Tabla de contenidos para Summer 2020 en Surfer

WELCOME TO YOUR MENTAL VACATION! YOU HAVE NOW ENTERED A CON-SPIRACY-THEORY-FREE ZONE. AS YOU’LL NOTICE, THERE’S NO COMMENT section below for people to digitally scream about fascism and “sheeple”. What’s that? Yes, of course we believe in science. Everyone does here. Just relax, you’re not in the bad place anymore. We’ll handle your baggage. Here, put this lei on. Would you like to try one of our complimentary mai tais? The pineapple is fresh. We could all use a vacation right now, and while the literal kind is probably not in the cards any time soon, the mental variety will have to do. Life during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of high strangeness—a bizarre cocktail of desperately missing interactions in the physical world and being consistently appalled by…

“Your source of stoke in surfing changes over time. For me, it’s not attached to riding the biggest wave or my year-end ratings anymore.” It’s totally possible to ride a wave so big and so intense that you just walk away from the sport afterward. I don’t think I could ever do it as dramatically as Greg Noll, but it has occurred to me. Every winter I assess my mindset and wonder if this will be the year I’ll paddle out at Jaws and decide that that’s it, I don’t want anything to do with it anymore. Now that I’ve been out of it for a little bit, I look back at some of the waves I’d ridden at Jaws and Mavs and I’m not sure I’ll ever top them…

“Despite history, we can forge ahead and create pathways for what we want to see now and in the future.”—Chelsea Woody Many surfers fetishize the past. We look at photos of uncrowded Malibu in the ‘50s, the Rincon cove before it was fronted by a six-lane highway, and think, “Yep, those were the days.” Even those of us who weren’t actually alive then—probably especially us younger generations—imagine those periods of light crowds and less development as surfing’s golden era. (Hell, this magazine has waxed romantic about surfing’s past as much as anyone, and as recently as our last issue, which showcased Ron Stoner’s 1960s surf photography). But not all of us see surfing’s past through this rosy lens. “In the 1960s Jim Crow laws prevented black people from congregating in…

ROW 1 Craig Semple, ENT Surgeon, Torquay + Eric Lizerbram M.D., Radiologist, San Diego + Nial Frederickson, ER Nurse, Los Angeles + Rob Culp, Fire Captain/Paramedic, San Juan Capistrano + 9 Miles Surf Outreach Program, Cape Town ROW 2 Captain Tim, Firefighter, Kauai + (L to R) E. and A. Chang, Surgeons; J. Chang, Pulmonary/Critical Care/ICU Specialist, Orange County + Chris Lepre, Longshoreman Crane Operator, Long Beach + Christian Reiner, Emergency Medical Services Worker, Pennsylvania ROW 3 Dr. Bradly Jacobs, Doctor, San Francisco + Dr. Jimmie Colón, Anesthesiologist, New Orleans + Eoin McCarthy Deering, General Practitioner, Ireland + Erik Adair, ER nurse, Northern California + Faith Moorhouse, Nurse, Waco, Texas ROW 4 Bob Gekle, Emergency Physician, Long Island + Jonathan Stubbs, ER Ambulance Driver, Noosa + Jule Swartz, Trauma and…

Welcome to the first-ever People’s Board Review. “What the hell is this and why does it have vaguely Marxist undertones,” you ask? Well, it’s a board test series in which we enlist working-stiff, relatable rippers to give us feedback on the latest surfboard models in dims you can find right there in the rack at your local surf shop. Because you probably don’t need to know if a pro’s custom sled feels a little off when reconnecting with the transition after an inverted full-rotation—but you do want to know if the stock version paddles well, if it can generate speed easily and if the thing can turn worth a damn. For this review, we put four different Surftech models in the hands of four relatable shredders to test out in…

Every season the collection is inspired by stories, culture, climate, people, and local textiles from travels to a different point on the map. While on our Spring expedition into the depths of the oft-not-touristed island of Java, Captain Ismanto, an East Javan local told us of a recent spearfishing story off a nearby reef shelf. He had came up for air to see a giant black panther who’d wandered in from the jungle looking for fish in the tide pools right in front of him. It was something he’d never seen, nor heard of before—his story lives on in our “Jungle Attack” collection. WEST JAVA Revivalists DREW MARTIN Photo…

RS Surf Co is a board brand with high-performance bona fides, but being based in Southern California, they also understand the importance of working shreddy design features into fuller outlines that offer some giddyup in average surf. The result? Their traditional-looking shortboards offer predictable high performance, and their more alternative-looking shapes offer unexpectedly high performance as well. For this review, we put four RS Surf Co models in the hands of four relatable rippers of varying sizes and board preferences and took them down to a fairly average California beach break on a peaky, head-high day. The boards included the “El Bandito”, a performance blade with training wheels; the “Musubi”, a squished-down shortboard with a curvy outline; the “Love Capsule”, a fat and flat small-wave ripper; and the “Low Love”,…

Italo Ferreira is sitting underneath a boom mic and a florescent studio light in the front of his house in Baia Formosa when he lets out a big yawn and blinks a set of heavy eyes. It’s been a long day for the 2019 World Champ, to be sure, but it’s also sort of a funny sight, considering how Ferreira tends to come across on the World Tour—an endlessly-energetic, spring-loaded ball of fast-twitch muscle fibers, more akin to an avatar from Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer than a flesh-and-blood wave rider. Joel Parkinson once described him as a “minion who can bounce everywhere.” But while Ferreira can light up multiple heats in a day and backflip off the podium afterward, being a newly-crowned World Champion in Brazil is draining even for…