Walking up the Swami’s stairs one afternoon, I heard my name called from above. A bearded man in a sports cap pulled low on his face, lifted his hat, and said, “Pat.” I recognized him but knew him more for his actions than his appearance or the few words he spoke.
At the top of the stairs, I laid my board against a railing, walked over, shook hands, and began the joyful task of catching up with the doings of Pat’s oldest son, Tom, who was shaking off the metal of three world surfing titles by touring the world in search of perfect waves. Pat had recently settled on Baja’s East Cape, where a major hurricane had just blown many structures to dust. “How’d your house do in the hurricane?” I asked.
I don’t think Pat owned a TV, and he seemed surprised by the news. Turning to the woman near him, he asked, “Did you hear anything about a hurricane?”
“No,” she said. Pat then shrugged and said, “Aw, the place needed work anyway.” Pat Curren’s humor depended as always on suffering and timing. One of the greatest surfers of his time, Phil Edwards, knows all about Curren’s mysterious ways.
Edwards grew up in Oceanside as both a surfer and a sailor. In his late teens, he often surfed a break in Carlsbad, now known as Terra Mar, which in the mid-’50s was called “Guayule,” after the plant that grew there to make rubber. As the top surfer in the area, young Phil became known as the “Guayule Kid.”
Around that time, Windansea had its own champion in Hawaiian transplant Bobby Patterson. Those in Oceanside said Phil was the best surfer in the world, and the guys from Windansea claimed Bobby was better. It would be settled by meeting at Guayule.
Carl Ekstrom drove up from La Jolla with Patterson, and L.J. Richards accompanied Edwards to the site. The unofficial contest never concluded because both surfers rode differently: Phil, a power surfer on a 10-foot, heavy board, and Bobby, on a feather-light, 8-foot egg.
As it turns out, Edwards and Patterson were two of the main branches on surfing’s tree, which to this day is divided into “power surfing,” a category dominated by Phil, and “hot dogging,” something Bobby was then king of.
— Excerpt from the book, “Windansea: Life. Death. Resurrection.”
For reasons that continue to defy explanation, many boards over 8 feet were sacrificed in the mid- to late 1960s to a baby and bathwater experiment called the shortboard revolution. An unexpected consequence of boards losing 3 feet and more in length was that softer, slower waves generally went unridden.
Guayule (Terra Mar) is just such a wave. Through the ’60s and much of the ’70s, the Carlsbad reef break remained nearly unridden. One day I surfed it on a solid south swell and found it had some fun lefts. When I told my mentor and hero, Wally Blodgett, about our “find,” he laughed and said, “I began surfing that spot in 1937,” well before any of us ever surfed Swami’s.
Since the return of longboards beginning in the late ’70s, Terra Mar has once again considered a high-ranking surf spot in North County.
To learn more about “Windansea: Life. Death. Resurrection.” please visit the website: Perelandrapublishingcompany.com
