Hey All, Ben Aipa, boardmaker and power surfer for the ages, died last week from a long list of ailments including diabetes, heart issues, and dementia. He was 78. Derek Rielly and I emailed back and forth about Ben yesterday, and the first thing I wrote was: “Ben didn’t start surfing until he was 21 […]

Hey All, The Kevin Brennan Joint two weeks ago connects us almost magnetically to Cronulla’s Bobby Brown, as they are the Lennon and McCartney of Aussie surfing tragedy. That gorgeous 1967 aquamarine Brennan-Brown-Tallows sequence in Hot Generation is a high point for both surfers—as well as the beginning of the end. Brennan found drugs and never recovered. Brown […]

Hey All, I’m very much looking forward to the new women’s pro surfing doc Girls Can’t Surf, which drops in March and, judging by this excellent trailer, will not pull any punches. (“They were all such dumb-ass chauvinistic pigs,” Wendy Botha says, after a couple of pork-scented quotes from Gary Elkerton and Damien Hardman.) That said, I’m […]

Hey All, Kevin Brennan is the jagged diamond that at some point drops into every historian’s lotion-soft hands as he or she tills the fields of mid-1960s surfing. But unless you’re a pension-age Bondi local familiar with the Hep Pit and can tell Bluey Mayes from Red Ted, you likely know just three things about […]

Hey All, This flaccid right deltoid of mine won’t be feeling the sweet vaccine poke until April or May, so I’m looking for anything to lighten the mood—and this new clip of Mason Ho and Kelly Slater dancing all over Velzyland was my joyful early-Christmas present. Where to start? V-land itself, of course, is a […]

Hey All, Surfing went full Bill Cartwright last week. Mavericks on Tuesday was whatever you want to call it, I’ll accept anything from 25- to 75-feet, and fissioning onto that motherless bone orchard of a reef like Bikini Atoll on loop—and that was the least dramatic event of the week. That same day, Josh Moniz kept pace […]

Hey All, “Surfing’s Mount Rushmore” blipped on social media two weeks ago, with all the usual suspects nominated and debated. I swung in late with a vote for Gidget, but made a big show over complaining about the lack of criteria. “Surfing’s Mount Rushmore” is too vague. Duke Kahanamoku is a given, but the other three […]

Hey All, Greetings from our isolated Thanksgiving condo-weekend in tiny Glacier, Washington (pop. 211), hiking distance to Canada and 10 or so crow-flying miles to Mt. Baker. Hardcore Pacific Northwest ski country. I’ve been thinking back to when rich Uncle Irv flew me and my brother to Mammoth for the first time. I was 11, Chris was 9, and […]

Hey All, Looking at the week ahead, I am grateful for Tom Carroll’s continued smiling and ever-viral presence in the world of surf, and happy to note that this year his birthday (59) falls on Thanksgiving. Which means nothing to Tom, of course, because Aussies don’t celebrate Thanksgiving and because on Thursday he and brother […]

Hey All, The 2020 Encyclopedia of Surfing fundraiser begins now with a special Spinal Tap video kickoff, but if you want to skip ahead, click here to donate, and here to subscribe or send a gift sub. A brief update on where Encyclopedia of Surfing stands, and where it might go in 2021. We added just over […]

Hey All, Mike Purpus is our only blue-chip surfer better known for his accoutrements than his wave-riding. All you old salts know the Purp-approved checklist as well as I do: XXL puka-shell necklace, Tom Selleck mustache, Katin trunks year-round (snugly layered atop his fullsuit in winter), Aqualid, wide-brim Ladero hat. Mike strapped Velcro-soled “Claws” to his […]

Hey All, Surfing has a knack for fragging itself with embarrassment. Always has. Cheap canvas Duke Kahanamoku signature tennies. Soul surfing. Garrett McNamara. The Surf Ranch Pro. I may roll my eyes and complain a little, but none of these misdirected surf-world outgrowths really bother me, for a couple of reasons. First, gorgeous as it […]

Hey All, In 2007, as I began researching History of Surfing, I got an email from 1965 world champion Felipe Pomar, of Peru. I’ve known Felipe since the late ’80s when he revealed to the SURFER staff and the sport at large that Peruvian fishermen were riding waves 3,000 years ago on small and incredibly cool-looking dagger-shaped reed […]

Hey All, Sydney surf-industry pioneer Barry Bennett, 89, dropped through the ceiling of his Bennett Surfboards factory last month, broke his fall on an unfinished longboard, and apparently is going to be okay. It was an uncharacteristically spectacular move for Bennett, who has spent the better part of seven decades (not a typo) producing high-quality […]

Hey All, There’s a lot of surf fiction out there, short and long, and damned if I can recall a single passage that gets anywhere close to a bullseye in terms of actual wave-riding. Tim Winton’s Breath, maybe—the early chapters, before it all goes big-wave-life-or-death-psycho-sexual-triangle. But as a rule, you will sooner lasso a cat with […]

Hey All, In 1972, at age 12, I wanted to grow up and be Jeff Hakman or Jerry West, flip a coin. Instead, I grew up to be the editor of SURFER, which is one of those consolation prizes that turns out to be better than the thing you wanted in the first place. I was hired […]

Hey All, Hang Ten beachwear cofounder Duke Boyd died last week at age 85. I never met Duke, but from the photos you can tell that his former business partner was on the money when she called him a “handsome California surfer,” and by all accounts Boyd was a smart, creative, generous, good-humored man. His […]

Hey All, Jack Murphy, the handsome surfer-playboy jewel thief—that’s what Nora Ephron would have you think, anyway—died last week at age 83, from heart failure. Murphy was born in L.A. but belongs to Florida. That’s where he made his mark as a surfer, winning the ’62 Daytona Championships and briefly running Murf’s Surf Shop in Indialantic. […]

Hey All, Fire and plague and a dozen other gloom-inducing recent events have led me to George Freeth, just as surely as romantic heartbreak used to lead me to Otis Redding’s ballads. Sometimes you fight the sadness, other times you melt into it, and I’ve always viewed Freeth as our sport’s top-ranked melancholic—or possibly #2, […]

Hey All, Big waves put the wind right up me, big books do not, and to explain we must return to Venice Beach, 1972. The Breakwater that year kicked my prepubescent 7th-grade ass so hard one morning that Allen Sarlo—just three years older, but covered head to toe in muscle and hair—swam over to rescue […]

“A little ditty about Jack and Charmian. . . .” Hey All, In the Spring of 1907, writer Jack London, along with a crew of five, including his cheerful free-loving socialist wife Charmian, set forth out of San Francisco bound for Hawaii on the Snark, Jack’s leaky DIY yacht. A few hours out of port somebody asked “Who’s […]

Hey All, Remember that uptempo Joint a few weeks back where Bo Diddley, Henry Mancini, Chubby Checker and others jumped on the surf music bandwagon and, to one degree or another, rocked? Afterward, some of you sent me links to other kindred salty-sweet tracks, and sweetest by far was “Surfer Boy,” by the Supremes, which […]

Hey All, I don’t know if Australian Surfing Hall of Fame photographer-kneeboarder-whirling dervish Peter Crawford really was a genius, as his aging but enthusiastic supporters claim, but he for sure had a formidable talent for head-fuckery. Which was annoying as hell to anyone on the receiving end of a Crawford verbal barrage of jabs, japes, […]

Hey All, Rumble at the Ranch is GO, and today’s pizza-oven forecast in Lemoore—102 degrees, no wind to speak of—has me feeling like the biggest, proudest snowflake in all of surfing. Yes, I may tune into the Rumble now and then as the day passes. But it will be from two states away, in my […]

Hey All, The self-justifying shit we’ve said and done over the years to make surfing grander than it is, am I right? All the energy we’ve spent pulling our beautiful blue sport this way and that, stretching and tugging till we can rub it against the hem of religion or the Olympics or all manner […]