-dawn darkness it came down to jump or burn. Of the 549 passengers and crew, 137 died. The surfing connection is barely there, just that the massive charred Morro Castle wreck ended up beached in spectacular fashion directly in front of the Asbury Park Convention Hall, just down the coast from where Tinker West and Bruce Springsteen would later be chasing waves and fame. 

Last October's Cornwall Joint is the absolute zenith for EOS video edits (Bowie '29 is my Citizen Kane), and I've just come across another clip that very much belongs in the same company. Bird's-Eye View ran from 1969 to 1971, and the entire 15-part BBC2 series was shot from a helicopter. "Beside the Seaside," the seventh installment, tracks the history of Brits venturing to the shore for health and recreation. Watch the entire 50-minute episode here, it is slow and stately, almost hypnotic, and beautifully filmed—shipwreck action near the beginning, if you're still wanting—and in the pre-drone age it must have looked nearly surreal. Click here to go straight to the surfing part. All of my surf-historian buttons are pushed by this three-minute sequence. The aerial view does an amazing job showing us what the local surfers were riding in 1969 (same as what American and Aussie surfers were riding a year earlier, basically), and I'm not sure if I've ever seen a wave-riding sequence that does a better job of putting the action in context with the surroundings.

The "Beside the Seaside" voice-over is unlike anything you've ever heard in a surf movie or video, posh and plummy and droll, and what a strange and amazing bonus, the voice belongs to beloved UK poet laureate Sir John Betjeman. Most of the "Seaside" narration, in fact, is delivered as verse. Betjeman did not himself surf but loved getting his 18 holes in of a sunny Cornish afternoon. "Seaside Golf" is one of his best-known poems, and if I thought for a moment that golf actually held even a fraction of the joy Betjeman describes below I would not have flounced off the Dominguez Hills par 3 in 1978 with a sworn promise (kept) to never again play the cursed game.

How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear'd the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker's back.
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.

And down the fairway, far along
It glowed a lonely white;
I played an iron sure and strong
And clipp'd it out of sight,
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I'd find it on the green.

And so I did. It lay content
Two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most surely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.

Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
Incoming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.

Have we flown too high this afternoon, what with the poetry and the Romans and the Rauschenberg pull? Probably, yes. Let's aim lower. Let's end with a recent discovery that brought me as much pleasure as Betjeman's beachside tee shot, and that is South Bay shaper Hap Jacobs trimming out at Haleiwa in the early 1960s in a pair of beige baggies. I was going to suggest that we at least weigh the possibility that Hap deliberately set this up as a playful performative statement (we are all naked and exposed with or without a thin layer of cotton twill upon our nethers, etc.) but no way, Jacobs was modest in all things, the closest thing our once-reprobate sport ever had to a gentleman. What you see here is nothing more than a simple but spectacular hocus-pocus fashion error.

Jacobs was such a gentleman in fact that he'd be okay with us having a PG-rated laugh at his expense.

Thanks, everyone, and see you next week.

Matt

PS: In the two days following the Morro Castle's flaming arrival at Asbury Park, it was estimated that up to 250,000 people turned out to rubberneck the disaster. On the first day, the heat from the still smoldering wreck could be felt from the boardwalk. Firemen working from the shore doused the ship for over a week. Morro Castle remained, drawing 10,000 a day, until the following March. 

PPS: Actual nude surfing here. Pics, hot links (not XXX hot), funny quotes. No video.

PPPS: John Betjeman was a throwback as a poet, a nostalgist, even as a young man, both in verse and temperament. But he loved open spaces, railed against development, and encouraged others to go to the beach as a mind and spirit restorative as well as for the joy and fun. "We need the seaside cure for relief from anxiety and tension," Betjeman says at the end of the BBC show. "We need it to realize there is something greater than ourselves, even if it only comes in small things: the feel of firm sand underfoot, the ripple of an incoming tide, a salt breeze, the smell of seaweed. That's where the cure is. At the sea's edge. And all the time, the waves, the waves, the waves."

The guv'nor himself, practicing what he preaches, beachside at Cornwall.

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: painting of the Morro Castle; Newquay surfing from "Beside the Seaside;" Hap Jacobs, photo by LeRoy Grannis; nude surfer on beach; Sir John Betjeman; Laird Hamilton on his GolfBoard in 2015. SS Morro Castle, beached at Asbury Park. Newquay, Cornwall, 1969, from "Beside the Seaside." Kelly Slater golfing. Hap Jacobs at Haleiwa, from Walt Phillips' Surf Mania.]