Tabla de contenidos para Fall 2019 en Surfer

I was talking to my dad, a longtime shaper of surfcraft, last night about a board that I really want to make—a 5'5" performance twin with an E-wing and a slightly concaved deck. It’s a board that’s been floating around the back of my mind since I hopped on a similar sled shaped by Derrick Disney a few months ago and the thing felt carved from psychic foam, intuiting everything I wanted to do on the wave and responding accordingly. “Why don’t you just ask him to shape you one?” said the supplier of half my genes. “That way you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.” I laughed at the fatherly practicality. “Reinventing the wheel” is actually the whole point in this instance, as is often the case when it…

The Shortboard Revolution began in 1967 when longboards reigned supreme and over the next 2 years, board lengths dropped from 10-foot tankers to 7-foot “mind machines”. Such was the era of hippies, psychedelics and anything goes. The designs that defined the summer of ‘69 actually had their genesis in the fall of 1968 at the World Surfing Championships in Puerto Rico. Back then, long before digital media, GoPros, videos or cell phones, the bi-annual gathering of surfing’s best was where surfboard design concepts came together and where the agenda was set for the coming year. While Hawaii’s Fred Hemmings eventually won the contest, it was the influence of the Australians that was the talk of the event. Defending champion, Nat Young, lead the charge and it was his designs and…

Almost 30 years ago, a young Josh Mulcoy embarked on his very first surf trip to Alaska. Back then, before Instagram feeds became clogged with photos of surfers standing on snow-laden beaches, hunting waves in Alaska was practically the surfy version of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But such trips were soon to become Mulcoy’s bread and butter. During his inaugural visit to America’s northern frontier, Mulcoy—alongside fellow surfers Brock Little and Dave Parmenter—found a bevy of fun waves, including a particularly rippable, seemingly-endless lefthander. The surf was so good, in fact, that Mulcoy would do whatever he could over the following three decades to get back to this particular coastline. He ended up visiting the area so frequently and forming such deep connections there that in 2006 he was…

I was wondering how the hell this whole thing had actually come together—and will anything like it ever happen again? I can’t remember the first time I heard the word “content” used as a catchall to describe writing, photography and film, but I do remember hating it. The word feels vaguely taunting as it tries to diminish the artform it describes, as if to say, “something to fill a void, doesn’t really matter what.” In the modern era, however, the word makes a sad kind of sense for most surf videos, as independent filmmakers have largely disappeared in the free-everything digital landscape, leaving brands to mostly pump mindless eye candy into your Instagram feed in an effort to achieve marketing objectives over creating real art. The surf film became the…

In winter, when long-period northwest swells batter Northern California and stir Mavericks from its slumber, odds are you’ll find Bianca Valenti sitting deep in the lineup on a bright-pink 9'2", waiting for an opportunity to chase down a horrifying wall of water while spectators lining the cliff watch on with mouths agape. On this partially cloudy day in June, however, there was hardly a ripple in the lineup and the only people on the cliff were day hikers and dog walkers. Yet Valenti still insisted that I see the spot in person, even if it wasn’t breaking. We stared out at the ocean from the base of Pillar Point, and Valenti gestured to a row of partially submerged, house-sized boulders just offshore, terrifyingly referred to as “The Boneyard.” “That south…

“This time of year, this wave usually isn’t so perfect,” says South African photographer Anthony Fox of this oh-so-perfect lineup located in Cape Town. “It’s very unusual to have those west swells and a southeast wind. It does get crowded, but when it gets over a certain size the crowd thins out dramatically. I shot those images over a two-day period and the first day was about as big as it can handle, so the crowds were minimal. The tricky party about surfing here is that it’s pretty sharky. Of the last three times I’ve surfed down there, I’ve been chased out twice by a great white.”…

Every surfer can relate on the subject of dues paid in exchange for waves; greasing a highway patrolman, evacuating a stomach bug, wearing a piece of exposed reef or a brutal, local-hootch-induced hangover, etc. “We’d all paid our dues at various frontiers,” wrote Southern California surfer Kevin Naughton in a dispatch from Africa published over the course of three issues of SURFER Magazine in 1975. Or was it Naughton’s traveling partner, Southern California photographer Craig Peterson who wrote that? The duo famously penned their epic travelogues in the third person, with the narrator attributing quotes to both Naughton and Peterson, so we can’t be sure. In any event, in Part II of Naughton and Peterson’s Africa feature, the line about paying dues serves to paraphrase a campfire conversation between an…

“It’s just a weird, crude, shambolic shit show where people get to hear these surfing legends peel back their masks and be the core lord degenerate wax heads we all know they are.” For the past half century, surf entertainment has mostly consisted of magazines, films and, more recently, webcasts. But lately, a handful of surf junkies have ventured into the realm of Joe Rogan and Terry Gross, getting in front of a microphone and some recording equipment to wax on about all things surf. Some have flipped, some have flopped, but Ain’t That Swell—the brainchild of surf writer Jed Smith and former Surfing World editor Vaughan Blakey—has become a cult favorite among a sect of surf-stoked masses dubbed the “Swellians”. Keeping surf-stoked individuals engaged in the age of unlimited…

It was mid-morning in the sleepy Mexican village of Barra de la Cruz and the streets were empty, save for the occasional stray dog and surfboard-toting gringo, the latter surely on their way to the same nearby pointbreak that we were heading to. Jon Rose first came to this part of Oaxaca nearly 20 years ago, during a very different time in his life. “From 13 until my late 20s, surfing was really the only thing I ever thought about,” says Rose, now 41. “I had a completely one-track mind for a lot of my life, and that was the thing that made me most happy.” Rose was born in Colorado, but after his parents split when he was young, he and his dad ended up settling in Laguna Beach,…

It’s Friday evening and an impromptu party is in the works in the typically quiet beachside village of Playa La Saladita. Though it’s after 10 p.m., the sun only just sank below the horizon, the lack of light pushing a portion of the small-but-growing assembly inside a modest three-bedroom beachfront house, where The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” is audible over clinking bottles of Mexican lager, the revelry of card games, conversations revolving around shared travel experiences—“Where’d you fly in from? When did you get in? How long are you staying?”—and dinner machinations for subsequent hours. As the group swells, filling the small living room and dining area, the gathering spills to the front porch and onto the sand. I join Kevin Skvarna and Noah Cardoza, two Southern California longboarders based…