To watch Brian Bent speed trim across a sparkling San O wall on his kook box, a chambered wooden surfboard popular in the ‘30s and ‘40s, is to watch a...

It was 1987 and Pipeline was 10-12 feet, breaking way out on the third reef, and there were no takers, it was a day to mindsurf.      Until.  ...

There was a time when surfing was confined to the water. Heaving lips were smacked with great chutzpah, glassy blue face was carved with sushi-chef precision, but the notion of...

We take for granted that the tri-fin is the most common surfboard in the lineup. It wasn’t always like this. Throughout the ‘70s it was singles and twins. Single-fins had...

The year was 1967. The Doors, the Grateful Dead, and David Bowie had just released their self-titled debut albums; Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, was sweeping...

I grew up in an idyllic suburban community on the west end of the San Fernando Valley that I despised. There were many modes of escape, but my favorite was...

Some years back, I was talking to my friend Jeannie Chesser about her move from Florida to Hawaii in 1970. We were standing in the Ala Moana Bowls parking lot,...

A couple years ago, the editors at Surfline.com proposed that I write/edit a series about the history of surfing and skateboarding and how these sports overlap and inform each other....

I first fell in love with Raymond Pettibon’s text/image drawings in the late ‘70s, when he made cover art for Black Flag records. They were witty, irreverent, subversive, pornographic, and...

Many years ago, in what feels like another life, I was a professional surfer. I had sponsors. I got my picture in the mag. I had a healthy- to bursting-at-the-seams-sized...

Sometimes it’s not the music you hear but where you hear it. I heard Marcos Valle’s ‘80s boogie dance tune “Estrelar” while driving in rush-hour traffic through the San Fernando...

Let’s play it back in the same blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pace that it seemed to happen: There was “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the Zika virus outbreak, the EU Migrant Crisis, Obama’s...

Winter does different things to different places. In Hawaii and Florida, it doesn’t change the water temperatures too dramatically. On the west coast and in the northeast, though, water temps...

On a recent Saturday morning at Malibu, I found myself checking the waves alongside a longhaired, bearded, barefoot, 60s-ish guy in old faded 501s and a jean jacket bedecked with...

In a recent post on the brilliant BrainPickings.org, founder Maria Popova added a new entry to the things she’s learned in the ten years she’s been editing the website: Don’t...