From Hope to Hype

​​The act of riding a wave, whatever perceived grace it contains, lasts from start to finish maybe five seconds, maybe ten, maybe twelve. That’s it. Seven seconds, or eight, maybe nine, depending on where in the world you happen to be surfing—the underwater bathymetry of the break you are riding, whether the wind is blowing offshore or on, the direction of the swell, how high the tide is. The wave itself is always carried out in mental silence, and so it carries an air of mystery, and in the water, as surfers, we always carry with us the faulty belief that we are on the inside of something that the people who watch us from jetties and piers—people who watch from land—do not understand. As surfers, we believe that we are engaged in an act, have become aware of a pursuit, that is esoteric and therefore special. And whether we perceive this act as spiritual or mysterious or athletic or rebellious or radical will always say more about us than it will about the pursuit. Surfing, that is, is simply the act of riding the wave for those few seconds. It is nothing more and nothing less. Everything else is just a projection.  

And yet, those seconds are precious. 

That more than half of my life has now been dedicated to these collections of seconds in no way makes me unique. I’m just one of four million, maybe five, maybe six. Nobody really knows, other than that it’s a number that has grown from a few thousand only five decades ago. I long ago stopped wondering what those people on the rock jetties must think of those ten seconds—viewed from the side, if not from the eye of God then at least the medical student’s cross-section, which allows the viewer to see everything for what it is, a pulse of formless energy traveling long distances, moving effortlessly until the water through which it pushes finally exceeds its angle of repose and spills from top to bottom, and begins its headlong rush toward shore. I’ve long ago stopped thinking about what those viewers might think about a group of people who have made a culture and a lifestyle out of the frivolous pursuit of riding that wave’s dying energy. 

People everywhere watch surfing like this—sitting on piers and jetties in Long Island and San Diego, Cape Town and Sydney. I may not wonder anymore what those people think about the ten seconds when a surfer is riding a wave, but I often think about what those people standing on those rocks, having come to California or Hawaii or Florida or wherever it is that people ride waves in the twenty-first century, must think of why a grown man might pull on a thick neoprene suit at half past six on a cold November morning, enter the frigid water, stare out at the horizon, and then propel himself onto a wave for mere seconds at a time—the aggregate sum spent surfing existing at a proportion of something like one minute, a minute and a half to be generous, for every hour or two in the water. 

I often think, too, of what’s left on the cutting room floor in this movie, and the fanatic dedication that those people do not see—the late nights and long hours that predate the physical act of surfing itself, time spent studying obscure buoys and swell models, and the legitimate excitement that a “purple blob” on a screen can inspire in a grown adult’s life. I think about the fact that, as one friend put it without irony, “the weather is fascinating,” to some people.

I don’t know if I agree that the weather is fascinating, but I do know that since the time spent surfing—those few seconds that constitute the actual act of riding a wave—is so short, it can explain the extreme premium that surfers will go in order to put themselves in the optimum position to ride waves. I do know that the role surf forecasting plays on the behavior of surfers in and out of the water can’t be overstated. And that is something that interests me deeply. 

***

To photographers, they say to beware of projects involving children and animals. While no such exhortation I’m aware of exists for writers, one might safely assume taking on an assignment to write 3,000 words about the weather—or, worse, the history of the reporting of the weather—is inadvisable at best.

And yet, nevertheless, this is the unenviable position in which I find myself. So from the outset, faced with the task, I put it to a group of surfers who I trust, who live and work in surfing: What is interesting about surf forecasting? 

I got a variety of answers. All of them—including the jaded and pessimistic ones—found a way to be upbeat, optimistic, and eminently boring. I received expected variations on the theme of “the weather is fascinating.” I fielded answers that were fatalistic: “It’s a necessary evil.” And answers that were rhapsodic: “I love it. If I’m going to drop five grand on a trip, you better believe I’m going to watch the forecast to make sure I score.” Some answers I won’t try to replicate here, especially the ones regarding the latest scientific trends in forecasting. I stopped listening to those answers for the fact that they turned over in my mind not unlike the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher.   

But then there was this, the one that stopped me dead in my tracks for how perfectly it articulated a thread in my own ruminations that I was having difficulty pinpointing: “Surf forecasting is where the whole sham begins.” 

If you’ve been around surfing long enough, you’ll recognize this variety of misanthropic cynicism is just a default setting embedded in most of us—as much a basic part of our genetic code as our inherent selfishness. So at first blush, I gave a polite chortle and was willing to disregard this answer as only more of the same, until my friend clarified that his answer had nothing to do with the kind of jaded disregard that I often recognize in my own thinking. Rather, he said, “It’s where the whole idea that the wave is mine, and my primary objective is to separate myself from you so that I can get it before you, begins. You know what I mean.” 

And I did. 

In 1960, in the first issue of Surfer magazine, the late John Severson wrote a single sentence that I know I have participated in sledgehammering into lore. You know the one. “In this crowded world,” Severson wrote, “the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day, the perfect wave, to be alone with the surf and his thoughts.” 

Accompanying this bit of wisdom was a picture of a surfer knee-paddling his longboard into the flawless, empty lineup of a break that I am not supposed to mention is at the Hollister Ranch. It’s not too much to say that the reason we still talk about that single sentence, nearly 60 years later, is because it perfectly encapsulates the promise that all of us are seeking every time we put a board in the water: perfection and solitude. In our minds, we hope that the waves are always perfect and that we are always alone. 

When Severson wrote that line, the idea was just that—an idea—and little more. But the element of surprise had been codified into the entire ethos of surfing. Then Hynson and August walked over the sand dunes at Cape St. Francis in The Endless Summer, and reinforced the concept that maybe around the next bend, the waves were pumping and the lineup was empty. You could still seek the perfect day, and every once in a while, you might find it. 

This was, and remains today, the ideal. The difference being that when Severson wrote his line in his magazine in 1960, surf forecasting was, at its most refined, a junk science and, at its most ethereal, a religious ceremony. The idea that one could distill scientific data into a reasonable approximation of what the surfing conditions might be like was a nascent one at best, and perhaps most surfers preferred to hand themselves over to the decidedly more romantic ritual inherent in praying for waves or whipping the water with vines, trying to conjure or divine a swell. 

It’s not that the most sober-minded surfers among us didn’t try. My favorite attempt comes from Tom Blake in his 1935 book Hawaiian Surfboard. “Big surf seems to be caused by disturbances in the earth, such as earthquakes,” he wrote. “Great swells are started from the place of the quake and travel just as ripples travel to the edge of a pond when a stone is cast in. A few days before a recent big surf, newspapers carried daily reports of earthquakes in Japan, Italy, and elsewhere. Prior to this, the bay at Waikiki was like a millpond. But overnight it changed and for four days we had some fine surf-riding.”

Not exactly, but Blake gets credit for linking cause to effect. The arc of wave science remained incredibly flat for the ensuing thirty or forty years, with few contributions to the field, which means that by the time the post-Gidget surfing boom happened in the early 60s, almost nobody, not even the most experienced surfers among us, had any idea what precisely created the waves they were riding. 

***

A key feature of era-defining technology is how easy it is to forget that we ever once lacked it. For proof of this, one need not look much past that omnipresent 6.28-inch brick in your pocket, which has short-circuited most of our amygdalas, and has only existed for 11 years. 

And so, yes, what I mean is this: it was not even 60 years ago that the vast majority of surfers might have viewed a breaking wave as a natural phenomenon that originated independent of a cause. 

It’s not that ocean science didn’t exist at the time, but it was nascent, and like all good innovations, borne of military necessity. All of modern day surf forecasting can be traced back to Walter Munk, Professor Emeritus at the Scripps Instiution in La Jolla. As Scripps tells it today, “During World War II, Munk and Harald U. Sverdrup, then director of Scripps Institution, developed a system for forecasting breakers and surf on beaches, a technique of crucial importance in military amphibious landings. Munk served for a year in the United States Army Ski Battalion, for a year as an oceanographer with the University of California Division of War Research, and as a meteorologist for the Army Air Force.”  

If Munk was widely regarded as the forerunner of what we consider modern surf forecasting, his work was incredibly thorough, scientific, and utterly out of reach for the average surfer. A man named Willard Bascom changed things with his 1964 contribution, Waves and Beaches: The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface. To hear Matt Warshaw tell it on his Encyclopedia of Surfing, “Bascom himself didn’t do the heavy lifting in terms of figuring out how waves are formed, how they travel, and how they react to the coastline…but [he] brought the word down from Science Mountain. He explained waves to the rest of us—surfers, boaters, fishermen, anyone fascinated by the ocean. [Waves and Beaches] laid everything out in reasonably clear language: storms, wave height, period, orbital motion, reflection, refraction, the whole show in all its energy-transporting glory.”

Like that, the work of interpreting the ocean and its vagaries became an interpretable science, and though some of us may have held dear to the belief that “the weather is fascinating,” still more of us just wanted to know what the waves were going to be like in the morning. As such, surfers remained in need of someone who could decode and distill that information for us. 

I had the discreet thought, in writing this essay, that a history of surf forecasting could really be written as a profile. In the same way that one can trace the origins of, say, the vast majority of socially, politically, and economically disruptive trends of the early 21st century to Steven Paul Jobs, it’s also true that in surf forecasting, one can trace the origins of pretty much every major trend to Sean Collins. 

So outsized is Collins’ impact on the sport, so codified into lore is his position, and so omnipresent are the fruits of his work, that it’s difficult to remember that twenty years ago “surf cams” as we have come to know them did not exist. It was at the 1996 U.S. Open that Collins jerry-rigged a security camera to capture and distribute a still photograph every five minutes, thereby creating the first “live” surf cam. It was only 33 years ago, before Collins founded Surfline and 976-SURF, that surf forecasting was still a sort of rite of passage, learned with a weather radio and a dubious lesson from somebody who either knew, or pretended to know, considerably more than you did. 

Today, Surfline exists as the most prominent of the consumer-facing surf forecasting sites. Nearly two million unique users log on each month, each of them hooked by the operating premise that the website has offered since its inception, which states you too can “know before you go.” 

But don’t take my word for it. The folks at Surfline are happy to boast about how, “Since Surfline’s 1985 debut, surfer behavior has been entirely transformed as a result of this product and craft. Part science, part art, and part pure data, a Surfline subscriber can now check swell predictions two weeks in advance, from any device—and not just from their backyard, but from anywhere on the planet. Wave and weather forecasting changes how you approach your life. It helps you choose which boards to take to G-Land. It gets you out of bed on mornings you’d otherwise have missed. Most importantly, it keeps you tuned in to movements in the ocean that once were utter mysteries.” 

The fact that “surfer behavior has been entirely transformed” by a website and access to information is presented here as an unmitigated good is telling. Perhaps it is a good,
but its reception in the culture has been decidedly something else. 

***

Take an anonymous online poll about surf forecasting and you’re bound to get different variations of the same basic grumble: “Something something something, too many kooks, something something something, things used to be different.” 

I recently found myself in need of wax and some t-shirts for gifts, and so I walked into my local surf shop for a chat with a friend I’ve known for 20 years. I told him about this essay, and I asked him for his thoughts. 

“People love to be grumpy about surf forecasting websites,” he said, “but that’s just because they don’t realize how good they’ve got it. Maybe they didn’t surf when we didn’t have any forecasting.” 

And just like that, I was reminded that any work on the history of surf forecasting would not be complete without a section on the history of people complaining about surf forecasting. 

The basic logic of the standard grumble is easy to follow and not that logical and goes something like this: Surf forecasting websites take once privileged information—information that one had to be in the know to earn—and they sell it for profit, thereby alerting the masses to details that were once a proprietary trade secret, thereby clogging the lineups, thereby ruining the surfing experience forever and ever.

The problem with this logic—or one of the problems, as there is undoubtedly much that is problematic with this way of thinking—is the easy, capricious manner in which it shifts blame constantly to the other. The problem is not in surf forecasting in and of itself, but rather it’s that they and not you alone have access to it. Things would be good in the surf if only I, and not you—we and not them—had access to this privileged information. It’s the stew of self-centeredness that my other friend had identified immediately when he pointed out that “it’s where the whole sham begins.” 

Crowding, though, is at this point just a foundational fact of surfing in the 21st century. And blaming crowds on surf forecasting feels both wrongheaded and too easy. It’s 2018 and everybody surfs. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube and that’s just that. 

I have come to wonder about a more nefarious and unforeseen ancillary effect of surf forecasting, one which might rob of us of something much more essential than an uncrowded lineup. If it’s true that the act of surfing is really only the act of riding a wave’s dying energy for seconds at a time, then it’s probably also true that what most of us are after is the unmitigated thrill of discovering and attaining those seconds. 

Perhaps there exists an uncanny valley, I found myself wondering, between our relationship to the real thing, the legitimate glee of hiking over the dune at our own personal Cape St. Francis, and the simulacrum, the having scoured and researched and consulted and been told to arrive at the appointed place and day and time. And then, having arrived to find exactly what we knew was going to be there all along, we feel a shell of the thing itself. 

If what we are after is that which is contained in those seconds that are so precious—the seconds upon which the very fabric of the whole hours and days and lives that we call surf culture are formed—it’s no wonder we all feel the need to hoard them. Because while it’s true that the surfer can still seek and find the perfect wave on the perfect day, to be alone with his surf and his thoughts, it’s also true that if we’re constantly wondering where the next one’s coming from, we might not be anywhere
at all.

But how many of us would be willing to put our proverbial money where our grumpy and theorizing mouths are? How many of us would be willing to voluntarily ostracize ourselves from the world of surf forecasting, to live in that constant state of perpetual nowness that one can imagine would be the perceived benefit of opting out of surf forecasting altogether. 

As I stood there, dogarming the counter of my surf shop-owning friend—a lifelong surfer in the once-small surf town in which we live—he told me that he has done just this for the past year, voluntarily foregoing surf forecasts and reports, choosing instead to rely on a daily cocktail of surf checks, weather reports, and his own decades-long institutional memory of surfing in Southern California to clue himself into the conditions. 

And I thought, there’s a response. You don’t have to own an iPhone. You don’t have to check the surf anywhere but from the sand. 

***

I ran into another old friend of mine at the beach the other day, a random and secluded spot, if such a thing can be said to exist in 2018 Southern California. We were surrounded by the trappings of middle age—blessings, put another way. A pair of towheads each running wild around our legs and beautiful wives, “the whole catastrophe.” This man gave me my first job out of college, editing a surf magazine, and for as indebted as I am to him for my start, I don’t often see him. 

We compared notes about surfing, and its lack. He had read something I’d written about quitting surfing a few years ago, and we talked for a bit about how neither of us felt like surfing had the same primordial pull it once had on us, or at least not with the same maniacal drive. It’s freeing, he said, to not be beholden to something. To not feel like you’re constantly missing out. 

I wondered, in that moment, about surf forecasting, and its promise. The promise to never miss a swell. To never miss a session. To live in that hypervigilant state of constant readiness and alertness. I wondered about what that does to a person, how desirable that state actually is, whether or not it runs counter to surfing’s main thesis and the freedom that we almost surely are seeking in those seven seconds, maybe eight, maybe nine. Those ten seconds, maybe eleven, maybe twelve. That time when we stand, however briefly on a moving wall of water, having forgotten entirely to worry about the world, its concerns, and its thoughts. A state that you can’t forecast at all.