Is Surfing Hip?

Lisa Andersen Surfs Better Than You

Killer Cute

Kelly Slater is Just Warming Up

Rebel for Hire

I Believe I Can Fly

A Monster in Half Moon Bay

Mark Foo's Last Ride

Open Throttle

Laird Means Lord

Tahitian Scream

A Webcam for Every Wave

Last Call for Print Media

Taylor Steele Likes it Rough

Searching for the Perfect Phrase

Hollywood Tries Again

Thirty is the New Twenty

Andy Irons' Poetic Fury

The Beast and Beyond

A Dance with the Past

Foam is Dead, Long Live Foam

Nature Gets a Makeover

Surf in a Box

The End of History

The Ride of Your Life

Laird Hamilton’s Millennium Wave, ridden on August 17, 2000, was the first real test of surfing’s Digital Age preparedness. Less than 48 hours after the event, photos of the ride, converted to low-res jpeg files, were attached to emails and sent to a handful of surf magazine editors. Within three or four days the images had landed in every surf-industry-related hard drive from Torquay to Tokyo. All identifying notes and remarks were removed from the image at some early point in the distribution chain, so the photos turned up on most computer screens unadorned; lots of recipients thought the whole thing was a well-crafted Photoshop hoax.

 won a bidding war for a video clip of Hamilton’s ride, which was immediately posted on its website. By the time 

 ran the Millennium Wave as a gatefold cover on the February 2001 issue, tens of thousands of internet-handy surf-world gawkers had already given themselves a headache from repeatedly watching a small, fuzzy, color-drained version on their PCs.

Surfers weren’t Digital Age early adopters, exactly, but they were ahead of the curve compared to other athletes. An incessant demand for surf media outpaced what magazines and videos could supply. All by itself, having a new outlet for photos, video clips, and news pulled a lot of surfers onto the web. But the real driving force—the thing that pushed a lot of surfers to become more computer-savvy than, say, volleyball players or hikers—was the medium’s suitability for wave reports and forecasting. Here, the internet didn’t simply replicate other surf media predecessors—it absolutely cleared the field. Two or three years into the new decade, virtually everything having to do with wave-tracking had shifted to the internet. It was just as futuristic and paradigm-smashing as tow surfing, but perfectly inverted. Creating and consuming internet wave information was nerd-driven, passive, and meaningful on a personal level to almost every surfer in the world.

In 1994, a San Diego County bodysurfer and code-jockey named Ron Britvich wrote a software program that automatically, six times an hour, uploaded a ten-second video snippet from a camera set up at a friend’s beachfront house in Carlsbad. The clips were posted on Britvich’s website, called Surf Net. Through Surf Net, the web-user could also link through to the National Weather Service and other relevant swell- and weather-related sites, which, at a painfully slow rate of speed, fill your computer screen with small-print columns of raw meteorological data—each page dense enough to send all but the most numbers-hardened surfer rushing back to the latest ten-second upload from Carlsbad. There was a teasing, hit-or-miss quality to the video clips; ten seconds could easily pass without a single wave breaking. But it was a start.

 had recently established its own dot-com beachhead, and in late 1994 the magazine published its first article about the internet. By “webbing” from site to site, 

 revealed, it might soon be possible to “instantly tap a live video feed [from] Kirra or Jeffreys Bay or Pipeline or Rincon.” Surfers would also be able to view computer-generated forecasting maps that would let them know days ahead of time where and when the surf would arrive. It all sounded “a little far-fetched,” the magazine admitted. But readers were advised that “for the cost of a personal computer and [an internet fee of] about $20 a month, you can already have a taste of these incredible possibilities.”

At first, surfers didn’t seem to care much. Surfline, the wildly popular Huntington-based wave report and forecasting service, went online in 1995, but initially the site was nothing more than a modem-channeled version of its 800-phone service. But things picked up two years later when Surfline and a few other similar companies put up the first 24-hour live-stream “surf cams.” Predictably, the surf-report wars from the 1980s flared back up. Critics mostly recycled old arguments—the new technology added to the crowds and made for a lazy surf-citizenry—and in a few places cameras were stolen or vandalized. The cameras were legal, aimed across public beaches toward public lineups, but to many surfers, even to those not particularly sympathetic to vandalism, these new computer-streamed portholes felt like an intrusion. The cameras were more or less the same devices used in banks, prisons, and 7-Elevens, and it was creepy seeing them on the beach. More than that, it was another dispiriting sign that wave-riding was being taken out of the wild and further domesticated.

Then again, how could you not look? One mouse click, and there was a live shot of Pipeline, or Malibu, or Bondi Beach. For a long time after cameras were introduced, the ability look at waves up and down the coast, across the continent, across entire oceans, felt like something very close to teleportation. Everybody, critics included, knew there was no turning back. And indeed, the attraction grew with each program upgrade, each improvement in download speed, each new generation of computers. This new technology quickly went from novel to essential. By the early 2000s, online cameras and reports had become an almost universal part of the surfing world.

Surfing got caught up in the same dot-com mania that swept across the United States at large during the turn of the century. Swell, Hardcloud, and Bluetorch, three California-based surfing megasites, together burned through $50 million in venture capital in 1999 and 2000. They raided surf magazine staffs, peeling off editors, designers, photographers, and management from both 

. They sponsored pro tour contests, developed boardsport spinoff sites, and bought a number of existing businesses, including Surfline. Each website hoped to become a “category killer.” Beyond that, nobody had much of a business plan.

All three sites were bright and flashy and layered with what everyone in the biz called “content.” Some of what was on there was totally appropriate to the medium—live contest feeds, user forums, breaking news. But much of what was posted was either throwaway, or redundant to what was being published in the magazines. All of it was glitchy. If you didn’t have the latest hardware and software and a fast connection, the sites either didn't work well or crashed altogether.

“This is a medium that’s still evolving,” a Hardcloud official admitted, not long after the site launched. “Nobody really knows where this is going.” The Big Three sites quickly found out. Onscreen ad space went unpurchased, customers browsed the affiliated “e-tail” stores but didn’t buy, and most pay-to-play features were ignored. All those dreamed-about six-figure stock offerings vanished into the ether. The surf sites weren’t alone in this, of course. When the inevitable dot-com meltdown arrived, much bigger and better-funded operations were gutted just as mercilessly as surf-themed sites. Hardcloud and Bluetorch both went bust during a two-week stretch in fall of 2000. Eight months later, Swell gave most of its entire site to Surfline. In their original form, none of the Big Three lasted more than a year.

To those involved, it felt like a wild ride. But when the smoke cleared, little actual damage had been done to any sector of the surf business. The millions of cinderized dot-com startup dollars had all come from outside investors, and while the surf industry went through a small downturn, along with the global economy, yet another surf boom was underway by the end of 2003.

Meanwhile, on the plus side, tens of thousands of surfers were now comfortable going online, and what was left after the shakeout was a new and vastly improved network of surf report and forecast services. Surfline was the big winner. In the early going, when venture capital was raining down by the bagful, nobody in the sport made better use of their good fortune than Surfline, as the company plowed it all back into better surf cams, improved data gathering and processing, and new graphics. CEO Sean Collins only improved his position as the great wave-predicting oracle: he was the “Alan Greenspan of surfing,” according to 

, who ranked him as the sport’s eighth-most powerful figure in 2002. Surfline had a small overhead, an in-demand product, and a loyal user base—500,000 visitors per month, as of 2002. It quickly became surfing’s model of online profitability, selling ads and charging a “premium membership” fee.

Surf cams, reports, and forecasts created a foundation for the surfer’s online experience. At this level, surfing became a shining example of no-messing-around online utility: the idea was to go, as quickly as possible, from surfing the internet for the latest and most pertinent wave info, to actual surfing. And if there was no surf? Well, there it became more like the rest of the online world, minus the porn. Hours could be killed downloading videos, building your “fantasy surfer" team, making vacation bookings, watching live world tour contest coverage, following surf blogs, and joining endlessly belligerent comment threads. Ten years after the meltdown, the Swell/Hardcloud/Bluetorch gang were looking less like dupes and more like visionaries.

For many, webcams trained on surf breaks were another dispiriting sign that the sport was being taken out of the wild and further domesticated. Then again, how could you not look? One click, and there was a live shot of Pipeline, or Malibu, or Bondi Beach. It almost felt like teleportation.

Chapter: 8

The Ride of Your Life

A Webcam for Every Wave

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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