Sea Notes
Celebrating 50 years in the surf
On Feb. 2 I celebrated a golden anniversary as 50 years of surfing passed beneath my feet. It started with a borrowed board until I bought one of my own, a used 9-foot-6-inch Wardy with two wedged redwood stringers encasing a swatch of condensed tinted yellow foam. I was too stoked to notice that my [...]
Waves of love on Valentine’s Day
Perfect weather and good surf have blessed our coast for the past few months. No matter what you ride, it’s a great time to be a surfer, watching rippers on boards from five to 10 feet. Five fins on one. Our beaches provide quite a show of talent. And while we often praise the artist [...]
Branches on the Burch family tree
My dad surfed a little in the early ‘40s. He mostly bodysurfed, however, and played around occasionally on wooden planks at Santa Monica Pier. Nonetheless, his stories and his encouragement in my early years were the primary stimulus in getting me to ride waves.
Last man, woman or child standing
I’ve already made my stand on stand up paddle boards, or SUPs, in the lineup. Simply stated it’s this: Someone with the advantage of a paddle on a surfboard should give way on a wave to someone without one. I feel the same way about longboards sharing the lineup with shortboards. The one with the [...]
Big wave country draws its own group of devotees
Big wave riders are different than most of us, so I suppose it’s only natural they would have different dreams. To quote Bruce Brown from “Endless Summer,” the waves they ride could, “light a city the size of Honolulu for a week.” I am not so poetic, but I like to say that just one [...]
Modern surf-sounds bring back memories of the ‘60s
In 1962 my sister came home from college with an album that would forever change my life. It was called “Surfer’s Choice,” the musician was Dick Dale, and we turned up our parent’s gigantic wooden hi-fi all the way. The enduring hit from that album, “Miserlou” provided a soundtrack to accompany a rush that only [...]
The surf was good, but the industry was calling
Scott Bass got it right. Again. If you were at the Del Mar Fairgrounds on Oct. 8 and Oct. 9, you know that this year’s Sacred Craft was the best surf show since the 1964 Surf-O-Rama. If you weren’t there, you were probably doing what we should have all been doing, surfing the first good [...]
I’d rather surf cold water than a red tide, that’s no joke
Red tide occurs when algae rapidly divide and release toxins into the water and air. The Fish and Wildlife Research Institute states that red tide is a natural phenomenon. Others don’t agree, believing it’s caused by polluted runoff. For sure, when local marine life ingests the toxin they can die off in great numbers. People [...]
Please, do support your local surf shop
When I was a kid in the early ‘60s, surf shops smelled like resin and rang with the sounds of power tools. Surfboards were often the only item featured in the showroom. In the back room, you could watch as your blank and resin were transformed into a dream machine. These were not department stores, [...]
All that was left was dust: a surfing tribute to firefighters who fell on 9/11
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, firefighter Brennan Savage had finished his shift at Ladder 137 in Southern Queens, the firehouse where he worked as a New York firefighter. He was thinking about the waves he would ride that day when suddenly he looked up across the bay to see one of the Twin [...]
