The Sunday Joint

SUNDAY JOINT, 5-4-2025: "THERE ARE ONLY THREE SPORTS: BULLFIGHTING, MOTOR RACING, AND SURFING. THE REST ARE MERELY GAMES"

Great subject line for today's Joint, and all I did was steal Ernest Hemingway's favorite barstool quote and change one word. "Mountaineering" was his actual third and final sport, of course, not "surfing"—which makes sense because what Hemingway valued above all things, apart from a pitcher of daiquiris and an open tab, was the lurking specter of danger and death. Surfing was never going to fit t...

SUNDAY JOINT, 4-13-2025: RAISE A G&T TO PEDRO MARTINS DE LIMA

Hey All, Three people got back to me about Kathy LaCroix, mysterious star of last week's Joint. Rusty Miller checked in from Byron Bay, just minutes after the Joint posted, to say that he and Kathy "had some surfs together somewhere, sometime," and that she was "an amazing and intriguing person" and "a beautiful spirit." A lovely memory, if low on detail. Fair enough, Rusty and Kathy met at the 1...

SUNDAY JOINT, 4-6-2025: SEARCHING FOR KATHY LACROIX

Hey All, If I've learned anything from the first two Knives Out movies (next one due in Fall), it is that I prefer my detective mysteries with a twist of dry humor, and Daniel Craig is the Chubby Checker of dry sleuthing. If I've learned anything else from the first two Knives Out movies (both excellent but the sequel is funnier) it is that mystery begets mystery, which brings us to the business...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-30-2025: STEPPING OUT OVER THE LINE WITH CARL "TINKER" WEST

Hey All, Today we connect our two recent Sunday Joint shipwreck stories—Dominator at Lunada Bay, Amaryllis at West Palm Beach—and do so with a thundering rock soundtrack no less, so let's raise the Jolly Roger and give a warm piratical EOS welcome to Carl "Tinker" West. Boomers of a certain age (60-plus), gender (male), place (Jersey), and musical taste (Boss) will be familiar with West for two ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-23-2025: LAST CALL FOR SHANE HERRING

Hey All, Shane Herring of Australia died at home last week at age 53, on Saint Patrick's Day, not long after falling down the stairs in his West Tweed Head apartment. He went to bed that night with a headache and never woke up. Herring is remembered for two things, more or less equally. He outsurfed Kelly Slater to win the 1992 Coke contest, the second event of the season—both were 20-year-old so...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-16-2025: ANCHORS AWAY IN FLA

Hey All, The gallery of shipwrecks posted at the bottom of last week's SS Dominator Joint was a fraction, a splinter, of the surfing-adjacent wracks and ruins through history—and of course there will be lots more in years to come as our imminent grid-collapsing Age of Deindustrialization will soon have us building boats to sail the coast for barter and fish and hopefully surf. Shipwrecks won't be...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-9-2025: THE DOMINATOR - LUNADA BAY'S HEAVIEST LOCAL

Hey All, There are many remarkable books on these sagging faux-wood Ikea shelves behind me, but the one nearest and dearest to my heart is Surfing Guide to Southern California, by David Stern and Bill Cleary—a 1963 self-published gem of a guidebook, researched to a fare-thee-well but cut with humor and flair, that I still turn to for inspiration. Dave Sweet himself gave it to me when he was clear...

SUNDAY JOINT, 3-2-2025: IRONMAN SURFER DALE DOBSON HAS ADVANCED TO THE NEXT ROUND

Hey All, I spent last week out of town and returned Saturday evening to find out Dale Dobson of San Diego died on Friday, age 78, after a years-long period of failing mental and physical health—ironic in that Dale in his prime was among the fittest, most disciplined, least-vice-ridden surfers of his or any other generation. I only met Dobson a few times; we both competed in the 1982 Op Pro, and h...

SUNDAY JOINT, 2-23-2025: THE PEARL OF PALM BEACH

Hey All, Two quick comments on last week's Abu Dhabi wavepool Joint. Veteran surf writer Matt Walker—the astronaut's son, our twang-voiced Mark Twain of the Outer Banks—was first to the inbox last Monday and delivered this one-liner: "I find it funny that pools elevated skateboarding and sank surfing." When a mot that bon drops from the sky my impulse is to pocket it, wait a respectful amount of ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 2-16-2025: LOST IN THE DESERT, FOUND IN THE SEA

Hey All, Put together a list of every bad decision the WSL has ever made, flow that into the massive list of bad decisions made on behalf of surfing competition in general, flow that list into the cloud of every bad decision made throughout surf history, all the way back to randy Hawaiian royalty of yore doing the dirty after a surf and getting turned to stone—and at the very top of that assembla...