Hottest of all was a new phone service called Surfline, located in Huntington Beach. For 55¢, Southern California surfers got a ninety-second recorded message on local wave conditions, and there was a lot of data in each recording: swell size, period, and angle; wave shape and consistency; wind and tide; and a short-range prediction. The original Surfline menu had twenty-two separate breaks between Ventura and Orange County; Santa Cruz and San Diego were soon added, and Florida was next. Most of the information came from a hired network of surfers, one for each break, who phoned Surfline HQ twice a day with their eyewitness reports. For another 55¢, you could key through to a second Surfline feature: a seventy-two-hour forecast, updated each evening and—as the company boasted in one of its first ads—“compiled with state-of-the-art computer technology.”
SURFLINE FORECASTER SEAN COLLINS.
Reliable wave and weather information has always been among the sport’s most valuable commodities. Every surfer filters surf data through their own matrix of needs, but the basic idea is to figure out where and when to surf while reducing, as much as possible, the ridiculous amount of time spent on the road hunting around. Nearly as important is keeping a step or two in front of the headless crowd.
Before Surfline, the whole thing was a difficult and balky do-it-yourself process. Information on current wave conditions was often gathered from a network of sources: a friend with a beachfront view, a local surf shop, whoever picked up the phone at the harbormaster’s office or the lifeguard headquarters. Reliability was all over the place. A wave-height estimate from a beachfront bro could be accurate to within six inches. Delivered by his kid sister, it could be off by six feet. Surf shop reports were especially suspect—the entire trade wasn’t known for customer service in general, and nobody wanted to be responsible for putting more warm bodies into their already-crowded local lineup. In the early seventies, lifeguard departments in a few heavily surfed regions began to offer taped call-in surf reports, but again there were problems. Just one call could be received at a time, and if a rumored swell was about to hit, you could dial until your index finger bled—this was rotary dialing; none of that sissy push-button stuff—and get nothing but a busy signal. When it came to lifeguard report accuracy, surfers were of two minds: half believed that wave-height information was exaggerated to discourage swimmers from getting in over their heads, and half believed the size was downplayed to keep out-of-towners away from the lineup. Meanwhile, radio surf reports had been around for years and were the best publicly available source—except you had to wait around to hear it. In Australia, a few Sydney-area Top 40 stations had been short broadcasting surf reports as far back as the midsixties, while FM rock stations in Los Angeles and Honolulu did the same starting in the midseventies.
“IT USED TO BE THAT A NEW SWELL WOULD HIT, AND IT WAS A DAY OR TWO BEFORE THE HORDES WOULD SHOW UP. NOW IF A SWELL’S EXPECTED ON TUESDAY, THE PARKING IS FULL AT DAYBREAK. THAT’S A LITTLE SAD.”
—Sean Collins
In very special cases, a report made its way to the surfer, not the other way around. Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler was holding a staff meeting in 1979 when an associate walked in, leaned over the boss’s shoulder, and discreetly placed a note facedown on the table. Chandler, a long-time member of the San Onofre Surf Club, turned the note over, adjourned the meeting, and walked out. An editor fished the note from the trash a few moments later. Two words: “Surf’s up.”
* * *
Technically speaking there isn’t much to a surf report—it’s just a simple real-time information relay. Surf forecasting and wave prediction, on the other hand, combine art and data, physics and prophesy. For surfers, it is an earth science that once seemed akin to magic.
Until the 1950s, nobody in the sport really understood how waves were created, much less when they were going to arrive. A Gidget character named Lord Gallo, introduced in the 1957 book as Malibu’s “most educated” surfer, was pretty sure that big surf was happening more often thanks to “all those H-bomb blasts” in the Pacific. Even today, a lot of surfers have a pagan-like belief that a full moon can break a flat spell (it can’t).
Wave forecasting didn’t come into its own as a study until World War II, when Allied commanders ordered that the D-Day amphibious landing at Normandy, for obvious reasons, be launched during to a low-surf window. In fact, on the advice of forecasters, Eisenhower delayed the invasion by twenty-four hours because the waves were too big. In the 1940s and 1950s, there was no swell-recording hardware. Wave height/period data sets were made by direct observation from ships, airplanes, piers, and harbors, then gathered, correlated, and fed into newly developed wave prediction models. After the war, the information was used mostly by shipping companies.
Forecasting took a giant leap forward in 1960, when NASA launched its first weather satellite. Here was a god’seye view. Meteorologists now had pressure-gradient isobaric charts that rendered each weather system as a kind of architectural line-drawing. Arranged in sequential order, the charts could define a storm by size, shape, depth, growth, route, route speed, temperature, and wind velocity—all the raw goods for surf forecasting.
Except it was more complicated even than that. There were a dozen or more skewing factors to swell creation and travel that meteorologists didn’t yet understand, any of which could throw a forecast out of whack. Organizers for the Makaha International surf contest, beginning in the late 1960s, were always in contact with the National Weather Bureau in the days leading up to the event, and the results weren’t so great. The predicted big surf often failed to materialize, or a nice double-overhead swell turned up completely out of the blue. “It will be some time before we can plan vacations or even days off according to surf forecasts,” Makaha official John Kelly glumly concluded in his 1965 book Surf and Sea.
Part of the problem was that meteorologists regarded wave forecasting, despite its importance to oceanic travel, as a kind of weather science backwater. Surfers were going to have to do it for themselves. Petersen’s Surfing magazine contributed with a 1969 featured called “Have Forecast, Then Travel,” which included a short but fluent section on swell formation and an illustrated sidebar titled “How to Read the Weather Map.” In 1977, The Weather Surfer: A Guide to Oceanography and Meteorology for the World’s Wave Hunters, a short, earnest, jargon-heavy paperback, was written by Florida surfer Vic Morris. By this time, the information sources had improved. Dozens of heavily equipped weather buoys were now deployed across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and both the terrestrial and supernal data streams were flowing into the 1970-founded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA, in turn, not only produced more accurate graphs, charts, and forecasts to news agencies, but it provided around-the-clock VHF-broadcast marine reports.
Among the Weather Surfer’s small but devoted readership was Sean Collins of Orange County—a red-haired junior college dropout who carefully banked his bartending tips and made wave-chasing quests up and down Baja’s west coast. Collins had picked up an interest in marine forecasting from his father, a navy navigator, but he was a self-taught meteorologist. He had a gift for tapping information sources on the fly—bumping down a dirt road somewhere in the middle of the Sonoran Desert during the early 1980s, he’d pull over at high noon, unpack a solar-powered fax machine, make a shortwave connection to the weather station in Christchurch, New Zealand, and wait as the latest South Pacific millibar chart made its agonizingly slow reveal from the bottom of the device. With the new information, he’d get back in the car and pick his break accordingly.
Most surfers in the 1970s were still making their predictions by augury. “We’d stare up at the sky,” California surf journalist Chris Mauro recalled, “and say to each other, ‘Oh, those look like south swell clouds.’” Collins was archiving storm charts, keeping records of laboratorial detail and organization, adding new data sources, and mapping out the bathymetric peaks and valleys that make West Coast surf so radically different from beach to beach. More to the point, he
was scoring good waves at a rate several orders of magnitude higher than if he’d been navigating by cloud formations and a full moon. “Nobody else knew anything,” Collins once told the New York Times, in a quietly boastful voice. “I’d just get tons of waves and it was like voodoo.”
In 1984, Surfline hired Collins to be their chief forecaster. He was thirty-two, married, and raising a two-year-old son. Surfline was his first real job. The company had moved quickly to take advantage of two new technological developments: Pacific Bell’s fee-based 900-prefix information lines (dozens of which had already been snapped up for “dial-a-porn” services), and digitized answering system hardware that allowed hundreds of calls to connect at once—no more busy signals. Surfline’s obvious choice for a phone number was 976-SURF.
For Surfline’s debut, in the spring of 1985, Collins gave a full week’s notice on a big, clean, early-season swell originating from well below the equator. Data from the South Pacific was harder to come by than from the North Pacific, and this particular wave-generating storm, almost six thousand miles to the south-southwest, was at a ridiculously long remove from Southern California. When it arrived exactly as Collins predicted, the early-adopters who’d risked a few quarters in toll calls and scored perfect overhead waves at Trestles, Newport, and Malibu called it a breakthrough. Despite competition from other forecasting services, Surfline rocketed out in front. Collins’ wave-guru reputation went national, then international.
* * *
Surfline’s arrival kicked over the embers of a still-smoldering debate about whether Southern California was a force for surf-world good or evil. The company was hailed as new and innovative. It was also reviled as yet another example of soul-draining West Coast commercialism. The backlash against Surfline and the all other surf report/forecast services hit the sport about fifteen minutes after Collins made his swell prediction in spring 1985.
The complaints were familiar to anyone who’d been around during the early days of the surf leash. First, Surfline put more people in the water. Second, Surfline took a hard-won advantage—wave knowledge and personal networks—and made it a commodity. Both points were valid. “Perfect waves belong to the kind of guys who know what dawn patrols are all about,” a Surfing reader put it, “not the kooks who spend 55 cents on some lame, surf’s-bitchin, come-on-down phone report.”
A quieter charge, one that Collins himself acknowledged, was that Surfline reduced the sport’s mystery. Before, surfers were forced to rely on some measure of conviction and faith that the ocean would provide—the flat spell would end, the wind would turn. There were days and weeks of frustration and tail-chasing when the surf was down, and there were incredible moments of serendipity. The new era created a before-and-after demarcation. While refined, consumer-packaged wave science would never remove surfing from its front-row pew in what Tom Blake called “the blessed church of the open sky,” it wasn’t sentimental indulgence when surfers recalled the arrival of a new swell as being grander, stranger, and more rapturous for literally rolling in out of the blue.
Still, doubling your wave count with a 55¢ phone call—wasn’t that a miracle as well?
None of the anti-Surfline arguments reduced what very quickly became an insatiable interest in surf reporting and forecasting. All that changed was the medium. Ten years after Surfline launched—following brief detours into surf-faxing and automated “wave alert” pager services—the entire industry, led by Surfline, migrated to the Internet, giving the sport a beachhead in the Information Age.
Size Matters: The Surf Press Bulks Up
Surf publishing was a nonstop growth industry throughout the 1980s, with increased ad revenue, new titles, bigger issues, more color. The trend was worldwide but most obvious in America. In the late 1970s, Surfer and Surfing had both gone monthly, and the average issue size was just over a hundred pages. By 1988, both magazines were producing copies at a Vogue-like two-hundred-plus pages, and circulation for each was about 110,000—more than double the size of their nearest rivals.
In Australia, Tracks and Surfing World were joined by Waves and Australia’s Surfing Life. Japan, South Africa, France, Brazil, Peru, New Zealand, and Spain each supported at least one surf magazine—all were essentially Surfer knockoffs. Surfing Life Japan cheerfully decorated its covers with English-translated blurbs like, “The Best Left Barrel that Accepts the Best Surfers Only,” and “Japanese Surfers on the North Shore: Go and Get.”
The cult of the surf photographer grew as well—a tradition going back twenty years to Ron Stoner’s short but brilliant Surfer career. Even with all the new jumbo-sized magazines, only twenty or so surf photographers worldwide were pulling down a middle-class-or-better wage. But money wasn’t really the point. It was the travel, the flexible schedule, and the endless hours of beach time. It was also the only glamour job in the sport, apart from being a pro surfer. Again, this was particularly true in America, where photographers like Jeff Divine, Dan Merkel, Warren Bolster, Don King, Steve Wilkings, Aaron Chang, Larry “Flame” Moore, Art Brewer, and Jeff Hornbaker were regularly featured in profiles of the same length and detail as those given to Gerry Lopez, Shaun Tomson, and Tom Curren. Chang’s 1988 Surfing profile included a hemispheric map of his travels from the previous year, a shot of the photographer himself jamming a cutback, and a Q&A that touched on Chang’s love life and a recent struggle with “psychological burnout.”
The French mags did the same with Sylvain Cazenave, their best surf photographer, while the Japanese feted Hiroshi Sato. The Aussies were the exception—although gifted Sydney-based photographers Hugh McLeod and Bruce Channon bought the venerable but down-at-heels Surfing World, gave it a smart design makeover, and transformed the magazine into something more like a luxe photography artbook than a surf publication.
Surf photography had branched out since the Stoner era. No sport in the world, in fact, was shot from so many angles. Surfers were photographed from underwater, from a low-flying helicopter, from the back of a Jet Ski running full-throttle just ahead of the wave, and from a wide-angle board-mounted camera operated from the beach by remote control. A British newcomer named Angus Chater attached a camera to the end of an eight-foot aluminum pole, which he hoisted up like an Iwo Jima flag-raiser while floating over the wave crest, shooting down on the rider with a trigger device welded into the pole’s base. Black-and-white photography made a comeback. Art Brewer, a longtime Surfer staffer, did portraiture work that was just a step or two behind Annie Leibovitz.
Water photography was overhauled. The waterhouse-covered camera—so heavy and cumbersome in the 1960s that the photographer had to ferry it into the channel atop his board—had slimmed down to a ten-pound unit that could be held like a lunchbox and taken into the heart of the impact zone. By 1984, a former Stanford University water polo player named Don King was shooting not just from the mouth of the tube as the surfer raced toward him, but flipper-kicking his way to the other side to capture the epiglottic view from the back of the tube, behind the surfer. On a good day at Pipeline or Backdoor in Hawaii, where most of era’s best surf photography took place, King and the rest of the water specialists worked their craft with the timing and precision of knife-throwers. They embedded themselves in the wave as it lifted vertically and then fanned out overhead, kept the camera trained on the surfer (a new feature called autofocus was a godsend to surf photographers), waited for the money shot (when the surfer was from six feet to six inches away), hit the shutter, and then burrowed into the wave’s interior before they were sucked into the whitewater mangle.
Professional surfers and photographers worked together often—and it was work, since everybody’s paycheck depended to one degree or another on a steady feed of magazine photos—and the whole operation became practically choreographed. It actually wasn’t quite as risky as it looked. King and the rest of the A-list photographers rarely got pitched over the falls, and could shoot an entire season without so much as brushing up against their subject. Cameras themselves we
re occasionally smashed and ruined. There were plenty of bumps and bruises. But no surf photographer died in action until 2005, when thirty-three-year-old Jon Mozo of Hawaii drowned after hitting the reef at Pipeline on what was by all accounts a middling six-foot day.
AARON CHANG, 1980.
Surf photography was given its mainstream benediction in 1985, when American Photographer ran a fourteen-page cover story on Aaron Chang from San Diego, California. Chang was the exotic-looking son of a Scottish mother and a Chinese father. In his American Photographer portrait he radiates mideighties surf-cool: turned-up shirt collar, moussed hair piled into a wavy black nest, a tripod-attached Nikon slung like an M-16 over his shoulder. Chang was the sport’s best all-arounder, equally skilled shooting from the water, the beach, and in the studio. And he knew how to give a quote. Crowds of photographers on the North Shore had turned the winter season into a “real maggot scene,” he said, and the low-paying surf magazine editors had turned his life into that of “an indentured servant.” This wasn’t exactly true—during the mideighties, Chang made about $50,000 a year, plus expenses.
Chang also said, with an attractive low-voiced sincerity, that when entering the ocean he strongly felt “the presence of God”—and by such rude-to-sacred means he did his part to uphold surfing’s reputation as something out of the ordinary.
“INSIDE LOOKING OUT.” PHOTOGRAPHER DON KING’S VIEW OF MARK LIDDELL, OFF-THE-WALL, 1984.
Video Kills the Surf Movie
For two decades, the surf movie was surfing’s own traveling medicine show, with filmmakers barnstorming their latest releases up and down the coast for loud, beery audiences, in what constituted the sport’s only type of nocturnal mass gathering. Up to fifteen full-length surf movies were produced annually during the genre’s first peak, in the early and midsixties, and a second peak followed ten years later. By the late 1970s, though, the genre hit the first in a terminal series of obstacles.
The History of Surfing Page 58
