The Sunday Joint

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...

SUNDAY JOINT, 2-9-2025: THE 100-PROOF SERENITY OF LANCE CARSON

Hey All, Future surf historians, brain-surfing the 4D zettabyte edition of Encyclopedia of Surfing Archive, will at some point come across Lance Carson and marvel at the discovery. They will likely think Carson never made it south of Hermosa or north of Santa Barbara. They will also think he never went left. Heck, I'm not sure if Lance ever went left, and I know this stuff front and back off top ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 2-2-2025: HOW TO LOVE ANDY WARHOL'S SURF MOVIE WITHOUT ACTUALLY SEEING IT

Hey All, Andy Warhol and a handful of his brightest Superstars arrived in San Diego in May 1968 to make a film with the working title of "the surfing movie." It was a surfing movie the same way Lonesome Cowboys, Warhol's previous film, was a Western—basically not at all. But the film was indeed set front and center in the surf world. Warhol's crew rented a house at the south end of La Jolla's Mar...

SUNDAY JOINT, 1-27-2025: ZERO-PERCENT CONTAINMENT

Hey All, The last two Joints were meant to be on the Palisades Fire, but the fire kept growing and the bad news kept coming—not just the headlines but straight to my inbox, from people who live in or near the burn area; no deaths among them, but houses gone, sometimes multiple houses in the same family. Three days into the fire I watched a passenger-side-view YouTube post of a car driving slowly ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 1-19-2025: MIKE HYNSON TRIMS INTO THE GREAT HEREAFTER

Hey All, Mike Hynson died last week at 82, and somebody had to go first, Mike or Keith Richards; both have been outrunning the death pool odds since the 1970s. Hynson going first seems fair—he's six months older than Richards. Years ago, while I was writing a book on Ron Stoner, boardmaker Steve Kroll told me that Ron had style mostly because "he ran with the style guys," by which he meant Skip ...