All the way through the pier. Wow!

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I was right.

I rode a 6'-2" 19.5 wide, glass-on thruster, at 2.5" thick in those days.

I currently ride a 5'-11" 19 wide at 2.25" thick.

We sure loved some volume back then.



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I was right.

A nice piece of Brad Jacobson storytelling. This is the extra-jumbo version, but short-period stuff on the Atlantic coast can be nasty.

Edited: 01/29/2024 at 01:54 AM by ww

I've been following surfing for more than 40 years, and this is the first time I've seen surfing in Madeira. It's Waimea with a wall. Wow!

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I was right.

William Finnegan wrote of staying and surfing in Madeira.

I read his book years ago. It was oddly dark. Too brooding for my liking anyway.

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I was right.

Finnegan deserved his Pulitzer prize for "Barbarian Days". In part, it's an expansion of a long previous New Yorker article, "Playing Doc's Games" which was indeed about challenge, not fun. A one-time supervisor, from the LA area, had gotten his bachelor's at SF State, and indeed surfed Ocean Beach.

I've been meaning to read that trilogy too. Offhand though- with places of waves like this, consistently too, that include the infrastructure enough too, Why?, aren't the WSL or whatever future governing body, replacing any of the mediocre venues used last season with,, "HERE" (Madeira) and everywhere else known as quality like. Thanks for these great clips "Dave" & Dubdub!! btw- "with a Wall"

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ola ~

Edited: 01/14/2024 at 11:24 AM by equipeola

"Playing Doc's Games" which was indeed about challenge, not fun.

He ventured to some of the most beautiful places on the planet, and yet I felt like I was reading about a Welsh industrial town in mid winter. If glum challenge was his goal, he stuck it as tight as a rivet in a boat hull.





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I was right.

He got more barrels on one wave than I have in 5 years in Brevard.

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I was right.

An hour-long interview, few watchers, with Spencer Pirdy, a Newport Beach surfing figure and board member of the Ben Carlson Foundation. it starts with a cautionary recent big-wave story (Pirdy's happy to have done a whole lot of swimming) and goes on to how Pirdy grew up, that his father valued waterman skills (be good at everything in the water), and that the late Ben Carlson was a greatly admired lifeguard and surfer, and someone who helped others in the community. Like introducing Pirdy to Puerto Escondido.

I'm poking through Patrick Moser's "Surf & Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture" about somone who bridged the Hawaiian and haole worlds and brought Hawaiian water skills to booming southern California until he died, age 35, in the great flu pandemic, 1919. Pirdy comes across as a direct descendant of Freeth values.

No need to listen to the whole thing; Pirdy's an interesting and well-spoken guy.

Edited: 01/29/2024 at 01:47 AM by ww

Slater. Fresh.

Been a bit dull in California, so Brent Weldon has a fresh half hour of "best of" at the Wedge and nearby.

Brad Jacobson did a bit of re-editing an old video of The Wedge on a super-nasty shorebreak day. Not huge by Wedge standards, but obviously dangerous. I wonder whether the attitude was "it took us an hour to drive here, and more time to find a parking spot, so why not get wet and get smashed?" The water was stuffed with people, including water photogs.

In keeping with that, Spencer Pirdy (whose podcast I linked) wiping out at the same place. Formidable waterman, now organizing the prone paddle to Catalina event.