A short and fairly meaningless piece of criticism........

[steve shearer]

On the latest issue of Surfing Mag from the US of A.( and specifically a piece jointly written by Chas Smith and Nick Carroll on the Pro surfing debuts of Owen Wright and Dusty Payne)

Which was in it's gestation when I met Carroll on the hill behind the Snapper arena, with his pen and paper in hand, and his jaw set firm in rebelling the Young Turks.
How surreal to read the piece almost 5 months later. 5 fcuking months!
Afghanistan has seen a failed surge, Obama has his health Care plan through , Australia has dispensed with a Prime minister with dizzying speed and brutality but somehow, down the Pipe a whole 5 months later comes this piece of journalism/writing from the Snapper Contest.

I mean, the whole thing has by now been endlessly dissected, with it's attendant modules and historical and sporting antecendents microscopically and publicly thrashed to the Nth degree looking for meaning.
And now 5 months later, arriving by ship I suspect, with trees chopped down and fossil fuels burnt so the inhabitants of the Antipodes can finally receive the Final Judgment on this epoch shattering event from the two finest minds straddling the Eras in surf writing, what do we get?
We get a complete non-story, thats what.
Both writers get absolutely zero material from their subjects.......Chas just gets an old fashioned stonewall....Carroll gets access but apart from some finely detailed observations can glean no psychological insight from Wright......
Sure Chas's uber-narcissism is funny sometimes, especially when shining a light on the hypocrisy of surfers...but mostly it's like any one trick pony. When you can see the punch coming it just becomes tedious and self congratulatory.

After reading it one question becomes blindingly obvious : Is there an editor for this rag? Because it must have been obvious very quickly that the story had shifted and the original premise was now meaningless.....
Why wasn't Carroll drafted to follow Parko and report on the fall-out from the Reynolds/Parko smackdown?

Irrelevant magazine journalism has a different tone now in the age of blogs and the internet. It has become background noise, barely worth reading.
Immoral?? Way too strong a word but certainly symbolic. Symbolic of the deep contempt that Mags have had for their readership since, oh, the 80"s as the Surf Industry slowly introduced the idea and the reality that the content of these mags was nothing more than thinly veiled advertorial whose sole purpose was to operate as de facto marketing spiel.
It's obvious now from comments on the Internet that this contempt is returned with spades.
In fact the credibility problem the surf industry faces can be traced back to this fact.

An argument now can not just be handed down from on high from one of these high Priests of the surf mags. It must be prosecuted in the public arena where the Public can comment and refute what is cant and trite advertorial.

[jimmy]

Great stuff Steve.. Was looking forward to the Carroll expose but don't think I'll bother now..

On the subject of Chas.. When Peely started the "time to start judging the journos thread" I asked a mate of mine what he thought of Chas and also suggested he check out the Outsider which I thought was excellent BTW.

When I asked him what he thought he said and I quote "Chas who I admire immensely, is in many ways an imitator of Hunter S Thompson. Shearer is a poor imitation of Chaz. The greatest irony of all Jimmy is that Chaz is better than Hunter while Shearer is immeasurably worse!"

[mical]

Immoral?? Way too strong a word but certainly symbolic. Symbolic of the deep contempt that Mags have had for their readership since, oh, the 80"s as the Surf Industry slowly introduced the idea and the reality that the content of these mags was nothing more than thinly veiled advertorial whose sole purpose was to operate as de facto marketing spiel.
It's obvious now from comments on the Internet that this contempt is returned with spades.
In fact the credibility problem the surf industry faces can be traced back to this fact.

An argument now can not just be handed down from on high from one of these high Priests of the surf mags. It must be prosecuted in the public arena where the Public can comment and refute what is cant and trite advertorial.

Please tell me you've not just realised this Shearer?

"Chas who I admire immensely, is in many ways an imitator of Hunter S Thompson. Shearer is a poor imitation of Chaz. The greatest irony of all Jimmy is that Chaz is better than Hunter while Shearer is immeasurably worse!"

Lol .. sorry Jimmy but fcuk me that's a stupid observation.

[jimmy]

^^^^^^^ I know Mical not my words.. Just thought it relevant to the topic..

Funny thing is that the guy is a well respected writer just not in surfing circles..

[oldman]

Chas is better than Hunter S. Thompson!

Jimmy, tell your mate he is in a club of 1, or maybe 2.

[jimmy]

Chas is better than Hunter S. Thompson!

Jimmy, tell your mate he is in a club of 1, or maybe 2.

Or just maybe all the guys at Stab!

[steve shearer]

Prolly right, but isn't every argument self-defeating when you get right down to it.

I meant no disrespect to Carroll or Chas either for that matter.
I enjoy Chas's blog writing but his efforts in print seem to fall flat..they just lack the urgency and cogency of his more immediate utterings, especially when he offers an incensed public the right of reply.
And Carrolls' final salvo in the great Bells War was right up there : it was demoralising reading it.

Just saying the landscape has changed.....

[Beanpole]

People read that stuff in surfing mags
Theyre just comic books. Its like the old-"I read Penthouse for the articles."

At best a race call. It would be like publishing the weekly league rundown in mag form
three months after the game.

[Nick Carroll]

What the hell.

OK since you're all such avid readers of surf mags, you will have read what I'm now about to dump on you: to wit, a few samples of yours truly's work published in Surfing magazine over the past few years.

The mags have already sold through so I'm not burning 'em by running it here.

You can make your own judgements over whether the work is "meaningless" in the context of surf culture and surf media generally.

Let's start with, hmm, Californian localism, from early 2006.

GOING UNDERGROUND

Along with Malibu, Tom Curren, and the gigantic surf industry, California’s long been renowned as the home of the world’s harshest localism. But this is 2005. Does localism still exist? Nick Carroll spends a week of December’s great surf testing the waters to find out.


“In this crowded world the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day, the perfect wave, and be alone with the surf and his thoughts.”
- John Severson



There’s a spacey, fairyland quality to the California coast on clear winter days, when the sea-fog gathers offshore and does odd refractive things to the light. At times on such days, it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t real … but one thing any surfer knows is that fog means cold fricken water.
Roaring up the 101 somewhere north of Goleta in the cold December sunrise, a couple faithful surfboards tucked behind the passenger seat, thick as hell wetsuit in the trunk, I’m wondering to myself: Why even take this assignment?? I could be in Hawaii, or at home in Australia, riding warmwater barrels, among friends.
But I feel like this is a must-do mission. Surfing’s changing, as it has to, changing its shape under the sheer weight of the modern Beginner Boom, and at such times you’ve got to record what you can of the culture…. And Localism IS a culture. It’s not pretty, the way we’ve made the ‘60s look pretty, for instance, with the Aloha shirts and surfboard collections and packaged nostalgia. Nonetheless, Localism – that tightening of a group grip around a surf spot, that flat hostility toward the newcomer, that curiously fearful sense of ownership – is a vital if utterly irrational part of how surfing’s core has seen itself, ever since the original growth of crowds, the first Beginner Boom in the 1960s and early ‘70s.
All the spots I wanted to visit had turned Localistic in that period, and if you examine the times, it’s easy to see why the Localism culture developed. Surfing in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was not the cakewalk it is today. Surfboards sucked – they didn’t do the work for you, the way a modern Thruster or epoxy longboard or retro Fish does. There were no surf camps, no forecasts, no leashes, no surf-friendly parents, no happy surfing girls, no surf schools with their smiling tribes of initiates balancing on super stable soft deck boards, ushered along by sturdy-looking instructors. No comfy wetsuits, either. None of it.
Surfing HURT back then …. it was male, it was tough, you paid the price of learning. And to many surfers who’d done the paying, it seemed only right that they alone should reap its rewards. Hell, I was one of ‘em – I knew.
On top of that, at least in California, resounded the American ideal of individualism – the dream of male retreat, so eloquently expressed by John in the quote above. Wasn’t this the root of many surfers’ beginnings in the 1970s – a desire to get away from Nixon, from Vietnam, from all the shit, to wall off from the world? Which is all great in theory, but how could it ever stand up to any kind of worldly change? The Beginner Boom of the Noughties is transfiguring the sport in ways we still haven’t fully grasped …and I couldn’t help wondering if Localism might yet become its victim.
So, here I am, flying along the 101 on a cold bright morning, psyching to expose myself to several of the hardest-core midwinter Local zones in the Golden State, for no reason other than to take their butt-cold social temperatures…. And, oh yeah, to surf.

-----------------------------

I’ve set myself certain rules for this assignment. I’ve made these rules so as to keep myself in the realm of any other surfer who might want to wander the California coast and surf anywhere he chose.
- I’ve gotta go by myself, or with one other person, no more, no photography.
- I can’t draw on any friendly local resources beforehand – pulling some sort of weight through connections would distort the circumstances too much.
- I’ve got to approach the sessions the way I would at any unfamiliar break, given many years of surfing experience – give other surfers plenty of room, but don’t betray your own right to figure out the break and ride the waves that come your way.
- I don’t have to offer any information about what I’m doing, but I do have to answer people’s questions if asked.
- I can ask non-local friends for information on the spot, and use other publicly available information – online, books etc.
- I can’t retaliate with violence of any kind, and will only report incidents to the cops if they involve serious or permanent damage to limb or possessions.
I truly hope I don’t have to call the cops.

HAZARD CANYON
On December 10, the day I arrive from Oz, the first real northwest swell of the year is predicted, so after a bit of consultation with the weather gods, I decide to visit Hazards.
It’s a solid drive from San Clemente, much of it in the dark up the 405, watching traffic begin to gather and clog toward Los Angeles – then just before Ventura, the freeway’s closed thanks to an accident. A real mess.
All along Ventura and Santa Barbara there’s swell lines sliding along the points, through that chocolatey morning water.
When I’d looked for information on Hazard Canyon, I’d found it mentioned on numerous surf-related websites – but the only site with an actual location map was a state parks guide, which explained how I could go on a walking tour of Montana Del Oro State Park down to Hazard Reef … “a longish walk down through some nice eucalypts”. I take the wrong exits and blunder around in Grover Beach before finally getting it right and heading down through farmland and broken hill country to Los Osos and the Mountains of Gold. The swell in Morro Bay is clearly big, and as soon as there’s a pull-over off the narrow park road, I stop and run down a path across the dunes to get a proper look. It’s like France on a big day, 12-foot lines closing out way out the back, then rolling and reforming in a mega-shorebreak. No humans to be seen except a honeymooning hiker couple off down the sand.
I keep driving and pulling over and running down the little coastal trails till I find two cars with boards in the back. Sure enough, the trail leads downhill into a eucalyptus grove, damp with the scent of wild thyme, and out onto a rock platform. Nobody is in sight. There’s big washy whitewaters foaming and breaking wide of what looks like a gnarly but well-shaped reef. This is Hazard’s, but there’s no-one out for the weirdest reason – too much swell!
A good wandering around reveals the nature of this reef – tilted sedimentary rock with a lava core. It’s got to be good on its day, but this isn’t it.
Vaguely peering further south through the sea-mist, I see a large left break and almost swear there’s a small figure dropping down it. Then a little flick of spray off the top which couldn’t have been just the wind – after all, it’s dead glass. I drive a bit further and run over to the cliff, and yep, there’s one guy out riding a large, mushy, heavy-breaking wave outside a small semi-cove. He sits a while, catches a flat faced wave, then is caught lengthily inside. I watch it carefully for about 10 minutes and consider joining him.
Further south again, a big left is breaking outside a long point. Just as I’m thinking, “This would be a SICK place for a jetski,” around this point comes … a jetski! The ski pulls up in the bay next to the left and watches for a while, but nobody gets off to ride and eventually the ski drives down into what looks like some sort of cove on the inside.
I run back and get changed to ride the big fat left; by the time I get back, the lone guy has gone in. It’s a trick getting out – jumping into a rip running out of the semi-cove – and once out it’s a frustrating surf; difficult to position, a wave that doesn’t really want you to ride it, and freezing bloody cold especially when you’ve gotta duckdive a big fat rolling whitewash.
After a while I take the wave’s hint and come in, get in my car and follow the road around to the long point. There’s a cove on the inside all right. A big bloke, wetsuited to within an inch of his life, is just jumping in to paddle out to the left. He strokes very slowly and the trip takes him about 20 minutes.
I sit and watch, beginning to get the feeling that this is what being a surfer on this part of the coast is like – you do a lot of lonely driving, and watching.
A rugged looking bloke pulls up next to me in a half-cab. Guys up here don’t drive the giant glossy 4WDs of Orange County: they’d burn too much gas. The guy stands and watches for a bit. Then another bloke – one of three or four hanging out a little further up the cliff line – comes down. The bloke’s fully geared up in a wetsuit with built in hood, boots, and a gnarled old Country Surfboards squaretail thruster (oddly enough shaped by Michael Anthony, a mate of mine from Bells Beach) that must’ve been nine feet if it was an inch.
“Seen any?” he asks the watching bloke. The watcher makes a non-commital noise. “Surf anywhere yet?”
“Ah, the Canyon this morning, but…”
“A little hectic though huh?”
The watcher says something I don’t catch. “Yeah,” says the surfer, “it’s a little wide … I think it’s the low tide. I’m gonna go out and have a look around anyway.” And he walks down to the beach, stretches, leashes up, and jumps into the shorebreak. He paddles out directly and quite strongly, so his wake cuts a path through a thick foam layer halfway out – like someone hacking his way through a forest.
Neither surfer has caught a wave by the time I split a half hour later. The rugged looking bloke has already left, after a nervy ten minutes of watching and drumming on his car hood.
Driving around, getting hammered by freezing closeouts, hour-long surfs without a wave … this coast must beat you senseless at times. Anyone who spends time hunting it has got my respect.

--------------------------

Two and a half hours after I leave Los Osos, I’m in the Rincon parking lot, not even bothering to check it, and I’ve just finished zipping up my suit when someone says, “Oh, no!” and I turn around to see Benji Weatherly and Shane Dorian. For God’s sake! I tell ‘em what I’ve been doing all day. “Yeah, we were there too,” says Benji. What?? It turns out they were the ones with the jetski. “We drove around for a while but didn’t get anything. Went past Hazard’s early, we wanted to have a look at it – but there were a couple of guys out and they yelled at us, waving, told us to fuck off! So we did.”
Rincon’s pumping. About 100 people out – well, it’s late in the day – and some really enjoyable waves. The mood is like some sort of party. Heaps of surfers – all kinds! Kids on longboards, old guys on shortboards, girls on double-enders, people videoing, dogs, exercise chicks, god knows what else.
And I note something I’ve seen before at other spots in California and overseas – despite the large numbers, there’s a surprising lack of bad vibe. People paddle on the shoulder but they don’t drop in if the rider’s gonna make it. And they even give each other waves on the Indicator takeoff, splitting sets on the basis of first come first served. This is the paradox of Localism: at a crowded spot, people learn to get along; otherwise, they hunker down and learn to hate.

-----------------------

NEWBREAK
Next day I get up a bit late – absolutely buggered after 12 hours driving on top of 13 hours flying – and see it’s a nice day again. At Salt Creek it’s about three feet and closing out without mercy; maybe 50 surfers out, mostly near the point. The tide’s dropping. Perfect afternoon for San Diego, for the right reef at the southern end of Sunset Cliffs called Newbreak.
This time I take someone else, my buddy Jeff. We’ve surfed together quite a bit at Lowers and while he’s not as fanatical as me, he can handle himself OK. He knows the rules.
Jeff’s keen at first while we’re driving down the I-5 but as we finally park down the far end of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, he starts complaining. “Man, I don’t want to walk down there,” he says, when I point down to where I think Newbreak must be. “I want to surf! Can’t we just go out the front?”
Despite a weird fogbank that’s rolled in all of a sudden, Sunset Cliffs is packed with surfers this afternoon – hundreds of cars right along the cliff-front. There’s the same sort of party atmosphere as at Rincon, although at one point a loud-talking guy with a longer shortboard comes back up on to the road, roaring about how someone’s “picked the wrong guy this time” and how he’s gonna “let him know who he’s dealing with”. A couple of other guys, seemingly his friends, are gathered around looking faintly embarrassed, trying to settle him down.
We get changed and make a blundering attempt to run along the clifftop, eventually climbing through some bushes and on to a clay track. A little pack of three young energetic guys are running along with us; turns out they’re from San Clemente too. But Jeff takes a dump break before we get down the slippery track to the beach, and once we’re on the sand, the other guys kind of fall back, paddling out to surf other reefs.
I keep walking and suddenly there I am right in front of this crevicy little reefbreak, about 15 guys out. One or two old guys standing under the cliff face, not looking super stoked. A young guy, not more than 22, comes jogging up the sand, and waves to the old guys; he’s carrying a small Fish, an actual real Fish, with big wood twin fins, and he’s not wearing a leash. He lies down and does some pretty rubbery stretching and paddles out. I follow him.
In the lineup there’s a lot of angular, stylish, self-conscious trimming and stalling going on. Waves are rearing up on an outer slab but as I soon discover, they’re not easy to pick, and if they don’t break they sag into a hole before jumping on the reef further in.

-----------------

I’m not supposed to go straight to the inside – part of the Rules -- but I can’t help myself. This is an alluring little bowly wave and I want to take off behind it. To compensate, I sit back and let some sets go by, watch the guys who catch ‘em. There’s two older blokes out there – one big and heavy with a moustache and a wetsuit hood, the other slighter and lean with a moustache and a wetsuit hood -- I know they’d have faded me if I’d taken straight off. There’s a kneerider with a very focused expression. There’s a couple of Asian kids who look competent and on the case. The young guy on the Fish is working it. The other ten or so surfers are hunting whatever they can find.
I catch a couple of waves and on the way out, after one of ‘em, a bloke says: “Do I know you?”
“We might have surfed together somewhere,” I venture, looking at him – a largish surfer with long hair and a moustache, like many old school San Diegans seem to wear.
Turns out this is Tom Curtis, or “TC” as he tells me, surfboard maker by trade. He paddles around Newbreak like he’s surfed here for many years. Talking with TC, about paddleboarding and other stuff, turns this surf into fun; it’s a reminder that even today, surfing still has a kind of family feeling, at least once you’ve paid your dues.
Late in the surf a big bloke on a blue shortboard comes out. (No longboards at Newbreak. Localized surf cultures, born in the early ‘70s, hate longboards with unequaled passion.) He looks a bit awkward, and paddles way outside to where the sets are trying and failing to break. You’re kidding, matey, I think, but then after a minute of waiting the guy catches a wave from where nobody’s managed all surf. Then he pulls three more in a row and actually gets a barrel. Localism’s good side – a surfer of normal ability, raised to something higher through the knowledge of his spot.
TC gives me a Newbreak rundown as we walk back out: “You know Steve Lis, this is the wave the Fish was made to surf, and all these guys now are trying to make Fish the way he used to make ‘em back in 1970 … but Steve doesn’t do them that way anymore. He’s evolved.”
Evolve, I think, that’s what surfers have to do now, you evolve or perish.

--------------------------

SILVERSTRAND
There’s a couple of slow swell days so I spend a bit of time friggin’ around in the mag offices and watching the storms. Wednesday’s looking good then Friday. On Wednesday at 4am I get back in the car and burn up the freeway toward Ventura and the infamous Silver Strand.
I dig how I don’t know what these places will be like!
This time I use a website called wannasurf.com to find my way there. Wannasurf doesn’t explain how to get to Silver Strand but it does list directions to Oxnard Shores. I follow these directions and find myself on a very long beach with seagrass on a low dune and some drawn out four foot lines turning to peaks and peeling down an outside bar. That amazing California morning light is just striking the tops of these waves. There’s no one out as far as I can see, north or south. Cripes! Didn’t expect it to be so beautiful.
What did I expect. Gnarly Mexican dudes with knives ripping off cars. A lineup choc-a-bloc with heavyfisted older guys snarling at intruders. It sorta didn’t jibe with the blokes I knew from the area, like Timmy Curran and the Malloys and Evan Slater; bloody good surfers, yep, but narky and violent? Hardly! One of the head locals has the kind of name any old school surfer would kill for: Jack Waterman. “Nick’s gonna surf with Jack Waterman!” chortled Evan in the mag office. Fuck! I hoped so.
But this isn’t Strand so I get back in the car and drive south trying to remember the distances on the little map I’d printed off some travel website the night before. South of the Ventura Harbor the neighborhood changes, takes on a slightly surly air, a bit like a tough-guy version of Newport Beach. Must be here.
A check reveals about a mile of beach between two jetties, solid wedgey barrels all the way up and down. Larger peaks at the north end, breaking further out. I figure that looks like where a Jack Waterman would ride. I decide to start there and ride down the length of the beach.
Six to eight guys out, four to five foot peaks wedging either way. Smell of diesel from a big dredging machine inside the harbor wall. This’d be a dead ringer for Newport, except for the waves – and the large black pipeline running the entire length of the beach. The pipeline makes a weird gurgling sound as it shunts tons of sand from the harbor to south of Silver Strand. Later a surfer I meet on the beach, Carter Slade, tells me the sand’s been building really good waves near the southern jetty: “Wait till Friday!” he says.

--------------------------

Back to the north end. I get a couple of waves and paddle near a grom. “Some fun lefts here!” he tells me. “Tide’s like six feet at 11am. Hope it doesn’t kill it.”
Four or five older guys sitting well out on fairly big boards, the seven foot plus gun range. They’re all staring out to sea, man-alone-with-his-thoughts style. Any of ‘em could be Jack Waterman by the look. I forget about Jack, and concentrate on catching the lefts, which are swinging and bowling really nicely toward the north corner. Sometimes a right goes back the other way.
After about an hour and a half of this I see an older bloke paddle out on a near-longboard. He’s just a salty-looking man. He catches a good right straight up and calls a guy off – the first call-off I’ve seen. Then he paddles back out and up to me.
“Is your name Aaron?” he asks. This bloke is graying blond with longish hair and a spacey sort of manner. While he doesn’t have a thousand-yard stare, it’s out there in the low hundreds.
“No,” I say politely, “why do you ask?”
“Have you been to Indo?”
“Heaps of times,” I tell him.
“I was there … on the boat, Adventure Komodo. With Peter McCabe … and one other guy!” McCabe! I flash on a mad trip with Peter 16 years ago in the Grajagan jungle, drinking arak and getting horribly pitted on a 10-foot Speedies day. Again, there’s that sense of the surfing family, a circle closing across oceans.
“Do you surf here much?” I ask.
“All the time, in winter,” he says. “But I just came off chemo. It’s a liver disease. I said I’d do this, get in the water and catch a wave. I’ve done it now! Done the impossible. Feels soooo good!”
It’d be a nice end to the segue if this was Jack Waterman. But he’s not – he’s just a classy older surfer, battling the odds. When he gets his next wave, I cheer him on.
A few more waves and I go in. What I don’t know at the time is that Jack Waterman has long since moved away, to Utah, and a couple of recent surf-rage convictions by the Ventura D.A.’s office has dampened the regional fisticuffs, perhaps forever. What I do know is my tires aren’t slashed and I don’t get hassled by any gnarly looking Mexican types. Instead I get to eat breakfast at the Jetty Surf Café. Roger the owner’s a surfer and the Denver Omelette’s a gem. Tell ‘em Surfing magazine sent you.

------------------------

LUNADA BAY
I don’t really want to go to Lunada Bay today; I don’t want to ruin the nice feeling of the Silver Strand session. But I drive there anyway because of all the spots, I want to surf this one more than anything.
Immediately I pull over and have a close look at Lunada Bay, I realize I can’t write about it in a surf magazine. It’s the most beautiful place in Southern California. Palos Verdes, rising behind the Bay, veritably reeks of wealth – or rather, exclusivity – in a way Laguna Beach, for instance, doesn’t. Long lawns cascade down to the quiet streets; eucalypts droop over the verges. In the midst of it all, Lunada Bay glows in the early afternoon light like some ineffable jewel.
No wonder the locals are protective. I don’t want anyone else to surf it either. In fact, I don’t want ANYBODY TO BE THERE AT ALL. I want it ALL to MYSELF!
I get my favorite longer board, a 6’8” AB six-channel, a wetsuit, a towel, and walk down the trail, making a bargain with myself – if I’m allowed to surf here unmolested, I’ll think up some excuse for the mag about why I couldn’t write about it. It was shitty. I didn’t surf. My grandmother died. The dog ate my notebook.
On the rocks down at the cliff base, a guy recognizes me, then puts his finger to his lips, grinning. A girl walks past with a board: “Did you have a good day?” I ask.
“Oh yes!” she answers.
It all feels mellow; I change into my wetsuit and paddle out.
Lunada Bay is a classic wave, behaving like small Todos Santos or large Angourie without the barrel. It stands up beautifully in a wedgey peak and bowls and sections down the line. “You’d pay $3000 to go on a trip and surf this,” one of the guys on the rocks had said, and he’s not far off the mark, despite the kelp along the rim.
There’s around 15 guys out, mostly older and experienced. I don’t go where the surfing instinct would take me – out to the north side of the peak. Instead, extra humble, I hang on the inner rim of the takeoff zone, catching leftovers. More than obeying the Rules.
Then I hear a shout from the rocks: “Nick Carroll! Fuck you!” I look around and see what I’d missed: a group of people inside a little sort of fortress on the tip of the point, with a shade half built over it. Somewhere up there is the voice that shouted.
As the surf goes on, I hear it again a few times: “Go in! Fuck you!”
A guy in the lineup says to me, “You’re not writing about this, are you?”
“I’m just here to have a surf,” I say, meaning it – I’m still entranced by this place, despite the yelling.
“’Cause we don’t want any of that. Camera crews, Billabong seaplanes … we just wanna surf.”
I begin to chuckle, thinking of the mad idea of the Billabong Clipper landing in the midst of all this. The guy looks at me suspiciously. “I really appreciate the chance to surf here,” I tell him.
Nothing mellows out. I stay deep on the rim, letting the crew catch waves. The shouts continue. I catch a small wave and ride it for a few yards and hear somebody say, “Whatever!” This time it’s somebody paddling out: dark haired, medium height, riding a Channel Islands. “What are you thinking?” he barks at me. “You’ve got your own spots, why don’t you go back to them? Think you can just come out to the peak just like that? We wait all year for waves and here you come expecting to catch ‘em! You know the deal!” More like that.
I count to ten, to make sure I don’t react, then say: “I’d really appreciate the chance to catch some waves here.” I truly mean it because I still don’t want to write about this. But the guy ruins it for me. “Go ride the inside! Why don’t you go back to your own spots?”
“They’re 7,000 miles away,” I say, with some effort. I’m sure I’ve seen this guy somewhere, but where?
“I’m gonna sit right on you! Do I have to sound everyone, every surf?” he asks another surfer rhetorically. “Burn that guy every wave!” And so on.
Another guy paddles out and says, “You get paid to go on surf trips and we wait all year for waves! And you want to come out and catch some! Have some CLASS!”
I try to ignore the sheer idiocy of this and say, “Look, I’m in California for a week, I’ve always wanted to surf here and never had the chance, I’m not taking anyone’s waves.” It’s starting to piss me off now. These are my fellow surfers for god’s sake! The guy feels a bit of this. “It probably wouldn’t be so bad,” he says, “but we wait all year for this, and it’s the first day of good surf.”
“Yeah, and you’re in the middle of Los Angeles,” I point out. That’s it, really, isn’t it. They’re in the middle of LA and pretending otherwise. They want the money without the messy humanity.
So I know I’m not welcome and I’ve always thought why surf where you’re not welcome, so I catch a little wave in. Going past a guy in the process who says, “You’ve caught enough waves now haven’t you?”
Near the top of the trail, I’m following a group of three young guys, they’ve pulled over to talk with a big bloke with no shirt on. “How was your session?” asks the big bloke.
“Well, I wasn’t welcome,” I reply.
“Yeah, it’s pretty localized,” he says. “I went to Australia once and got hassled, so…”
Yeah, sure you did. Lunada Bay is the most beautiful surf spot in Southern California, but it’s no good. Not for visitors, and not really for the locals either. Don’t go there. Leave it to the rich.

-------------------------

So there it is … Localism in the Golden State… Up north, the surf guards itself and has no need for Locals. At Newbreak they’d grown up, evolved; at Silverstrand they’d been tamed by the law of the land. At Lunada Bay they reign, yet to their own eternal discontent, like kings in purgatory.
Something in me says the trip is over. But there’s a swell due on Friday – the leftovers of the Eddie swell. This one is majorly telegraphed and it’s supposed to be bigger than last week. I suspect there isn’t a surfer in Southern California who hasn’t heard about this swell, so it’s only half surprising when Evan and I show up at Blacks at 6:20 am and find 30 or more cars in the dirt parking lot.
But the swell isn’t living up to its hype and most of the 120 or so surfers in the lineup are disappointed – paddling around looking for something that isn’t there. Sometimes there’s a good one but not often. One mid-30s guy is obviously very annoyed. “Friday peaking, yeah,” he mutters, half to himself. “Take a day off. Yeah!”
I flash – there must be a lot of puzzled employers out there this morning.
I surf Blacks a couple more times before leaving. There’s a lot of surfers in the water each time, but generally what I see is a lot of surfers enjoying themselves. In the end, I suspect this is what will break down the old Localism philosophy – most surfers these days know if the waves are good you can enjoy yourself, other blokes or not.
My last wave in California is a little right. It’s a fortunate wave because it bends the way Blacks lefts normally bend, and I fall into the barrel. It’s super clean and the water is clear. The rail slides a bit but it catches again, and I come out into the winter sun, stoked!

(Nick would like to thank all the surfers he saw and surfed with on this mission. Also thanks to Dave Lester at Quiksilver for the 4x3mm full suit. Saved my bloody life.)

[Nick Carroll]

A bit of contrast: a profile of Julian Wilson from 2008.

THE LUCKIEST SURFER ON EARTH
Seven days with Julian Wilson

We are hanging out in the baggage collection zone at Sydney’s domestic airport, waiting for Julian Wilson’s buddy Dusty Payne to show up on a flight from the Gold Coast, when a guy stands up from a nearby café table.
Just a random guy, sharing a joke with his two woman companions while he pays for his coffee. The guy relaxed, smiling, brimming with the self-confidence of someone who’s clearly about to depart on vacation. And perched on top of his head is a Quiksilver hat.
Like one of those semi military caps, with the brand name scrawled across the left side of the front rim.
Julian looks at the guy, briefly curious…and for a moment there, it’s indeed a curious flash…the guy smiling at his joke, and the 20-year-old Young Gun from Paradise, whose amazingly flawless life is being funded by the guy’s groovy little hat.

Julian Wilson is a very nice, well-brought-up, friendly, uncomplicated youngest child of a surfing family based at Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Julian has surfed since he was a baby and can ride pretty much any type of surfboard, long, short or in between, with a kind of grooved-in timing and accuracy that looks purely natural and instinctive, but is more likely the result of thousands of hours in the water. His two older brothers, Bart and Sebastian, are both talented surfers; Bart is Julian’s full time manager. His father Mick is a tradesman who these days surfs on weekends.
His mother Nola brings Julian to the airport near Noosa Heads, where we’ve planned to meet, and where Julian walks straight up and unassumingly introduces himself. “Nice to meet ya,” he says.
Julian is kind of almost startlingly good looking, in a young Brad Pitt kind of way: unblemished tan, hazel eyes, turned up nose, streaked blond hair.
Nola gives an immediate impression of strength: strong handshake, a penetrating gaze that studies things and people quite carefully without imposing itself.
“It was a perfect place for them to grow up,” she says, of Noosa. “We’d go down to first point in the mornings with the kids and other families and they’d go out and surf all day. Come in, swap boards, go back out, come in, grab another one. And it’s all inside that bay…so protected. Even when the open beaches were wild and windy, inside First Point it’s always smooth. There’s nowhere like it.”
Nola is right. Noosa IS different. Physically it’s beautiful, with a chain of pointbreaks – Granite Bay, Ti-Tree, Johnsons – leading down to the quiet First Point. It’s a lot classier than most Australian beach towns: no Coolie high-rise overwhelm, no Superbank hype job. It’s also entirely sheltered from the wild open ocean. The cyclones that flare off this subtropical coast each summer may smash all the nearby coastlines, but Noosa just gets offshore winds and surf.

The plan is to fly to Sydney, hook up with Dusty, Jordy Smith, Tonino Benson and a camera crew and go wandering around the coast, looking for waves. But Dusty’s plane is three hours late. While we wait for Dusty in the Sydney airport baggage collection area, Julian remains fairly calm. He reacts to my apparent agitation in an interesting way; he tries to calm me down. “Don’t worry,” he says, “he’ll be here soon, we’ll be on our way.” He even offers to drive on the four-hour trip up the coast.
In the morning we surf a little beachbreak. It’s small but fun, and I watch Julian surf his shortboard for a while, carving and busting small airs on the inside. Then he borrows a longboard from someone in the lineup, and catches six or seven little walls, drop-kneeing and hanging five, switching from 6’0” to 9’0” without a blink.
We drive down through bush and sand tracks, looking for more surf. Julian is in the back of the car with hyperactive Jordy and cheerful Dusty. He doesn’t try to take the lead in the situation, just lets ‘em fire off, and weighs in with a dry remark every now and then.
Actually Julian is busy listening to the car, which is making a funny noise at the back end.
Dusty’s semi taking the mickey out of Jordy, Jordy’s firing back, and Julian is listening to the car.
They talk about education. Jordy went to Durban Boys School – shaved heads, ties, jackets, 7am to 4pm, and no girls allowed, which kind of creeps Dusty out: “Learning to socialize, isn’t that the whole POINT?” he groans.
Dusty’s theory is that as long as you can spell, write, and do basic math, then school’s done its job.
Julian sits with head down and to one side, he’s listening, but not entering into the conversation. But eventually he’s asked if he finished school. “Ahhh,” he says, starting to say something, and smiles. “Not very much.”

On another remote beach, sand-parked in a 4 wd, Julian and Dusty play a game of tic-tac-toe on a piece of wax.
“It’s noughts-and-crosses,” says Julian.
“It’s tic-tac-toe,” Dusty chides him.
“Why’s it called that when it’s made up of noughts and crosses?” Julian asks him.
“Look, it’s tic-tac-toe, ok? Tic-tac-toe. That’s the name.”
They carve away in the wax with their fingernails while the perfect little three foot beachbreak forms and falls 50 yards away.
Then suddenly: “I got ya!” It’s Julian.
“No you didn’t!” says Dusty.
He can’t believe it, but in fact Dusty has just lost a game of tic tac toe to Julian.
“Damn!” he yowls. “You didn’t even finish school!”
“Yeah,” says Julian lazily, “but I beat you at noughts and crosses.”

Julian is kind of a cipher in that way. He is actually quite hard to read. He’s really neutral, but straight to the point. He doesn’t waste time engaging with people for the sake of it. But when they engage with him, he’s perfectly friendly and able to put them at ease. At a local pizza joint an attractive teenage girl is working out back on the dishes. She glimpses Julian through the kitchen hatch and immediately nudges her friend, smiling and blushing. She’s clearly recognized the superkid of Young Guns 3, and after five minutes or so, she can’t help it and comes out to Julian’s table to introduce herself. He smiles and nods, responds to her questions; she’s happy and walks off back to the job. He doesn’t look bugged by the intrusion but neither does he try to put any moves on her, or impress in any way.
Maybe Julian uses his good looks on the girls, but I never see it. A lot of the time he deliberately keeps a damper on it, somehow …keeping his head down, keeping quiet.

I pay for Julian’s pizza one evening, and he’s like, “I’ve only got a $50, I’ll pay you back.”
I decide to pay attention to this – see how long it takes. Two night later at dinner, I pay again. “Hey, I owe you $20 from last time,” Julian says, and forks over that $20 – but not the $20 from tonight’s dinner.
Ha ha, I think, this could go on for a while, … but it doesn’t, ‘cause next day, without being asked, Julian buys me lunch. He settles the debt on his terms.

Another day we visit a long zippy left. It looks great, but Julian and Dusty won’t go out. They watch for two hours, while Jordy and Tonino surf and Julian keeps the morning sun off with a towel, wishing Jordy back in after every wave.
They are a hell of a contrast: Jordy out there as long as possible every surf, trying a crazy move almost every turn and falling eight times out of ten, pursuing some superhuman performance goal only he currently perceives – and Julian, surfing within himself, just playing, really, and refusing to get his head out of line about anything as easy as SURFING, for christ’s sake.
“Jordy’s like a shark,” muses Julian, mildly amused, watching as Jordy prowls the shorebreak, looking for a last ride, then finding one and exploding on it with five of the quickest turns you’ll ever see. “He’s just a big angry South African.”
Jordy’s Dad, Graham, is with us, piloting his kid and entourage around in a large black 4WD. “Jordy’s only surfing like that because Julian’s here watching,” Graham says.
Julian’s Dad, Mick, is back at home in Noosa. Mick is a tiler by trade. One of Julian’s best mates is also a tiler, but Julian can’t imagine what he’d be doing if he wasn’t surfing for a living. He used to be into dirt bikes, buying ‘em with his surfing sponsorship money, until a minor crash and head bump made him realize what was at stake. He still thinks about getting into the bikes again down the line somewhere.
Julian has a Motorola Razr 2 cellphone and a Macbook, the black one with the 13” screen and the faster chip, and a Toyoto HiLux that he’s thinking about selling soon because, as he puts it: “The half cabin won’t carry a board bag. It’s not long enough.”
He likes the TV show “Heroes” and has a wide range of musical tastes. He doesn’t read books, so he’s not the world’s most literate kid. “How do you spell ‘tough’?” he asks Dusty one day. “T-o-u-g-h,” Dusty tells him, twice. A dubious silence issues forth from Julian; you can tell he’s thinking, kinda stupid way to spell a word.

Jordy is the trip frother, for sure, but in the end Julian tops him.
It’s a day on the long left, slightly bigger, and Jordy’s well up the line picking off sets. Julian and Dusty are sitting further down, frustrated by the otherwise perfect wave’s refusal to fully barrel. Dusty’s swearing he’ll never surf this gay wave again.
Then a nice wedgey peak comes to Julian … he takes it, comes off the bottom, sees photographer Billy Morris in position off the shoulder, and boom! Pulls a full flip, almost right over Billy’s head. By far the move of the trip. “It’s the first flip I’ve done,” Julian says, almost shyly.

For a while there Julian was a freak: the Golden Child, an almost laughably perfect example of the blond headed grommet supersurfer. Australian surfing hadn’t seen anyone who could win national championships on longboards and shortboards, who could hang ten and bust air; in this regard Julian is still one-of-a-kind.
Billy Morris did a surf trip with him to Stradbroke Island when Julian was 10. Morris says he was just dumbfounded by how heavily Julian ripped – at age 10! “I think he has freaked out a few times because of all the attention,” says Bill. “He went to his Mum and told her ‘look, I can’t deal with this, I can’t cope with it’.”
I call Nola, ask her about this, and she knows what Billy meant. “I think the basis of it is that Julian doesn’t have an ego. I don’t think he ever looked in the mirror till he was 17 years old.”
She then tells me some most interesting stuff. “He got a lot of attention when he was young. I sent a pic of him to a women’s magazine, just on impulse. It was a competition for a fashionable boot maker. He ended up at a big event in Melbourne, very glitzy. The prize was a year’s contract, shooting catalogs and ads and so forth. Julian won it.”
How old was he? “Julian was six years old.”
Whoa.
“He didn’t seem to notice,” she continues, “he was just riding his skateboard around while everyone else was making a fuss.”
The contract lasted four years, not one. Nola thinks over time that her youngest son learned that “being in front of the camera was a means to something special. He didn’t like the photo shoots, but he got paid, so he could buy a new skateboard.”
But at the same time, she says, they made sure he stayed anchored in the family environment. “His wellbeing always came before the opportunity. And if you knew Julian’s Dad, he kind of always kept everyone’s feet on the ground… Our whole aim was to keep him a kid as long as we could. And because he feels so safe, so content, he never needed or wanted to be anything other than what he was.”
It’s an unusual mix: the Golden Child who the camera loves, who was appearing in fashion catalogs at six and blowing minds in the surf at 10, who’s also held in the protective cradle of Noosa and a close-knit family.
Maybe this has something to do with why Julian seems to shrug the pressure so well. For instance, he’s the first Australian superkid in history who isn’t being hounded by the stressful label of Future World Professional Surfing Champion – a label that’s haunted Aussie kids from Nat Young to Mick Fanning. For some reason, nobody’s tagging him.
I start to wonder if Julian is the luckiest surfer in the world.

Julian and Dusty are going to Bali after this, for nearly three weeks, then to Newcastle for the WQS event, then to Margaret River for the WQS there. One evening Julian gets a call from the Bali-based photographer Jason Childs, who tells him that Indonesia’s about to get a grand season-opening swell, a real cracker, straight from the gut of the Southern Ocean. “Friday?” says Julian. “Are we gonna be there on Friday?”
That he isn’t sure of this surprises me because I have watched Nola walk through his flight itinerary. Back in the Sunshine Coast airport, she’d dug it out of his travel wallet and put it in front of him, showing him exactly when his flight would leave Sydney for Bali, and when he was due to return.
But then I remember, Julian is only 20 years of age and he’s on the travel schedule of a 35-year-old CEO-in-waiting.
Dusty gets a phone call, talks and listens for a while, it’s his manager, Blair Marlin. “Hey,” he tells Julian, “I’m on another boat trip.”
“When?”
“Right … after … Margarets. Like Bruce and (Mitch) Coleborn. You could come too. Blair said anyone else who was gonna contribute …”
Dusty leaves the idea hanging in mid-air. Julian starts thinking about the next three months. “Man, he sighs, “this year’s already sooo busy.”

One evening we sit down and do the obligatory taped interview thing, and Julian switches on. Pays full attention. Answers intelligently. He sees Kelly Slater as the ultimate example of excellence in surfing, and thinks Dane Reynolds is pretty much the best in the world right at this moment. He knows he’s had an unusual surf upbringing by his country’s standards, yet he’s always considered it a strength and intends to work with it that way.
He talks about a man named Matt Hayden, a professional sportsman quite famous in Australia, who’s a family friend and clearly a role model of sorts.
Of his surfing goals, he says, he isn’t rushing anything. “I do have a desire to win,” he says, “deep down there I do. And I would like to have a crack at a world title, down the track.”
At first, I’d thought, there’s no way he has a shot. Because to be world champion, 99.9% of the time, requires a disturbance within the individual – some sort of tweak of the equilibrium that causes a surfer to spin slightly off the emotional axis, and to try to claw his way through by winning and winning, and winning some more. And Julian is truly the least disturbed young surf star I’ve met in many, many years. Aside from the whole Golden Child aura and the super ridiculously high degree of surfing talent, he’s entirely, functionally normal.
Then I think for Julian Wilson, it really isn’t going to matter. He truly is one of a kind. He can cruise and work on a competitive act if he chooses, meantime pulling a Sushi Roll or flip for the cameras with a quick exertion of his natural skills every now and then, and let it come together at his own pace – or not.
He’s 20 years old! He’s from Noosa! And as long as he’s busting those flips, and guys in airports are buying those hats, he’s got it made.

[Nick Carroll]

A rather cynical essay from late 07.

MODERN TIMES
How the surf culture is changing faster than you think. And how it may be heading for a fall … of a kind. By Nick Carroll.


We all know surfing’s wonderful … the best thing you can do on the planet’s surface and very possibly beyond … but I gotta say, lately, I’ve begun to wonder if it’s just gone weird on us.

These modern times in which we find ourselves! Think of it! Imagine you’d slept through the first few years of the century. Waking today, you’d find over a thousand surf schools at work around the globe, churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates every year, from San Clemente to the Canary Islands. Half a million – in other words, almost half – of the world’s annual supply of surfboards are being made in Thailand, Taiwan, and mainland China, and the old standard surfboard is now referred to almost offhand as “PU”. Laws have been passed and people prosecuted in several nations over violent actions at surf spots. Mainstream movies and TV shows based on surfing are almost ho-hum, large branded surf shops can be found in Manhattan and Paris, and with a few clicks and an appropriate credit card, you can book a week at Lance’s Right, Mentawais, Sumatra, in air conditioned luxury.

If you’d tried that before you’d gone to sleep back in, say, 1999, you’d have ended up with malaria.

Amazing!

But there’s another face to these shiny surfing times, one I crashed into on a recent visit to Australia’s original home of surf culture, Bondi Beach. Bondi’s kind of a Huntington gig – a semi-legendary urban beachbreak zone – and I hadn’t been there in years…but what I saw was like a scene out of a surfing morality play. Once a classic, filthy haunt of some of Australia’s best surfers, where old school heroes like Cheyne Horan, Richard Cram and Joe Engel ruined everything in sight and the local boardrider’s club was called In The Nude, Bondi is now a backpacker DMZ, littered with endless surf shop board racks full of popped-out “funboards” and Rent-A-Slugs being grafted off the owners by cheeseclothed dreadlocked wannabes from Holland. Surf schools run 24/7, churning out streams of eager beginners who leave the schools only to run each other over first time out, or almost instantly be sucked out in a rip and rescued by the long suffering lifeguard crew.

Meanwhile, up the street a ways, at a “retro” surfboard store, yuppie half-men pay $800 for reconditioned ‘70s single fins so as to hang ‘em in their apartments and convince themselves they’re Core.

Who isn’t a surfer these days, one asks? And along with it, you gotta ask the opposite: WHO IS? Has surfing finally done what the old hippies used to warn us it’d do, and died a whimpering death from Overpopularity?


A couple weeks ago, a guy called Mark e-mailed me. Mark is a 41-year-old British immigrant, newly arrived in Australia with wife and two pre-teen kids, and just moved into a house on the northern beaches of Sydney, not far from mine. “We’re taking up surfing as a family,” he informed me, “and I’d like you to write a really good guide to all the local beaches – just for people like us. Tell us all about the best surf spots, which ones are best to surf at what times of year.... Ideally this information would be available on the Internet, but I can only find this” (attached was a wannasurf.com map of the northern beaches, featuring a bunch of mis-named local spots). “I think you seem like the right person to write this.”

I thought hard for a while about Mark’s request, and eventually decided to take it seriously. Drawing down on all I’d learned about these beaches in half a lifetime’s surfing, I wrote him back. I explained the local swells, winds and tides, and how knowledge about surf conditions is best gained through long-term personal observation. How one of the great joys of surfing is how it gives you permission just to stand there and gaze at the ocean for hours, trying to figure out every mood of a spot. That there were spots just right for learning, and other spots I’d suggest he and his family avoid, unless they wanted to drown or be savagely ridiculed by packs of 20-year-old crazies, and that it would be largely up to him to navigate between the two. That the beaches he’d decided to live on have a century-long surfing history, how that history has built up through generations of great surfers both famous and unknown, and how it exists on every good day of surf right there in the lineups of these beaches, where you can see skills and behaviour patterns developed over all those 100 years...

In short, that this was not something to rush, but to take time with and deal with on its own terms....

…and he e’ed back saying in effect, thanks for my time, but he still wanted it all via instant access on a website somewhere.


I kind of enjoyed the exchange, because it’s a reminder of how swiftly the surfing “culture” is changing. A culture once governed from the top through superstition, tribalism, localism, and awe of the ocean and the magical godlike powers of the best surfers and boardmakers, is shifting to a culture governed from the beginner to intermediate layers, through the democratic yet somewhat unmagical power of Money.

This phenomenon has a fantastic name, and I damn well wish I’d coined it, but the glory belongs to Dave Parmenter, who stuck a pin clean through it in a recent Surfer’s Journal article on the rise of epoxy molded surfboards. He called it the “Kookocracy”.

The Kookocracy is a direct result of the explosion in surfing numbers in the past decade, the Beginner Boom, and how it’s redefined the culture and business of surfing – re-made it, in fact, to fit the needs of this entirely new type of surfer.

Being part of this Beginner Boom meant starting a surfing life in a way never before experienced by any generation of surfers. Most of all, through the surf schools, it meant a soft introduction, an easy way through the first excruciating paddle-out that’d have baffled surfers of other times – surfers of the 1970s perhaps, or the early ‘90s, whose surfing began in ignorance, excitement and wide-eyed terror, immersed in a quasi-magical world of watery glory and torment.

No! Beginner Boomers approached it with something else, something bred into them by years of living in the world’s most privileged societies: a sense of entitlement. Savvy, alive to their own needs, they wanted better value from this thing they’d taken on, just as they expected better value from their computers, or their 401k plans. Hell, they’d paid money to learn this thing! Boards that dented? Locals-only mythology? No, they wanted surfing to behave, to look, as they’d begun to imagine it: cool, slick, kinda hippie, retro-ironic, soulful, yet most of all accessible … as accessible as everything else in their unimaginably privileged lives.

Thus, in the past decade, has formed a great divergence in the surf community, a divergence we all feel to some extent – a kind of fault line, between the old school surfer and his big ideas about Respect, Local Power, Hand Shaped Boards from the Guy Down the Street, and Climbing the Ladder at your Local Spot, and pretty much everyone else. And so far, there’s no doubt who’s been calling the tune. After all, what we call surfing culture these days is largely about business…and the Beginner Boomers are the best business in the sport. They’ve driven the rise of SurfTech, surf coaching, surf resort travel, widescreen surf documentaries, surf websites, surf-imaged SUVs, Retro surf art, surf collector’s items, super-glossy photo books, ‘70s Renaissance board designs, and waterproof iPod cases. Multi-multi-millions of dollars are being spent right now on developing stuff designed to satisfy their tastes and needs.

The opinions and choices of a Mark now matter as much or more than those of, say, me. Probably more; after all, with my three-plus decades of surfing, my boardmaker buddies, and my occasional buff-job pack of trunks, I’m hardly a gold-mine target market. I’ll spend way more time in the water, but any day of the surfing week, Mark’s gonna spend more money than me.

And so the world is turned. As Parmenter might say, the Kookocracy reigns.


Meanwhile the surf industry machine has rolled along through a huge era of prosperity, at least partly on the Beginner Boomer’s bank ....

Yet the apparent prosperity of modern surfing conceals something very interesting: There’s a bigger gulf today than ever before between the imagery of surfing, the way it APPEARS – the multi-million-dollar pro scene, the big wave hellmen, the flawless tropical pits – and the average surfer’s experience, the way surfing actually IS.

The pro scene is just one example. About the only consistent thing in the past decade is the fact that Kelly Slater is still world champion. To a recent Beginner, it might even feel as if Kelly’s a longtime friend ... a familiar, fixed point in a changing world. Yet even that belies the gap between the Boomers and the pros. You go to a big WCT event these days and the surfers are like racehorses on glue – twitchy, high-strung, rearing at the slightest disturbance; they’re almost not human. This is largely because of the increased pressure on them to respond to an audience – one that, despite all the webcasting commentary, still largely has no clue what the pros are up to. A top professional surfer exists at a level of skill so fine-tuned it allows him to ride Bells Beach one week and Teahupo’o the next, and score 10s at both. He burns through dozens of boards a month, snapping some and discarding most, and cosseting the remainder like they were gold – which they might as well be, given the prizemoney potential lurking in their super-stylized curves. He signs autographs by the hundreds, and shields himself behind managers, homeboy bros, girlfriends and business class air tickets. Surfing earns him millions more than his parents ever made, and it’s changed him utterly.

This stuff is as alien to the Boomer as redwood is to Styrofoam. It’s surfing, Jim, but not as we know it.

The same goes for the big wave thing, and the surf travel dream. Charging Maverick’s? Tropical reef barrels? They look good, but in every other way, they might as well be on the moon. Go to Lance’s Rights! Catch a set wave off the bombie! Give our regards to the reef.



But guess what? There’s something else happening here. The Beginner Boom is running down. The explosive worldwide growth of surf schools has stalled; there’s been no significant change in school numbers since Surfing magazine’s last survey of the phenomena, back in 2003. While surfboard sales patterns have altered dramatically in the period, there’s no evidence to suggest an increase in overall sales – indeed, in the big surf nations, numbers may well have dropped back.

And surfing? Well, underneath the pretenses of the surf schools and the marketeers, underneath its generic wonderfulness, it’s still really the same deal it’s always been. It’s still almost impossibly hard to do well, or to gain any real skill whatsoever. It still brings you into contact with rocks, buries you under lines of white water, and snaps your board, epoxy or not. It’s still full of guys who’ll humiliate you without even saying a word, just by the way they paddle past after your last wipeout. Unlike almost everything else in the Boomer’s world, it’s not something you can do lightly and get away with for long.

You know what I reckon will happen in the next five years? In the face of crowds, in the face of flat spells and cold water and sheer difficulty, in the face of that gulf between how surfing APPEARS and how it really truly IS, a lot of Boom-era surfers are gonna crystallize something in their heads – that the things they first thought about surfing just aren’t true. And a lot of ‘em are going to quit.


The time of the Great Quitting! It’s not such a radical idea.

It’s happened before, like everything. There’s some odd parallels between today’s festival of kookery and the last great Beginner Boom, in the early ‘60s. Back then the Boom was triggered by a flood of extracultural flipsiness – Gidget, Beach Boys, etc – and the sudden availability of easy to handle, easy to ride surfboards. It was followed in the late 1960s by a wave of mass quitting. By the early 1970s, the surfboard market had all but collapsed, Gidget had gone to Rome, the Beach Boys were totally spun, and there were less active surfers than there’d been a decade earlier.

Then there was the surf business Boom of the late 1980s, when surfing went blowdried neon. In 1991, surfing was suddenly not cool at all, and it was like a door slammed on the surf industry’s fingers. If you didn’t really believe in the sport, you walked away … or were pushed.

The thing to pay attention to in each case is what occurred next. The Quitting of the late ‘60s was followed by perhaps the most spectacular creative period in surfing since its Duke-led resurrection. In the ‘70s, Pipeline was mastered, the shortboard revolution was completed, the surf industry grew its roots, a true world championship was founded, and surfing genius arose on coasts from Durban to Ala Moana. And the ’91 crash landing was followed by everything we now think of as surfing’s modern golden era: Kelly and the New School, airshows, Laird’s tow-surfing experiments, the unveiling of Maverick’s, the widescreen surf movies, the surf school explosion, and eventually, the Beginner Boom itself…the very thing I suspect we’re about to see begin to crumble.

Surfing never dies from Overpopularity. It just sheds a skin or two and renews itself. Today, right now, it’s getting ready to shed another. The Boom will pass, a new wave will arise from the heart of the sport, and whatever we thought was cool or necessary will be overthrown.


What will take its place? If I could answer that, I’d really be clairvoyant. Maybe that answer can be found in unexpected places – in the sudden growth of surfing skill among grommet girls worldwide, for example. Maybe surfing will renew itself from the perimeters, from the new surf cultures now a couple of generations advanced, in places like France, Spain, Réunion Island, Bali, Japan … places where history doesn’t hang too heavily, and styles aren’t too fixed. Where kids can relax and invent.

More poignantly, I suspect we’ll also see the departure of quite a few old-schoolers, surfers who’ve found the changes initiated by the Boom – the arrival of mass produced surfboards, the outlandish crowding of classic waves, the boost to surf tourism, the legal challenges to localism, and the Beginner’s sense of entitlement that’s such a general feature of the Kookocracy – simply too much to cope with. So many of these changes have disrupted, denigrated or outright disproved the great myths upon which old school surfing rested. “No respect!” they’ll sigh, and walk off into the sunset, feeling the sport drained of its meaning.

I think this will be a shame, because they’ll have missed a chance to teach a lot. Not every Beginner’s lesson has to come from a surf school, or from a tough guy local’s fist.

And…what of my British buddy, Mark? The guy who wanted to be an Instant Local? Man! I feel like he’s throwing himself to the wolves! I have this awful image of him taking his family out to my local hardcore spot, and the boys going all Deliverance on his ass...

But then again...maybe not. Maybe he’ll get himself into a group of like minded people: Beginners, with plenty of money, and a healthy sense of adult entitlement. They’ll all get together to surf once a week at one of the safer and shittier beachbreaks around here. They’ll buy Retro Fish boards for the wall, and Morning of the Earth T-shirts, and Surfer’s Journal photo books, and pretend to a knowledge and crustiness they’ll never attain and have no real idea exists...

And it won’t make a darn bit of difference! As far as anyone will know, they’ll be as Core as they come.

[Nick Carroll]

Anyway I agree with shearer about the Owen piece, but there's a story behind that...a rather telling one in a way. The day after returning from the Goldie, I did what I usually do after researching a piece; I transcribed all the rough notes from the trip into the computer and sent 'em off to the mag crew, just to give 'em an idea of possible titles and help with pic selection. Usually you then give it a few days then go back and edit, add some of the further "psychological insights" etc etc. Maybe call your subject and follow up with a couple of things. I emailed the mag asking for a heads up only to discover to my surprise that they'd leaped on the rough notes and run 'em in the mag as is. Whoa! That's why the piece reads like it does -- straight up observation without the additional context that frames observation. Sorry about that steve.

Of course if it'd been an online publication I coulda just had the turbo version slid into its place. But that's print.

I do not, however, buy his -- nor any of your -- complete dismissal of surf magazines or surf print media in general, I still believe it has a strong place in the surfing universe and that in many ways, now they're relieved of the duty of newsbreaking and gossip-columnising (such a vital part of the online media, surf or otherwise), surf magazines are currently on an improvement cycle. But what the hell. Most of you, so convinced of yourselves about their supposedly parlous and worthless state, will never read 'em.

[steve shearer]

Carroll's belted it out of the park.....

I didn't read that at the time......but it was a great read.

I had a similar experience at Hazards to the one you had at Lunada Bay.

Me and a mate from Bribie broke down in Montana de Oro and spent a week camped there......sort of stranded really, like refugees.
Eventually the locals came to accept us. like a stray dog that eventually becomes part of the furniture.

Now I believe that wind is starting to tend NW ......

[Quangers]

Well written essay.
How much of it, do you think, has come to fruition?

[mical]

Nick, your writing is great and I doubt anyone could or would ever seriously dispute that.

Real writing, real viewpoints, real people will always have me putting my money on the counter for a mag .. and Stab because I like a laugh.

However everything else I can get from the www, including the hard and hidden sell of advertisers and general fluff that's printed around the rare gems.

I still believe it has a strong place in the surfing universe and that in many ways, now they're relieved of the duty of newsbreaking and gossip-columnising (such a vital part of the online media, surf or otherwise), surf magazines are currently on an improvement cycle.

Point taken .. I really hope you're right.

[oldman]

Looking forward to reading those Nick.

[alakaboo]

firstly, thanks for steve for shaking the tree.
not because i have any particular views on the matter, and i don't think it's necessarily the way i'd be voicing my comments, but it got nick arced up enough to post some quality writing.

and the best part of that, is that i didn't have to buy the mags.

to me, the writing in surf mags has got nothing to do with why i don't buy them, i like the writing and wish there was more of it.

the reason i don't buy them is because i'm not the target market for the content. it's all been said before.... i'm not interested in aerials at all, i don't like any fashion with skulls on it or black and white or fluorescent patterns , i think trucker's caps look fuggen stupid, i'm not a good enough surfer to even notice the difference fins make half the time, and i'm not going to base my board or wetsuit choices on the ads in the mags.

if there was a mag that just had 3 boat or road trips with a few pros, a journo, a scientist, a lucky punter and fisherman sent on each, i'd happily fork over my hard earned every month. throw in a cultural piece
i suspect i'm not alone

surf magazines are currently on an improvement cycle.

but i wonder if the markets have diverged too far already?

[Nick Carroll]

Now I believe that wind is starting to tend NW ......

Oh fcuk there's probably swell up there isn't there.

I'm the one getting belted.