The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Production costs had gone up steadily through the decade. Cosmic Children, in 1970, cost $12,000; Morning of the Earth, released two years later, cost $20,000; and 1977’s Free Ride, the most expensive surf movie to that point, cost just over $70,000. Movies could still be made for much less, but Earth, Free Ride, and a few other high-end titles had raised the bar in terms of quality, and moviegoers were no longer as willing to put up with the old grindhouse-style surf flick. “Surfers are getting ripped-off by amateur filmmakers,” photographer Dan Merkel noted, sizing up the post–Free Ride movies. “Jerky panning, out-of-focus shots, poor color—you can only tolerate so much of it.”

  Meanwhile, record label legal departments had told filmmakers that the enterprisingly bootlegged soundtrack—a defining feature of the genre during the early 1970s, with Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Santana, and Neil Young all making huge, unknowing, free contributions to surf cinema—was over. Finally, the single-screen art-house theater, which had long been the surf moviemaker’s preferred venue, was itself a dying breed. Battered but upright, the surf movie made a wobbly entrance into the 1980s—only to get steamrolled, along with big-screen pornography, by the VCR.

  Video first came to the attention of surfers not as entertainment but as a self-help tool. In the early 1980s, world tour pros (and world tour hopefuls) arranged to have themselves taped while surfing and then watched the results with an eye toward correcting flaws in their performance. Nobody could then afford their own video equipment—even an inexpensive camera-playback system cost about $2,000—and there was a short boomlet of we-film-you services, where for $50 a “videographer” would drive to the appointed break and shoot a customer for two hours.

  Hollywood, meanwhile, got religion on the second-market profitability of what was already being called the “home video revolution,” and by 1984, thousands of pre-Blockbuster mom-and-pop video rental stores were loading their shelves with dueling pairs of Betamax and VHS titles. Surfing made its quiet entry to video that year, with Bruce Brown’s 1966 classic The Endless Summer, and a negligible 1982 effort from Santa Barbara called Off the Wall II. Brown’s movie was the first of its kind available at rental stores. Off the Wall II and another half dozen titles, each priced at $49.95, were soon available by mail-order through a Southern California startup called Surf Video Network. (All-Time Bells, a two-hour documentary of the 1981 Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach, was available in Australia just a few weeks after the contest finished, but it cost $69 and was introduced to a national surfing market that was still pretty much VCR-free.)

  More surf videos followed. Prices came down, and rentals were easy to find. Surfer ran an article in 1985 called “Has Video Killed the Surf Movie?” Surfing answered a few months later by noting that “the era of the surf movie sadly seems to be drawing to a close.” The handful of big-screen productions that followed—including 1990’s Surfers: the Movie, made by Free Ride creator Bill Delaney at a cost of $400,000—felt like encores to a past age.

  * * *

  Keeping pace with the larger video market, the number of new and reissued surf titles grew exponentially during the second half of the decade. Hollywood released its small collection of surf movies, including 1978’s box office dud Big Wednesday, which became surfing’s first and biggest video cult classic. “Video edition” surf magazines were produced. In 1984, Quiksilver made a for-sale promo video called The Performers, and other surf company marketing departments copied the idea right away. Next up was the first in a long series of Wave Warriors titles by Astrodeck, makers of a wildly successful peel-and-stick surfboard traction product.

  Continuing surf cinema’s one-man-show tradition, a small but growing number of independent filmmakers shot, edited, scored, and in some cases distributed their own work—at less than one-tenth the cost of a surf movie. Thirteen new titles were released in 1989 alone.

  Surfers, like gratified VCR owners everywhere, loved the convenience and economy of video. But it went beyond that. For a quick pre-surf adrenaline boost, nothing worked better than a two-minute hit of Filthy Habits, Surf Into Summer, or Wave Warriors III. VHS tapes, in fact, turned out to be the best instructional tool the sport had ever seen—using the rewind and slow-motion buttons, everybody, beginner to expert, could now dissect and diagnose the techniques of the world’s best surfers. When they weren’t in the water, Kelly Slater and the rest of the 1990s “new school” pros spent their grommethoods attached to their TV screens, watching Tom Curren, Mark Occhilupo, and Tom Carroll, until the pros’ moves were pretty much transferred by osmosis.

  Quality, for the most part, was no longer a surf cinema consideration. Bill Delaney, Greg MacGillivray, Alby Falzon—all of the sport’s ranking filmmakers from the 1970s either moved on with their careers or wanted nothing to do with video. For the most part, surf videos looked like short, bad, stripped-down surf movies. They were half as long (forty-five rather than ninety minutes) and followed the same format: brief segments strung together in no real order, each one backed with its own piece of music, but without any of the quickie comedy bits that had been a surf movie staple since the late-fifties. With a few exceptions, the soundtracks and narration were awful. Image quality wasn’t too bad, at first; nobody was yet using camcorders, which were big, heavy, and expensive, impossible to waterproof, lacked a slow-motion feature, and produced a flat, cheap-looking image. Videomakers instead shot in Super-8 or 16mm film, then transferred the film to videotape for editing. There was some loss of color and clarity, but not much, and they were miles better than the shot-on-tape videos that arrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s—surf cinema’s dreary low point.

  When the living room replaced the auditorium as the surf movie venue, the sport lost its best communal activity. But by this time, surfers in general were less concerned with self-validation. In 1959, it meant a lot to jam your way into an overheated shoulder-to-shoulder nighttime crowd of two hundred, a thousand, or even three thousand surfers, and make enough noise to alert the world to your presence—to holler your allegiance to a sport that the squares didn’t understand. By 1989, surf culture was everywhere, having blended into the larger culture, and less distinct for being so diffuse. Nonsurfers wore Quiksilver trunks and said “bro.” All the Animal House rowdyism that got surfers in trouble during the Eisenhower years—the squares loved that stuff now. There was no longer anything particularly liberating or statement-making about attending a surf movie, in other words. This particular culture war skirmish was over. Surfers won.

  Yet the sport was a poorer place for the surf movie’s downfall. Surfing looks incredible on the big screen. Surfers love to pile into an auditorium. Given the forces at work, it probably couldn’t have played out any other way, but the sport’s mideighties conversion from movie house to VCR nonetheless felt like a betrayal—for the sake of convenience, surfing had allowed itself to become several degrees less festive, less public, less out-and-about.

  Waves For Sale: Tavarua and the Surf Resort

  In the late 1970s, Java’s Grajagan became the first pay-to-play surf camp, and over the next decade prepackaged surf adventure caught on in a big way. By 1988, Sydney’s Surf Travel Company—the original surfing-only travel agency—listed nine destinations in its brochure, from Indonesia to Baja to the Philippines. The camps themselves were owned by American and Australian surfer-entrepreneurs, all of whom had to run the usual Third World gauntlet of wheedling, lobbying, and bribing before the necessary operating permits were issued. All of the camps, with one exception, were down-market in every possible way: from the price (an average of $75 a day, not counting airfare); to the bunkhouse or thatched-hut rooms; to the latrines, generator-produced electricity, and lack of medical services of any kind. Camp entertainment usually didn’t extend past a backgammon board, a deck of cards, and a moldering stack of paperbacks.

  Baja’s Isla Natividad was the roughest of all—a wind-blasted cinderblock squat in the middle of nothing but dirt, dust, rock, and cactus. It was accessed from Tijua
na by way of a battered single-engine Cessna. Natividad newcomers, surf journalist Sam George wrote, needed a day or two to get used to the “blue-bottle flies crawling into your nostrils, and the taste of water that’s been super-heated by the desert sun then cooled in hot plastic.” If the surf was up, nobody cared. That hot Natividad wind blew offshore all afternoon, every afternoon, and the long sandy beach near the camp, on the right day, pumped out a hundred perfect two-way tubes per hour.

  All by itself on the other end of the comfort scale was the Tavarua Island Resort in Fiji. It was described—usually with longing, sometimes with disdain—as surfing’s version of Club Med. A short boat ride from Viti Levu, Tavarua is a tiny pendant of a tropical island (a fifteen-minute beach walk takes you around the whole thing), bracketed by two excellent nearshore breaks. One mile to the northwest is a sprawling open-ocean wave zone known to the Fijians as Thunder Cloud Reef; surfers named it Cloudbreak, and Australia’s Surfing Life magazine would call it the best wave in the world, along with Pipeline.

  Santa Barbara’s Dave Clark, one of the first to surf Tavarua, spent the most of 1983 in Viti Levu putting together a sixty-six-year shared-revenue lease on Tavarua. Along with new business partner Scott Funk, also from Southern California, Clark wasted no time in building what he hoped would be a new kind of surf camp. Tavarua Island Resort opened in late 1983 with eight detached and private two-occupancy rooms. Just a few months later, Surfer ran a gushing Tavarua feature, with a cover shot of surf adventurer Kevin Naughton jumping gracefully from the side of a boat to an empty lineup, with a superb Cloudbreak left peeling off in the background.

  RESTAURANTS’ LINEUP, TAVARUA, WITH TAVARUA ISLAND RESORT IN THE FOREGROUND.

  “THE TRUTH HERE IS THAT A SMALL GROUP OF SURFERS HAVE BECOME UTTER IMPERIALISTS. THEY’VE COME, TAKEN OVER AND NOW RULE THEIR LITTLE ISLAND KINGDOM JUST LIKE ANY OF THE PATHETIC EUROPEAN CONQUERORS OF YORE.”

  —Derek Rielly, on the Tavarua Island Resort

  Tavarua lifted pay-to-play surf travel out of the dirt. At first, “resort” was a bit of a stretch, but “camp” was a nonstarter as far as Clark was concerned; the word, he said, “makes people think of outhouses and tents.” Tavarua was comfortable and clean, and improvements came steadily. By the end of the decade, all rooms had electrical outlets and a ceiling fan. There was a beach volleyball court, and guests were encouraged to use the resort’s fishing equipment. Meals were made fresh—heavy on the smoothies and fruit in the morning; mostly fish and mixed-vegetable dishes for dinner—and served in a beachfront restaurant-bar that looked out to the nearshore left, now known as Restaurants. The island was not only mosquito-free, but heart-shaped, and Tavarua Resort cleverly marketed itself as a place were a hardcore surfer could in good conscience bring a nonsurfing mate. Fijian dancers boated in from Viti Levu to entertain guests, and a local island chief oversaw the kava ceremony for new arrivals—all sat cross-legged in the common area, a coconut bilo filled with kava was passed from guest to guest, everybody chugged down their share, grimaced at the dirt-water flavor, then sat back in anticipation of a warm Valium-like buzz.

  Tavarua quickly passed Grajagan as the ultimate surf-retreat. The waves were more or less equal, but Tavarua included amenities and a setting that made it no contest: Grajagan’s claustrophobic mosquito-ridden jungle was something you put up with. “Tavarua,” on the other hand, as Australian surf journalist Tim Baker wrote after his first stay on the island, was “the world’s most satisfying surfing experience.” Customers agreed. From 1985 on, Tavarua Resort reservations had to be made months, even years, in advance.

  Detractors began circling immediately. The arguments were familiar: Tavarua violated surfing’s DIY tradition and undermined the “journey is the destination” travel ethic. Dave Clark and Scott Funk were smart to publicly introduce the Tavarua Resort by way of Kevin Naughton, a surf traveler with unimpeachable four-continent credentials. Naughton deftly parried the complaints by saying that he and travel partner Craig Peterson had “forged through the jungles and deserts of Africa, Central America, Mexico, and South America; lived like gypsies in Europe; and hopped cargo flights and mail boats to esoteric islands. What we usually discovered were the places not to go for good surf.” Here at Tavarua, Naughton happily spent a month in what he called a “Fiji wave garden . . . an idyllic paradise.”

  Dedicated surf travelers in the 1960s and 1970s had learned to embrace nonsurfing hardships while on the road. They had to, since a huge majority of the trip was made up of such experiences. With prepackaged travel, surfers now had a choice: more adventure or more waves? Lots of people were happy to skip the life-lessony travails to get on with wave-riding. And as Surfing magazine pointed out in its 1989 review of camps and resorts, there was no need for debate. Anyone was welcome to search out waves on their own and to savor all the detours and discoveries, contingencies and surprises along the way. Meanwhile, “the rest of us will be slipping into beachbreak barrels at Isla Natividad, or racing the long, reeling lefts off Tavarua—then we’ll paddle to shore and let someone else cook our meals.”

  * * *

  A second, thornier argument against camps and resorts focused on water-rights and exclusivity. Tavarua first capped the number of surfers at six—soon doubled to twelve, then twenty-four—so that visitors would get the most waves possible for their vacation dollar. Then in 1987, a group of Australian surfers motored into Cloudbreak from nearby Malololailai Island. Tavarua staff workers told the Aussies they were trespassing and ordered them to leave the water; after refusing, according to the Fiji Times, they were beaten up by Tavarua guests.

  The question of access only got more complicated. Fijians from another island, also hoping to ferry surf tourists to Cloudbreak, claimed the reef in question was theirs. The legal issue revolved around fishing rights and vague but constitutionally enshrined public-use laws. For a few weeks, Tavarua became a minor cause celebre after a group of native Fijian surfers were herded out of the Cloudbreak lineup to make room for resort visitors. None of the questions were clearly resolved, but there was an unsavory imperialist flavor to all of this. The Tavarua Resort meanwhile remained in good standing with the right government officials and continued to operate as if it had private use of the reef. The skirmishing continued at Cloudbreak for another few years, but non-resort surfers pretty much gave up on the break.

  A lot of people were disturbed by the idea that you could buy waves and kick other people out of the lineup. Issues of national sovereignty and public rights aside, it went against the sport’s most basic tenet—free surf. It broke faith with the sport’s own history: modern surfing is for the most part a lower-middle-class creation, built by people who depend on free admittance and cheap equipment. The sport worshipped its broke but resourceful legends: Duke Kahanamoku sailing the Pacific in his two-bit cardboard-lined suit, California’s unemployed Depression-era surfers eating like barefoot tycoons on lobster and abalone pulled from nearshore reefs, Dale Velzy in his ratty navy surplus cutoff shorts making boards with a bag of hand tools and a pair of sawhorses. The surfing pauper helped take Jan and Dean’s Surf City to number one: “And if my woody breaks down on me somewhere on the surf route, I’ll strap my board to my back and hitch a ride in my wetsuit.”

  Surfing was a great leveler. Rank and station counted for nothing when everybody was stripped down to a pair of trunks, and the skill that earned you credit in the water—and status on the beach—was gained only through a huge investment of time and effort. Wealth itself wasn’t the enemy. Surfing had plenty of rich supporters over the years—including Jack London, most Outrigger Canoe Club members, Lima’s aristocrat-surfers—many of whom, to one degree or another, had done the sport a good turn. But the pursuit of money came at the expense of days, weeks, and years spent in the surf—the true wealth metric, for most surfers.

  Tavarua Resort challenged surfing’s meritocracy. The Australians were the most passionate in making the case against exclusive surf breaks—their traditional
“fair go” creed didn’t square up against this kind of privilege—and for a short period it looked as if the court of opinion would come down strongly against the Tavarua enterprise. But it didn’t happen. Voices were raised against Tavarua specifically and against the commodification of surf breaks in general. These protests were followed by a loud silence—which suggested that most surfers found gated breaks acceptable.

  This was puzzling given that just a tiny fraction of surfers had been to Tavarua or any other “gated” resort. One explanation was that everyone had seen firsthand how the ethic of “free surf” led to lineups so jammed that nobody could get a wave to themselves. As the world’s top breaks became evermore crowded, limiting the number of visitors at a few places, like Tavarua, was seen not as an abuse of power but an act of preservation. Or as Tavarua Resort cofounder Scott Funk put it, “If this place was wide open, I think people would really miss us.” A more cynical explanation was that surfers, while happy to thumb their noses at mainstream middle-class values, were just as striving and upwardly mobile as anybody. So what if you were barred from Cloudbreak today. Next year, or in five years, or whenever, you’d have enough money socked away for a Tavarua vacation—and when that time came, the lineup damn well better be free and clear of outsiders.

  More breaks around the world would be roped off, but it was a slow process. As of 2010, of the roughly 150 surf camps and resorts worldwide, only a dozen or so are exclusionary. Still, the longer the idea is around, the more acceptable it becomes to the rank-and-file.

  “I have worked to build a stable marriage,” a Tavarua customer told Surfer magazine. “I have a mortgage and office overhead, life insurance and a 401(k) plan. In other words, I have a life, and due to my dedication to surfing, trips to Tavarua are part of it. So are trips to Baja and Mainland Mexico. Some are packaged, some are not. Like it or not, surf tours are now an established part of our surf culture. They are not for everyone, but who is to judge? The only person who can define what true surfing is for me is me.”