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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
Hey All, The last last three Joints are all offshoots from "Kaena Point: the Big-Wave Break that Got Away," which I noodled on for months and finally posted last week. Tarzan Smith began his hallucinatory 90-mile marathon Oahu–Kauai paddle from the tip of Kaena. Jim Neece staked and lost his big-wave career on the Kaena Challenge. Ace Cool, today's subject, also took up the Challenge, but eventua...
Hey All, "Kaena Point: the Big-Wave Break that Got Away" posted on EOS last week, and it is a big sprawling White Album of a page, illustrated to a fare thee well, with lots of embedded ripped-from-the-headlines source material. Kaena was a strange spot (and yes, I think of it in past tense; prove me wrong Kai Lenny!), ridden a couple of times, sort of, but not really. Never at anything close to ...
Hey All, Gene "Tarzan" Smith spent most of the Depression either in Hawaii or Southern California, surfing and lifeguarding. He was superhuman on a paddleboard, and in 1940 became the first to cross the 90-mile channel between Oahu and Kauai. But to those who knew him personally, friend and foe alike, Smith was best remembered as a bull-sized, bloody-knuckled, never-say-die street fighter. Surf h...
Hey All, Last week's Joint about upward-thrusting red lines and bulb-bursting finales got you guys all hotted up! Big finish for the 2024 Fundraiser. Massive. Thermometer destroyed, replaced by our back-up thermometer, which was also destroyed. So . . . middling-good fundraiser goes record-breaking in less than a week. How? The wordy answer is that EOS, 11-plus years into its life as a nonprofi...
Hey All, We're eight days into the 2024 EOS Fundraiser, and I am always raccoon-eyed and fretful and espresso-drenched at this point, and this year is no exception. We've done okay so far. Middling-good. If I'd followed through on my first bad idea of the morning and downloaded a cartoon clip-art thermometer in order to show where the fundraiser is right now, the red line would be maybe two-third...