Country Club Hours

In recent years, fueled by social media and vlogs, Newport Beach’s Wedge has had something of a relaunch into stand-up surf infamy. Still, Sean Starky, a member of the decades-old merry band of wave sliders known as the Wedge Crew, will insist that it’s a bodysurfing spot—and a heritage site. He should know: He’s risked life and limb learning to ride it. 

Originally from Huntington Beach, Starky shunned Surf City’s high-performance ethos from a young age. Wedge first called when he heard about it as a junior lifeguard. Then 15, he was a dose of reinvigorating new blood for an aging Wedge Crew. 

From then on, he’s continued to arrange his life around the US Army Corps–engineered monstrosity during its blackball season. “What grown-ass man can go to the beach during the week from 10 to five?” Starky asked. “My jobs have always aligned with me being able to dip and go get waves when it’s good.” 

A self-proclaimed gear nerd, Starky committed himself to designing a fin from the ground up six years ago. His encyclopedic knowledge of fin design, and having some of the best bodysurfers in the world as his test subjects, helped him fine-tune his prototypes, and after two years of R&D, Yucca Surf Fins were on the market. Today, his rubber-scented Costa Mesa warehouse is packed with the thousands of fins he has in pre-shipment, along with skis, bikes, and alt surf craft. 

Having battled health issues for much of his twenties, Starky was put on immunosuppressants at the beginning of 2020 to help with complications from surgery related to ulcerative colitis. With the start of the pandemic, strict doctor’s orders to stay inside meant that it was easy for his mind to wander to bleak places. But with all of that darkness, there was light. A combination of therapy, meds, and the distraction of running a company struggling to keep up with the initial pandemic hardware boom helped Starky focus on going all in with his business. In the process, he was able to quit his day job maintaining yachts in Newport Harbor and, slowly, get his mental and physical health back under control. 

Now 37, Starky is still attending to those big Wedge swells, albeit more selectively. And even though things are mostly a one-man show at Yucca, when Wedge calls, he still makes the time to answer.

MF    Can you talk about coming up as one of the younger guys at Wedge? I know in the Dirty Old Wedge doc, John Karam says that you were one of the first kids from the new generation. 

SS     It’s weird. My dad grew up kind of inland, and his family didn’t have any money, so he was into going to the beach. He was really cool about getting me to the ocean. I just always liked bodysurfing. I started surfing a lot in high school, but if you’re out bodysurfing, you know about Wedge, so my ass ended up at Wedge. It’s a shame. That place was so locked down back in the day. A lot of people don’t like localism, but it’s so [overcrowded now]. It’s cool thinking about that. Wedge was scary. 

MF    It still is. 

SS     It was different then, and everything is a little different when you’re a kid, but those dudes had it locked down. I’m 37. I started riding there when I was 15. There still are guys from that generation that if they show up, I am not up. When I was younger, I finally got a good day, and there were, like, 30 dudes that knew what they were doing. I didn’t get one wave. But it was cool getting to ride with all of those guys. 

MF    Was that kind of thing formative to you, just being in the water with them? And then to be accepted by them? 

SS     Yeah. I didn’t even know what I was doing. [Wedge Crew] was having issues. It was so localized and hard to get in with that crew. There were no young guys bodysurfing. So Potato Head [John Karam] was finally like, “Yo, dude, this is gonna be a bad look.” Because they all started hitting that age where a lot of them from that generation were having kids and gaining responsibilities. All of a sudden, there was no one at the beach during blackball. So he kind of fostered the young guys that were into it.

MF    With Wedge, it just feels like it’s always had, I don’t know if “circus” is the right word, but that sort of spectacle element to it.

SS     Yeah, we call it a media swell. Like the media comes down and blows it out of proportion. 

MF    Have you seen that change over the years at all?

SS     It’s gotten worse, for sure. I’ll get down there super early just to get set up. Then you have to manage your adrenaline. [Laughs.] I used to bodyboard. I would even surfmat Wedge. Now it’s just so crowded. I just bodysurf it at blackball from 10 to five. I call it country club hours. It’s a lot more mellow. Unfortunately, I’m 37 and I’m still kind of chasing it. That wave is so hit or miss and so fickle. 

MF    Why design a swim fin? 

SS     I’m just a gearhead. I grew up skiing and mountain biking, to the point where it’s obsessive. I’ve always had a fascination with f ins. I had some health issues in my twenties, too, and that kind of woke me up and made me realize there’s an expiration date. It’s definitely been a lot harder than I initially thought it’d be. I’m not a businessman. I’m a tradie. I’d say designing the fins was the easy part. We kind of spent all our money designing the fin, so how we offset risk was that we cut my size first and we just sold larges. God bless all my homies who supported it. My best friend’s a size 13 and he was just running the larges. Just crammed. Never complained. 

MF    If you’re comfortable talking about it, I wanted to ask about your health issues in the past. 

SS     I got super sick. I had gotten diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which is usually treatable. Of course, I didn’t really have treatable ulcerative colitis, so they ended up taking my colon out. And I had all these fucking problems, and I was doing the thing where I was laying at home, like, feeling so sorry for myself, [thinking] if I ever fucking get out of here [I’m going to make the most of it]. And that’s one thing I always really wanted to do—make my own fin. I love fins. I don’t really collect them anymore, because I have a warehouse full of fins. It’s lost its luster a little bit. [Laughs.] 

MF    With the health issues, you said you were misdiagnosed, right?

SS     I definitely had ulcerative colitis. But now I don’t have a colon, so they can’t call it ulcerative colitis anymore. I have this really rare thing called a J-pouch, where they kind of make a reservoir, a new colon, out of your small bowel. It’s not nearly as bad as how sick I’d get. I’d get really bad ulcerations in my colon. Now I have inflammation, so they have to call it Crohn’s, which is a mindfuck.  I had to deal with not having a colon, which is tough being an athletic dude, and I had to get on these heavy hitting meds. Then COVID hit and I had some fucking mental-health shit go down.

MF Were you bodysurfing at all?

SS     No, I was a little freaked out because my doctors were freaking me out. But it helped me to just say, “Fuck it. Let’s go.” I went all in at Yucca. There was that run on hardgoods. No one could do anything, so they went to the beach. It kind of helped Yucca get moving. 

MF    I want to ask about your work with EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing] therapy.

SS     I’ve been on meds, and I’ve tried to stay off the meds, but there’s a place for them. I’m all about Western medicine. Like, it saved my life. But I was dealing with PTSD really bad because I just [pauses]…I hadn’t dealt with my previous health issues. I just put them in a hole and moved forward. I tried to power through it, couldn’t, and then I did rapid eye movement therapy. What it does is it takes the edge off. So that blade that is cutting you apart, it dulls it. It’s not a cure-all, but it definitely helps.

MF    For someone who might not be familiar with rapid eye movement therapy, can you explain?

SS     They essentially put you into almost like a REM sleep through eye movement. It’s crazy. You have an emotional release that comes out. What they do is you have a happy place [and they guide you toward it]. For me, it was literally, like, 1960s shag carpet with a wood-burning stove and it’s snowing outside— and they overlay your trauma with that. So the idea is when you get triggered, like going to doctor’s appointments and dealing with all this stressful shit, instead of reliving all that horrible shit you’ve been through, you kind of have that happy place overlaid as a baseline.

MF    In terms of younger people who are coming up at Wedge now, is there anyone who stands out?

SS     There’s a bunch of kids, yeah. Noah Gerard. He’s a [Corona Del Mar] kid. Nicest kid. There’s another young kid—he’s older now—Scott Mathews. He’s, like, up there with the all-time greats. He’s super into it. I’m just kind of there. I call it my bar scene. I like to sit on those rocks, bullshitting, because I’m just getting in the water. I just had my hip replaced, my neck is fucked from Wedge, so I’m looking for good waves. Scott’s still keyed. He wants those big ones. I enjoy it now. As I get older, probably like how Karam was, I want to get a couple, but I have just as much fun watching all my friends get good ones. 

MF    Does it feel different to be on the opposite end of that rotation?  

SS     Yeah, it’s less stressful, right? [Laughs.] I used to lose sleep and I’d get scared, too, at Wedge. You get like, “Is it gonna be that big?” I feel like I’ve dodged so many bullets. I haven’t really missed a big swell at Wedge since I was 15, and I’m still walking upright. So you’re like, “Dude, how many lives do you have?” 

MF    When you look at a lot of these first- and second-generation Wedge Crew guys, they’re either retired from it or don’t go out on the bigger days anymore. 

SS     It’s a punishing wave. Bodysurfing, you’re not popping out of all of them. You’re kind of wearing all of them. Which is insane. It’s zero gravity in some of those barrels when you get blasted. I used to get frustrated when I was young. You’re fucking made of Play-Doh and you see all these guys you like just hang it up and dip. Now I’m older and I fully get it. You just don’t want to be sitting on ice bags for a month after one session. 

MF    In an article that Ron Romanosky wrote in 2004 [“Our Wedge, Our Way,” from TSJ 14.2], you have a quote saying that bodysurfing is “the last soul sport there is—no commercialization.”

SS     You can’t really put sponsors’ stickers on your fucking Speedo, right? And I always thought there’s some superhero vibes kind of going at Wedge. 

MF    It’s the Speedo. 

SS     I used to go to Wedge and people on the beach would be like, “Woah, this is wild. These guys are swimming into 20-foot waves!” And then I would go back to the shipyard and just get treated like shit. [Laughs.] So it’s this weird dynamic. All these dudes are regular dudes coaching their kids in youth sports, and then they’re also just these freaky super athletes because Wedge is a gnarly spot. I always laugh at the NFL. They’re all concerned with traumatic brain injury, and they have all these resources. Me and my boys have been surfing Wedge since we were preteens, getting smoked, and there’s nothing. There’s no support. It’s just pure passion, dude.

MF    You need the Yucca Center for Traumatic Brain Injuries.

SS     Yeah, right? [Laughs.] That’s what I like about it: Everyone down there is doing it for the right reasons. 

[Feature Image Caption: Starky, laid out and relaxed at Club Wedge. “I call it my bar scene,” he says. “As I get older, I want to get a couple, but I have just as much fun watching all my friends get good ones.” Photo by Jordan Anast.]