Indholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2016 i Surfer

Since I started working at SURFER back in 2010, I’ve managed to milk the magazine’s travel budget for surf trips to Kanyakumari in Southern India, Bull Bay in Jamaica, and Salina Cruz in Mainland Mexico. I’ve hustled for scraps on the inside at Snapper Rocks, Australia, and surfed for an audience of bored sheep in South Africa’s Transkei. Once I even paddled out at Shipstern Bluff, Tasmania, where I promptly pissed myself at the first sign of a set and broke paddling-speed records back to the boat. Those were all very memorable experiences (especially the nearly lethal ones), but over the last six years, the surf zone that made the greatest impression on me wasn’t some far-flung locale I visited on assignment. Oddly enough, it was Big Sur, California, just…

EVERY TABLE IN THE LARGE, rectangular space is piled high with paints, India ink, brushes, half-finished drawings, and mangled books. There must be hundreds of works scattered throughout Raymond Pettibon’s New York studio— some drawings on notebook-size paper stacked haphazardly on the paint-splattered floor, others large-scale paintings hanging on the wall: the Statue of Liberty, a Babe Ruth–era baseball player, a noir-ish woman smoking a cigarette, and, of course, a tiny surfer in the maw of a massive wave. Born in 1957 and raised in Hermosa Beach, California, Pettibon had a childhood filled with books, comics, baseball, and surfing. When his older brother, Greg Ginn (Pettibon is a nom de plume), formed a band, Pettibon suggested the name Black Flag. He also designed their now-famous logo—a stylized rendering of four…

On those crowded bluebird days at First Peak—a clean, pulsing north swell in the water, a gentle west wind kissing the wedging peak’s pencil-thin lips—you could hear a sound—pop pop pop pop— as sets approached the viperpit pack, pinballing through the jetty’s pilings. The East Coast’s best surfers knew it well, heard it in their dreams. Ask Kelly Slater; he remembers. Or Jeff Crawford, if you can find him. Mike Tabeling probably heard it on his way out. For nearly40 years, Sebastian Inlet groomed more champion surfers than perhaps any wave on the planet, responsible for eight Pipe Masters wins, 16 world titles, and countless major East Coast, national, and World Championship event wins, not to mention dozens and dozens of local, underground, world-class surfers filling in the gaps. Then,…

A ROUND 9 A.M. on February 25, not long after the Eddie Aikau big-wave invitational was called on, Will Skudin sat alone on the left at Jaws. Seventy-five yards to the west, the right was filling up with surfers and Jet Skis, but because of its propensity for closing out over the inside shallows, the left is often overlooked. Skudin paddled up and over a set—a lopsided trip with a long, rollercoaster ascent and quick, spray-showered slide down the back. As he surveyed the empty lineup, he started wondering if he was going crazy. Was it not 30 feet and perfect? Why weren’t there other surfers out? The answer lay a hundred miles to the northwest, on Oahu, where most of the big-wave elite had collected. All eyes were on…

1 PROCTOR SURFBOARDS MONSTAFISH Dimensions: 6'6" × 23 1/2" × 3 3/8" (60.5l) Construction: Custom Proxy Epoxy Superduty Fins: Twin or quad The Skinny: A full-bodied modern fish in the vein of the MonstaChief series; for big guys that want a performance fish for smaller days. Heavy concaves throughout, an ’80s-style flat deck to pack on the liters, combined with sloped, downrails and hard edges to knife your corners at top velocity; with a subtle beaky buzzard nose. 2 PROCTOR SURFBOARDS BULLET Dimensions: 5'9" × 20 1/4" × 2 5/8" (33l) Construction: Poly with resin tint Fins: Single fin, thruster, bonzer, quad, 2+1, 4+1 The Skinny: Ever glide along at full tilt speed trim and feel like you’re weightless? The Bullet gets you there. 3 PROCTOR SURFBOARDS CELESTIAL TRANSPORTER/MENDIA Dimensions:…

SID ABRUZZI 64, NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND 36 “I was born in Newport and have been surfing here for over 50 years,” says Sid Abruzzi, owner of Rhode Island’s Waterbrothers surf/skate shop. “Rhode Island is unique compared to any other state on the East Coast because it faces south and we have a good combination of pointbreaks and beachbreaks. From Ruggles to Rincon to Little Compton’s mysto points, we’ve got great waves. We’ve got a good surf/skate scene, too. When I built Skater Island, it was like the North Shore of skateboarding. A bunch of good bands—Verbal Assault, Throwing Muses, and Belly—have come out of here too.” MATT LOPEZ 34, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA “YOU CAN MOVE TO SAN FRANCISCO and be whatever you want, but 20 years ago, if you said,…

Since 1994 WaterWays has developed relationships with only the best operators in each destination represented. What makes each operation the best? The combination of location, service & hospitality, amenities and ease of access to the best surf in the zone. These may not be the least expensive options, but without exception they provide the best value for your travel dollar. 1. Cinnamon Dhonveli Resort – Maldives CDM has exclusive access to Pasta Point and quick access to a number of other waves– Sultan’s is just across the channel. Surf transfers from CDM operate on a flexible schedule and the resort takes a maximum of 30 surfers. With Pasta Point not being tide sensitive, the ease of access to surf other breaks, the limited number of surfers and many surfers only…

ANDY IRONS IS IN THE PASSENGER SEAT AS THE CAR BARRELS ACROSS THE FLAT RED NEVER NEVER OF THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT. “BRAH, DID WE JUST TURN BACK THERE?” The steering wheel had inched maybe three degrees to the left on the faintest, most imperceptible chicane, the only deviation in hours on this long, lonely, hot slash of highway. Irons is on the road to becoming someone else, but for now he’s Lil Wayne. He’s deep into the playlist, scrolls to “A Milli” and the subwoofers start shaking coins in the center console while he’s all shakas and gangster hands. After six hours of featureless desert, Irons is no longer in the passenger seat; he’s in the music video for “A Milli,” standing on the hood of a brand-new Maserati. The…

December of 2014 brought four rainstorms to San Diego County, ringing in the monthly precipitation total to almost 4 inches— more than double the average. These storms were accompanied by a stretch of large surf. Intermittent sunny days coincided with prime wind conditions. So, despite a general, county-wide warning to avoid ocean contact for 72 hours after a rain event, surfers all along the coast paddled out. Among them was 71-year-old Barry Ault, a Sunset Cliffs local and former competitor who was known for being extraordinarily fit and passionate about surfing despite his age. In fact, Ault had been surfing throughout December’s patch of wet weather. His wife, Sally, said, “He was having a hard time being 71; he felt 30 years old inside and was surfing circles around guys…

KELLY SLATER is no stranger to man-made miracles. The 11-time world champ and wave-pool mogul was shaped by the Army Corps of Engineers’ happy accident, First Peak Sebastian Inlet (see some of Slater’s early work there on pg. 107). If you’d have asked him what a perfect wave looked like back then, an adolescent Slater might have described one of those pristine Inlet afternoons: “There were these rare days at First Peak when the sand built up against the jetty and you could catch the wedge out at the end, ride into it, and get barreled all the way along the length of the jetty.” Thirty years later, Slater’s recreated his childhood haunt 100 miles from the coast, only the barrel is 10 times as long and there’s no one…

AN EIGHT-PAGE FEATURE on a negligible little piece of Hermosa Beach, California, holding down the middle of an issue that’s just 60 pages cover to cover? Really? If you don’t know Hermosa, you are baffled. If you do know Hermosa, you are even more baffled. South Bay old-timers will bang their canes on the floor and say Hermosa used to be better than it is now, and that may be true. But go back to Hermosa’s best year—1938 or 1963 or who knows when—and for 340 of those 365 days the surf would’ve been defective or worse for any and every reason you can imagine: too big, too small, blackballed, crowded, closed out, blown out. The limb I’m crawling on feels very secure behind me when I say that, in…

Though its occasionally breathtaking peaks have drawn increasing media attention over the past few winters, there are still plenty of San Francisco inhabitants who don’t seem to realize that Ocean Beach even exists. Many longtime residents are only vaguely aware that if they head west far enough, across Divisadero Street and straight through the seemingly endless northsouth grid of The Avenues, they’ll eventually reach the wild, thunderous edge of the Pacific. Despite the presence of a few surf shops scattered amongst the foggy outer reaches, and the growing congestion in its lineups on the most pleasant days, San Francisco is assuredly not a beach town. Ocean Beach’s moody disposition isn’t particularly welcoming to surfers, and, barring massive climate change that greatly warms the Northern Pacific, it never will be. To…

THERE ARE MANY WAYS one could go about measuring it. I’ll spare you the boring details, but the first thing you should know about Lake Superior is that it is the biggest lake in the world. Its shoreline is nearly three times longer than California’s. It contains enough water that, if emptied, it would flood all of North and South America to a depth of 12 inches. In the winter, the lake rages with ferocious storms that generate ship-eating 30-foot waves. Perhaps you’ve heard Gordon Lightfoot’s famous song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”? The Edmund Fitzgerald was a 700-foot monster of a ship, not a vessel to be trifled with, but in 1976 Lake Superior trifled with the Eddie Fitz anyway and in a stormy tirade sent her straight…

THE PORT OF GALILEE in Rhode Island is eerily quiet, the only sounds coming from the hypnotic lapping of metal lines against boat masts, and seagulls lured by the smells emanating from buckets of raw skate lining the docks. The biting cold and thick marine layer belie that spring has begun. Sheltered from the 20 mph winds ripping across the Atlantic Ocean, the port harbors a fleet of large commercial fishing vessels. From the leather captain’s chair of an 87-foot lobster boat, Jamie Risser is looking out across the 4-mile body of water between him and the land mass that fronts Narragansett’s famous break, Point Judith. Earlier this morning, the same winds that were tearing apart the south-facing beaches of Newport—Rhode Island’s best-known surf zone, just a few miles up…

American beaches and waves are constantly in flux. The construction of harbors and jetties can completely demolish a once-majestic wave (think Killer Dana in Dana Point, California), or they can create a new one (think Sandspit in Santa Barbara). Big swells can mold perfect-yet-fleeting sandbars at your home break, or they can dig out wave-wrecking trenches. Or, sometimes, two concrete dams can be removed from a major river, adding 100 acres of sand to the adjacent coast. The huge stretches of sand you see in this photo are at the head of the Elwha river mouth on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and they weren’t there five years ago. The Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam have impeded the natural flow of the Elwha River since their construction in the early…