SUNDAY JOINT, 8-17-2025: "DAILY DALE" WEBSTER ENDS STREAK AT 28,019 DAYS

Hey All,

Last week's Joint featuring Fred Van Dyke, surfing's emotionally-charged one-man Tortured Poets Department, reminded me how much I enjoyed writing those 10,000-word XXL features for Surfer's Journal in the 1990s and 2000s—back before social media threw our attention span in the woodchipper. Van Dyke's TSJ profile in particular was a joy to write, mostly thanks to Fred himself but also because I had the time and space to bring in other voices, people who knew Fred well, who loved him fierecly and were fully prepared to describe the man in full, quirks and all.

Longtime roommate and fellow Punahou teacher Peter Cole, for example, praised Van Dyke for being loyal, generous, and endlessly entertaining. But he also said Fred was a bit of a kook, in the way "kook" was defined before surfers stole it, meaning eccentric and fad-prone. 

He went through everything, every kind of diet and new health regime; dehydration diet, hydration diet, macrobiotics, all-fruit, all-this and all-that. I'm surprised he didn't really screw himself up. Fred was the first guy to really train for big waves. Nobody else did. I remember he'd be talking about all this healthy stuff, going on and on, and I'd pull out a quart of ice cream and eat it in front of him.

Recalling Van Dyke's infamous Sports Illustrated article, Cole told me that his friend had a knack for stirring the pot and would go out of his way to make a point with flair and color. "If someone came along with a tape recorder or notebook, Fred might say anything. And it worked. After a while, the reporters just ran past the rest of us to get to Fred." 

And the "latent homosexual" remark? "All these years, Fred's been saying we were mad at him for that. We weren't mad at him. We were laughing. It was funny; nobody I know took it that seriously."

Ricky Grigg, another former Van Dyke roommate, said Fred was among the world's "nicest human beings" and a "gentle soul"—and that these qualities, admirable on their own, probably worked against him in big surf.

Fred went out there with more fear in his heart than any of us. He said he rode big surf because he needed to be tougher. It was a means for him to express his manhood. The problem was he always thought the rest of us were doing it for the same reasons. Peter and I would say, ‘Fred, that has nothing to do with it.' Yeah, there was ego, and you wanted to look good and get recognized, especially at first. But that wasn’t the real reason. Peter and I just loved being out there. Big surf is the most incredibly beautiful thing in the world. Which I'm sure had something to do with the fact that Peter and I weren't really that afraid in big waves. Not very often, anyway. Peter could swim forever. I wasn't as fast but had that same kind of endurance. So it wasn't especially hard for us. Fred never had that. He was tense, all his muscles were flexed and contracted, his jaw was set. He was never a flowing surfer, you know. He was ready to get wiped out pretty much all the time. Because of all that, I've always said Fred actually had more courage than any of us.

These comments by Grigg and Cole do not, in my view, negate or undercut what Van Dyke said or wrote in Sports Illustrated and elsewhere. But they do support that idea that no single person has anything close to a wraparound view on any given topic. If you run past Peter and Ricky to get to Fred, you aren't missing the story, exactly. If you have to lean into one source, Van Dyke is your guy. But the story will end up like Fred's own pumped and fat-free latissimus dorsi—specactular and very slanted.

While we're here talking about gentle, offbeat, free-thinking, autocritical surfers, a last tip of the 5mm neoprene hood goes out this week to Dale Webster, the sad-faced surfing ironman of Sonoma County. Webster died last week at age 77, and of those 28,019 days on earth, over half—14,642—were stiched together into a consecutive-days-surfed streak that isn't just the longest of its kind, but possibly the greatest and without question the strangest athletic streak of any kind. For just over 40 years, Webster never missed a day of surfing. (Defined as: three waves ridden, minimum.) Fever, chills, kidney stones, loose bowels, raging storms, flat spells—Webster made it to the beach and paddled out. The streak grew and produced spin-offs. Dale kept every wetsuit he ever owned. Occasionally, like the rest of us, he would scrape the wax off his board—except Dale kept the shavings and smashed them into a huge, lopsided, dirty-grey off-gassing ball, which, I suppose, could now be bisected and time-dated, like rings on a tree stump, all the way back to the age of Pet Rocks and Gerald Ford. 

I drove up to Dale's home in Valley Ford in the winter of 2004, not long after he said the streak was about to end. Webster, like Van Dyke, didn't have much of a filter when talking, on record or off. He was all over the place, to be honest. He described the streak to me in the grandest terms possible and said it was "the ultimate thing to do." Fifteen minutes later he said the whole point of the streak was to make the cover of SURFER. The project had long since evolved into both a lifework and a burden, in roughly equal measure; Dale himself was always very open about this. He was 55 when we talked and said he spent a lot of time adding up the cost of devoting so much of his life to one specific, narrow, repetitive thing. "It practically brings tears to my eyes," he said, "thinking how obsessive I got." (Webster told writer Chris Mauro that the streak was at least partly the result of an undiagnosed thyroid condition. Mauro then asked if the streak, and surfing in general, is a type of addiction. The reply was pure uncut Webster: "When I started, I thought it was a sport. Then I figured it was a lifestyle, and later I thought of it as sort of a religion. But now I realize it is a disease.")

I visited Webster that cold, sunny afternoon because the streak was to have ended the day before. Here's what I wrote:

Webster announced in 2000 that he’d end the streak on February 29, 2004, after completing a full 28-year lunar cycle. He kept the date even when it was pointed out that a lunar cycle is 28-and-a-half days, not years. Reporters covered Webster’s final session, and a big party was held that night in his honor. The next day, March 1 dawned rainy and windy. “My wetsuit was damp,” Webster said that afternoon, “and my butt was black-and-blue from a wipeout the week before. So I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have to surf today? Great!’” He tried to go back to sleep. A half-hour later he quietly slipped out of bed, dressed, threw his board on the car and drove by himself to the beach to go surfing. “I don’t know,” he later said in a resigned voice. “It’s just easier to keep surfing than to stop."

I believe in Heaven only when convenient, and today is such an occasion. Fred Van Dyke has ushered Webster through the Pearly Gates and told him that he can surf or not surf, either way, no worries, no sharks, no wetsuit required, and later they'll get Sigmund to explain once and for all what "latent homosexual" means."

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

Matt

PS: The earliest mention I can find of Dale Webster's streak is this 1978 article in the Sonoma County Press Democrat, published just after Dale hit 1,000 days. An overlooked fact in the Webster story is that never during the 40-year streak did he live walking distance to the beach. He always had to drive. If his car broke he improvised, and in the early years Dale caught some pretty funky rides. "He has hitched rides in cars which have caught fire," the Press Democrat article says, "had wheels fall off or run out of gas. Frequently, he has walked."

PPS: Webster has a memorable segment in 2003's Step Into Liquid, where he looks and sounds like the mellow bong-scented middle-aged surfer-hippy he was. But Webster delivered sly, funny, curveball quotes as dependably as he caught that third wave each day, and in Liquid he does it by stating that while he is on a mission, "I don't really know what the mission is." That same year, he told the LA Times that his "inlaws used to think [the streak] was a quick-thinking, poorly-executed plan to avoid visiting them in Utah"—except of course the plan was executed beautifully. Let's sign off with my favorite Webster quote, having to do with the failure to land on Page One of his favorite magazine. "I have a better chance getting a cover of Baseball Weekly than SURFER," Dale told Chris Mauro. "I guess I'm not sexy enough for you guys." 

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Fred Van Dyke, photo by John Severson; Peter Cole, Waimea, photo by Don James; Ricky Grigg, 1964; Dale Webster surfing in 1994; kidney stones (not Webster's); Dale Webster in 2015, five weeks before the streak ended. Peter Cole, holding mic, and Buzzy Trent, from Bud Browne's 1962 film Calvalcade of Surf. Van Dyke at Sunset, around 1960, photo by Severson. Webster at home in the early 2000s. Webster surfing Bodega Bay in 1985. Driving to the beach in 2003. Webster onscreen in Step Into Liquid.]