It’s like Christmas and summer arrived at the same time as the swell jumped along with the thermometer last week. The water also seemed to have warmed a bit, and standout spots in town were sold out, playing to standing-room-only audiences.
The one-two punch of heat and humidity coincided with a water leak in our front room, which sent my wife, Tracy, our two cats, and me into the heart of Encinitas for three days. There, we were forced to endure a view uninterrupted all the way to Oahu.
As lovely as it was, when shared with a few hundred thousand strangers, tempers can flare, litter can increase, and places once visited by a few close friends can become melting pots of anxiety. And who am I to blame everybody for doing what everybody does? We are all influenced by the desire to be somewhere nicer or, at times, someone cooler.
When I was 13 years old, I was like every other young boy I knew in my desire to be Elvis Presley. I have evidence of that fact in a photo of myself holding an acoustic guitar, wearing a Blue Hawaii Aloha shirt, tight white shorts with black side stripes, and a fabulous slicked-down pompadour.
Photos from a year later show me with all the grease washed from my hair, wearing baggy surf trunks, and holding a 9-foot-6 Wardy surfboard. I no longer imitated rock ’n’ roll matinee idols, but surfers like Phil Edwards, Lance Carson and Miki Dora.
Phil and Lance were powerful and elegant, while Dora seemed more calculated and conscious of being stylish. Not to say he wasn’t a good surfer — he certainly was — but in the style department, he was doing karaoke to his hero’s original music. That hero was named Matt Kivlin.
Tweaked
Malibu’s Miki Dora was famous for his caustic wit, bizarre lifestyle and inventive surfing. His land scams eventually landed him in prison, while his predatory water dance proved more elusive and earned him the nickname “The Cat.”
He did moves we’d never seen before. One move, the “nose tweak,” was not really a move at all. It was more like a salute — a punctuation mark that generations of longboarders still copy without knowing why.
You may have seen Dora in surf movies, pinching his nose while riding down the line. But why would a functional surfer like Dora perform such a nonfunctional move? Dora’s mentor, Matt Kivlin, knew exactly why.
Calling Matt Kivlin a surf legend is like calling Leonardo da Vinci an illustrator. With Velzy, Quigg and Simmons, Kivlin ranks as one of the most influential surfers and board designers of the past century.
He cast such a big shadow that his No. 1 apprentice, Miki Dora, once commented, “Nobody will ever match the style of Matt Kivlin.”
Dora was so focused on Kivlin’s method that he imitated it in sickness and in health. According to a conversation I once had with Matt, “I had a sinus infection and was blowing my nose while I surfed. A while later, I noticed Miki riding a wave, pinching his nose. That seemed strange to me, since, as far as I knew, he wasn’t sick.”
Chris Ahrens is the author of “Windansea: Life, Death, Resurrection” and a surfer in Encinitas.
