Table of contents for October 2016 in Surfer

My friend and I sat on a short wooden railing overlooking a pristine cove in Santa Cruz, where two surfers traded glassy, chest-high wedges as the sun sank toward the horizon. It looked about as inviting as Northern California lineups get, but something about the situation didn’t compute. We had just driven all over town looking for waves, and everywhere else was far more crowded, with muchworse surf. And in all the time I’d spent surfing in Santa Cruz over the years, I’d never surfed this wave; hell, I’d never even bothered checking it. What was this under-the-radar swell magnet, and why hadn’t I been surfing here for years? “This is Stockton,” my friend told me. “Oh…shit,” I thought as the picture became clear in my mind. Although I'd never…

Iknow this sounds like a stretch, but even if you aren’t an auto-racing fan, the sport still manages to touch your life every time you drive a car. Pardon the gearhead-speak for a moment, but useful and often lifesaving advances like disc brakes, radial tires, fast-shifting automatic transmissions, and traction control—among many other bits of automotive gadgetry that you’re using whether you realize it or not—all had their debuts as cutting-edge technologies in the car-racing world years before they found their way into your dinged-up Civic. This trickle-down effect is pretty common in the rest of the sports world, too. Howitzer-powered carbon-fiber tennis rackets, space-age graphite-shaft golf clubs, those springy gel-foam running shoes you love to wear to the coffee shop and the mall—all were designed for the world’s best…

MARK RICHARDS, AS CONSISTENT as he was freakishly talented, was simply never going to be outpointed by Cheyne Horan over the course of a full World Tour season. So Horan, as clever as he was freakishly talented, hung a sharp left into the more outré district of board design and spent a half-dozen years in the prime of his career wiggling and check-turning and otherwise struggling on Lazer Zaps, mini-logs, double-enders, winged keels, and other sundry forms of unconventional surfcraft. Horan won by losing. He wasn’t playing “their” game, and therefore could not be judged by “their” metrics— World Tour ratings included. Horan thus reinvented himself as the patron saint of alternative surfing. I happen to think this is nonsense. Others do not. Knowledgeable people in surfing have run this…

It’s a cool January morning and Conner Coffin is sitting in a little Carpinteria, California, café, one of his local haunts, talking about rock ‘n’ roll. Coffin and his old friend, fellow Santa Barbara surfer Travers Adler, play music here when they’re both around. For a while, they had a band going. They’d set up and jam for hours. “The Dead, The Stones, Allman Brothers—those guys are my heroes,” Coffin says. “Duane Allman is a god. Old blues, old country. Travers got me into a lot of amazing old-country stuff—Hank Williams, Gillian Welch, John Prine. I really like Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers. But I grew up on a lot of that stuff. My dad played all that for me when I was a kid. That’s just what…

#1 THE NEEDLE NOSE IF YOU ARE LIKE MOST SURFERS, you look at your state-of-the-art tri-fin surfboard and assume that the story of one of surfing’s greatest design innovations, Simon Anderson’s Thruster, is told solely in those three fins studding the tail. Well, isn’t it? Not exactly. There is hidden in each modern tri-fin, another design revolution, that few surfers are aware of: the Needle Nose. Back in the late 1970s and up to the inception of the Thruster in 1981, most pro surfers were desperately seeking a board design to match Mark Richards and his unbeatable twin-fins. At roughly the same time Anderson was experimenting with making twinfins (which he hated) feel more like his single-fins, fellow pro Cheyne Horan and his shaper/designer Geoff McCoy were working on “the…

Shipping lanes aren’t meant for surfing. The Pacific Hero serves as reminder of this as its massive red hull slices through the busiest channel in sub-Saharan Africa, casting a long shadow over two comparatively ant-like surfers. The wake from the 650-foot container vessel crosses a strip of deep water before hitting an abrupt sandbar, causing it to create a breaking wave headed past the southern breakwater of the Durban Harbor and back out to sea. In addition to the ship’s wake, a strong southerly pulse is in the water. The two surfers, Grant “Twiggy” Baker and Andrew Lange, scratch over a big set as it doubles up and implodes on the tip of the breakwater, which is stained brown from the sediment and detritus constantly rushing out of the port.…