Table of contents for August 2017 in Surfer

I remember changing into my wetsuit on the sidewalk in the twilight, watching lanky egrets stand statuesque in the Oneonta Slough, a winding offshoot of the Tijuana River that fronts the southern stretch of coastal Imperial Beach, California. The quiet of that predawn hour, coupled with the stillness of the marshland, gave the normally tedious act of climbing into neoprene an almost meditative quality This was a ritual my friends and I repeated frequently, as we’d become deeply enamored with the powerful lefts that tore across the nearby beach on south swells. We’d paddle out along the vast, empty beach fronting the slough, where we’d get into a leg-burning rotation of riding a dozen or so lefts up the beach, then jogging back to whichever peak we started at to…

On May 28, 2005, an 8.6 magnitude earthquake struck just west of Sumatra. It was the third-most-powerful earthquake in Indonesia since 1965, wreaking havoc throughout the country and killing almost 1,000 people on the island of Nias. In the immediate aftermath, surfing was the last thing on anyone’s mind. But when a semblance of normalcy finally returned to the Indonesian isle, along with traveling surfers, it became clear that the earthquake had affected local lineups as well. The reef at Lagundri Bay — a wave that was already considered one of the best barreling right-handers in the world — had been raised nearly 10 feet from the quake, and the right had actually gotten better. The takeoff is now steeper, the barrel is longer and the wave requires much less…

Of all the waves that have been dramatically altered over the years, perhaps none has had a larger impact on surf culture than Sebastian Inlet. In the late ’60s, when the Army Corps of Engineers went to work extending the small jetties at Sebastian to prevent erosion and keep the channel clear for boats, they inadvertently created the best sandbar in Florida. In the decades that followed, Sebastian became ground zero for high-performance surfing — not just in Florida, but in the entire United States. On a good day, First Peak was a thick, wedging right with hundreds of talented surfers in the water abiding by a pecking order not dissimilar to the one at Pipeline. Sebastian was the venue for one of the first airs completed on a surfboard…

The quote on the previous spread, from the very first issue of SURFER, is easily the most iconic line in the magazine’s history. It says a lot about what surfing is all about; it also says a lot about what John Severson was all about. Severson was a lot of things: artist, writer, photographer, filmmaker and, of course, the founder of the magazine you are holding in your hands. But more than anything else, Severson was a surfer. As such, he had a deep appreciation for those perfect moments that happen when a person finds themselves alone with their thoughts in the surf, undistracted by the chaos of life on land. Severson fell hard for surfing in his early teens when his family moved to San Clemente, California, and his…

Surfers often follow a herd mentality. (Haven’t you noticed that every time you pick an empty beachbreak peak to paddle out at, someone will paddle up right next to you rather than to the identical empty peak down the beach?) For better or for worse, we tend to pick surfcraft the same way: by riding whatever looks safe and familiar instead of experimenting with exotic shapes and materials. Former aerospace engineer Edison Conner and business wiz Parker Borneman have been doing their best to change that mindset by reimagining the way surfboards are engineered from the inside out. You’ve probably heard of their company, Varial Surf Technology, which made a splash in the industry a few years ago with the release of Varial foam, a strong, lightweight, stringer-less blank that…

In late 2008, Surfing magazine ran a cover image of what appeared to be an endless left-hand sand-bottom barrel, accompanied by a blurb that read, “20-Second Tubes: On Location in Africa.” The story inside introduced the world to what might be the best wave on the planet, and it inspired tube hounds everywhere to seek out the racetrack left. But perhaps what is even more incredible than Skeleton Bay’s shapely lip line is its origin story. While it’s widely believed to be one of the best waves in the world now, it didn’t even exist until the late ’70s, when Namibia’s predominant southerly winds fluctuated by 20 degrees, altering nearshore currents and sand flow, which created a kink in the coastline for sand to collect, forming the freight-train left. Unfortunately,…

While details are vague concerning which swell direction and conditions are required to bring this rare righthand barrel to life in Italy, it’s clear that the break was first created by a freak accident roughly five years ago. “They were working on the highway, building a new tunnel,” says Italian surfer Roberto D’Amico, pictured here. “The workers left all the rocks in front of a park ing lot beside the river, but a huge rain came, causing the river to blow out, the parking lot to collapse and the rocks and rebar to pile up in the perfect place to create the slab that’s there now.” D’Amico explains that before this bizarre event happened, there wasn’t even a surf spot where the slab currently sits. But before you go jumping…

JUST offshore of Nazaré’s bustling beachside promenade of bars, souvenir shops and restaurants, there swirls a feared patch of ocean known to locals as the Widow’s Rip. In the years before the town’s harbor was built, fishermen used oxen to pull their brightly colored boats across the beach before rowing bravely into the surf. When seas were rough, as they almost always are in the winter, the small vessels would sometimes flip in the angry shorebreak. Any fisherman tossed from their boat would inevitably be carried out to sea by the Widow’s Rip, where they would sometimes drown in full view of their horrified wives. If you visit Nazaré today, you’ll see dozens of old women shuffling through the streets and along the beach, wearing black frocks in mourning for…

Last summer, Florida’s Treasure Coast found itself under siege by an unusual enemy: a noxious, guacamole-like cyanobacterium, more commonly known as blue-green algae, which had overrun waterways and contaminated many local beaches. The invasive algae showed up after a particularly rainy El Niño winter, when billions of gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee were released into the Indian River Lagoon System, eventually entering the St. Lucie River Estuary en route to the Atlantic. Fresh nitrogenand phosphorous-rich water coupled with increasingly warm summer temperatures created the ideal conditions for algal growth. Within months, putrid-smelling slime was washing up onto Treasure Coast beaches, prompting Florida Governor Rick Scott to issue an executive order declaring an emergency in Lee, Palm Beach, St. Lucie and Martin counties. Aside from emitting an atrocious smell, blue-green…

Would Kelly Slater have won 11 world titles if not for his formative sessions at Sebastian Inlet? Could John Florence have become the best surfer in the world if Pipeline didn’t exist? It can’t be overstated how much influence one wave can have on a surfer’s trajectory. Take Jordy Smith and New Pier, for example. Before New Pier was the dependably rippable right sandbank it is today, it was nothing more than a junky closeout, not even registering in the hierarchy of Durban beachbreaks. But in the mid-’80s, around the same time Smith was born, a fishing pier was erected, sand began to fill in around the pylons and a new wave had arrived. Now, New Pier offers some of the region’s best surf year-round, ranging from playful, short-period rip…

FROM the window seat of our small aircraft, the islands 13,000 feet beneath us looked like uncut emeralds poking out of a vibrant azure pool. I pressed my nose up against the Plexiglas to study the contours of each one. Dense forests blanketed the isles, bisected by brown, winding rivers. On their perimeters sat palm-fringed, white-sand beaches. The only signs of human development here in this remote, northern region of the Solomon Islands — a 1,000-island archipelago located just northeast of Australia, between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu — were small clusters of houses settled along the coastlines, their corrugated tin roofs reflecting the sun back up at us. Across the aisle from me, surfers Torren Martyn and Leila Hurst and photographer Ryan Craig had their eyes glued on trails…