Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

Tri-fins, car phones, bandeau bikini tops, and high-top sneakers all made 

 magazine’s “What’s Hot” list for 1986. On the “What’s Not” side: Drugs, localism, and “surfing like Mark Richards.”

Hottest of all was a new phone service called Surfline, located in Huntington Beach. For 55¢ a pop, Southern California could dial up a 90-second recorded message on local wave conditions. The voice was surfy and relaxed, but there was plenty of hard data included as well, including swell size, period, and angle; wave shape and consistency; wind and tide; and a short-range prediction. The original Surfline menu had 22 separate breaks between Ventura and Orange County; Santa Cruz and San Diego were soon added, and Florida was next. Most of the information came from a hired network of surfers, one for each break, who phoned Surfline HQ twice a day with their eyewitness reports. For another 55¢, you could key through to a second Surfline feature: a 72-hour forecast, updated each evening and—as the company boasted in one of its first ads—“compiled with state-of-the-art computer technology.”

Reliable wave and weather information have always been among the sport’s most valuable commodities. Each person filters surf data through their own matrix of needs, but the basic idea is to figure out where and when to surf while reducing, as much as possible, the ridiculous amount of time spent in the field hunting around. Nearly as important is keeping a step or two in front of the crowd.

Before Surfline, the whole thing was a difficult and balky do-it-yourself process. Information might be gathered from a network of sources: a friend with a beachfront view, the local surf shop, whoever picked up the phone at the harbormaster’s office or the lifeguard headquarters. Each source had its own reliability rating. A wave-height reading passed on by a beachfront bro could be accurate to within six inches. Delivered by his kid brother, it could be off by six feet. Surf shop reports were especially suspect—the entire trade wasn’t known for customer service in general, and nobody wanted to be responsible for putting more bodies into their already-crowded local lineup. In the early '70s, lifeguard departments in a few heavily-surfed regions began to offer recorded call-in surf reports, but again there were problems. Just one call could be answered at a time, and if a rumored swell was about to hit, you could dial repeatedly until your index finger bled—this was 

 dialing; none of that sissy push-button stuff—and get nothing but a busy signal. When it came to lifeguard report accuracy, surfers were of two minds: half believed that wave-height information was exaggerated to discourage swimmers from getting in over their heads, and half believed the size was downplayed to keep out-of-towners away from the lineup. Meanwhile, radio surf reports had been around for years and were the best publicly available source—except you had to wait around to hear it. In Australia, a few Sydney-area Top 40 stations had been broadcasting surf reports as far back as the mid-'60s, while FM rock stations in Los Angeles and Honolulu did the same starting in the mid-'70s.

In very special cases, a report made its way to the surfer, not the other way around. 

 publisher Otis Chandler was holding a staff meeting in 1979 when an associate walked in, leaned over the boss’s shoulder, and discreetly placed a note facedown on the table. Chandler, a long-time member of the San Onofre Surf Club, turned the note over, adjourned the meeting, and walked out. An editor fished the note from the trash a few moments later. Two words: “Surf’s up.”

Good surf reports have ruined millions of meetings and scheduled events. The transaction itself is simple—just a basic real-time information relay. Surf forecasting is a whole different thing. When it comes to something as complex as ocean waves, predictions are based on data and physics, yes, but also art and "feel." For surfers, it is an earth science that once seemed akin to magic.

Until the 1950s, nobody in the sport had any real idea how waves were created, much less when they were going to arrive. Surf pioneer Tom Blake wrote in 1935 that "surf seems to be caused by disturbances in the earth, such as earthquakes." A 

 character named Lord Gallo, introduced in the 1957 book as Malibu’s “most educated” surfer, was pretty sure that big waves were the result “all those H-bomb blasts” in the Pacific. Even today, a lot of surfers have a pagan-like belief that a full moon can break a flat spell (it can’t).

Wave forecasting came into its own as a science during World War II, when Allied commanders ordered that the D-Day amphibious landing at Normandy be timed to a low-surf window, to increase the odds for a safe landing. In fact, on the advice of forecasters, Eisenhower delayed the invasion by 24 hours because the waves were too big.

In the 1940s and 1950s, there was no swell-recording hardware. Wave height/period data sets were made by direct observation from ships, airplanes, piers, and harbors, then gathered, correlated, and fed into newly-developed wave-prediction models. After the war, the information-gathering continued and was used mostly by shipping companies as a way to keep their boats afloat and on schedule.

Forecasting took a giant leap forward in 1960, when NASA launched its first weather satellite. With this new god’s-eye view, meteorologists could now make detailed pressure-gradient isobaric charts and render each weather system into a kind of architectural line-drawing. Arranged in sequential order, the charts could define a storm by size, shape, depth, growth, route, route speed, temperature, and wind velocity—the raw goods for surf forecasting.

Except it was more complicated even than that. There were a dozen or more skewing factors to swell creation and mobility that meteorologists didn’t yet understand, any of which could throw a forecast out of whack. Organizers for the Makaha International surf contest, beginning in the late 1960s, were in constant touch with the National Weather Bureau in the days leading up to the event, and the results weren’t so great. The predicted big surf often failed to materialize, or a double-overhead swell might turn up completely out of the blue. “It will be some time before we can plan vacations or even days off according to surf forecasts,” Makaha official John Kelly glumly concluded in his 1965 book 

Part of the problem was that meteorologists regarded wave forecasting, despite its importance to oceanic travel, as a kind of weather-science backwater. Surfers were going to have to do it for themselves. Although not written for surfers, 1964's 

, by American oceanographer Willard Bascom, was a big step in the right direction, as it provided a detailed technical understanding of swell formation and wave/coastline interaction. (Much of Bascom's work was based on research done by oceanographer Walter Munk of San Diego.) 

 magazine contributed with a 1969 feature called “Have Forecast, Then Travel,” which included a fluent precis on swell formation and an illustrated sidebar titled “How to Read the Weather Map.” In 1977, 

The Weather Surfer: A Guide to Oceanography and Meteorology for the World’s Wave Hunters

, a short, earnest, jargon-heavy paperback, was written by Florida surfer Vic Morris. By this time, the information sources had improved. Dozens of heavily-equipped weather buoys had been deployed across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and both the terrestrial and supernal data streams were flowing into the 1970-founded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA, in turn, not only sent accurate graphs, charts, and forecasts to news agencies, but it provided around-the-clock VHF-broadcast marine reports. If you had a weather radio, knew the lingo, and could work out the vectors for your favorite breaks, it was now possible—easy, almost—to keep a jump ahead of the surfing masses who were still getting their surf info from the local shop and the newspaper weather page.

s small but devoted readership was Sean Collins of Orange County—a quiet surfer-blond junior college dropout who carefully banked his bartending tips and made wave-chasing quests up and down Baja’s west coast. He had picked up an interest in marine forecasting from his father, a navy navigator, but was a self-taught meteorologist. Collins had a gift for tapping information sources on the fly—bumping down a dirt road somewhere in the middle of the Sonoran Desert during the early 1980s, he’d pull over at high noon, unpack a solar-powered fax machine, make a shortwave connection to the weather station in Christchurch, New Zealand, and wait as the latest South Pacific millibar chart made its agonizingly slow reveal from the bottom of the device. With the new information, he’d get back in the car and pick his break accordingly.

Back home, Collins was archiving storm charts, keeping records of laboratorial detail and organization, adding new channels to his data stream, and mapping out the bathymetric peaks and valleys that make West Coast surf so radically different from beach to beach. More to the point, he was scoring good waves at a rate several orders of magnitude higher than if he’d been navigating by moon cycles and rumor, like most surfers. “Nobody else knew anything,” Collins later told the 

, in a quietly boastful voice. “I’d get tons of waves and it was like voodoo.”

In 1984, a not-yet-launched startup called Surfline hired Collins to be their chief forecaster. He was 32, married, and raising a two-year-old son. Surfline was his first real job. The not-yet-launched company had moved quickly to take advantage of two new technological developments: Pacific Bell’s fee-based 900-prefix information lines (dozens of which had already been snapped up “dial-a-porn” services), and digitized answering system hardware that allowed hundreds of calls to connect at once—which meant no more busy signals. Surfline’s obvious choice for a phone number was 976-SURF.

For Surfline’s debut, in the spring of 1985, Collins gave a full week’s notice on a big, clean, early-season swell originating from well below the equator. Data from the South Pacific was much harder to come by than from the North Pacific, and this particular wave-generating storm, almost 6,000 miles to the south-southwest, was at a ridiculously long remove from Southern California. When it arrived exactly as Collins predicted, the early-adopters who’d risked a few quarters in toll calls and scored perfect overhead waves at Trestles, Newport, and Malibu called it a revelation. Other surf forecasting services were already in the game, but Surfline rocketed out in front—and never left. Collins’ wave-guru reputation, meanwhile, went national, then international.

Surfline’s arrival kicked over the embers of the still-smoldering debate about whether Southern California was a force for surf-world good or evil. The company was hailed as new and innovative. It was also reviled as yet another example of soul-draining West Coast surfing commercialism. The backlash against Surfline and the all other surf report services hit the sport about 15 minutes after Collins’ made his famous south swell prediction in the spring of 1985.

The two main complaints were familiar to anyone who’d been around during the early days of the surf leash. First, Surfline put more people in the water. Second, Surfline took hard-won advantages—wave knowledge and personal networks—and turned them into a commodity. Both points were valid. “Perfect waves belong to the kind of guys who know what dawn patrols are all about,” a 

 reader put it, “not the kooks who spend 55 cents on some lame, surf’s-bitchin, come-on-down phone report.”

A quieter charge, one that Collins himself acknowledged, was that Surfline reduced the sport’s mystery. Before, surfers were forced to rely on some measure of conviction and faith that the ocean would provide—the flat spell would end, the wind would turn. There were days and weeks of frustration and tail-chasing when the surf was down, and there were incredible moments of serendipity. The new Surfline-led era created a demarcation. Consumer-packaged wave science would never dislodge surfing from its front-row pew in what Tom Blake called “the blessed church of the open sky.” Then again, it wasn’t sentimental indulgence when surfers recalled the arrival of a new swell as being grander, stranger, and more rapturous for literally rolling in out of the blue.

On the other hand—doubling your wave count with a 55¢ phone call? Wasn’t that a miracle as well?

None of the anti-Surfline arguments reduced what very quickly became an insatiable interest in surf reporting and forecasting. All that changed was the medium. Ten years after Surfline launched—following brief detours into surf-faxing and automated “wave alert” pager services—the entire industry, led by Surfline, migrated to the internet and gave the sport a beachhead in the Information Age.

Nobody had any real idea how waves were created, much less when they were going to arrive. A 

 character named Lord Gallo, introduced as Malibu's “most educated” surfer, thought big surf was happening more often thanks to “all those H-bomb blasts” in the Pacific.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

I Predict Waves in Your Future

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