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Believe it or not, there was a time when you couldn’t check the waves from your bed. The Huntington cam, where it all started.
Date: February, 1996
Location: Huntington Beach, California
Moment: Sean Collins installs the very first surf camera at the iconic Huntington Beach Pier.
“He was surfing’s Leonardo da Vinci.” – Bill Sharp
For most of surfing’s history, its mystique revolved around playing the guessing game. We were at the mercy of the whimsy of waves. Those pulses seemed to magically greet us without warning, and surfing was just as much about finding waves as it was about actually riding them – that is, until surf forecasting came along.
In the beginning – which, considering where things stand today, wasn’t all that long ago – forecasting waves was nearly impossible. There were simply too many parts that turned the wheel; too many considerations for most to comprehend. Swell size, swell direction, bathymetry, period, wind… taken as small pieces, each contained a vast amount of research, local knowledge, and to put it simply, time spent looking at each break. Time spent watching one wave through all its cycles: varying swells, tides, winds, and everything else that comes into play. And in the end, it was still a pretty big guessing game. One still never knew with any certainty what the waves would look like tomorrow.
That is, until forecasting became reliable enough to trust and available for the masses. And before the Internet, a lot had to be done. Yes, there was a time before you could stare at conditions on a 15-inch monitor or check the surf next Wednesday from your smartphone. The amount of research that went into getting those conditions to your computer is staggering. And one man, with a little help from his friends, did most of it.
Sean Collins built a forecasting empire out of a fax machine, some old weather charts, and a short wave radio. In doing so, he changed the forecast for surfing. Well before we expected to know what the waves were doing every hour on the hour, Collins was scouring Baja in a pickup truck. Using an old weather fax machine and a tall cactus to hold his 100-foot wire, he watched as satellite images churned out. That was the beginning of everything. Calling on a wealth of knowledge gleaned from oceanography books, marine studies, and years of staring at the ocean from the roof of his Surfside home, he developed the first reliable system to forecast waves. Then he shared it with his friends. Then they shared it with theirs, and they shared it with theirs.
Eventually, more than just more than just a small circle of his friends knew about Sean’s crystal ball. His accuracy at predicting swells was second-to-none. And, because surfers like surfing, everyone wanted a piece. Collins began receiving phone calls from strangers requesting information. At the time, his life revolved around surfing (and continued to do so until his death in 2011), and he worked as a waiter and bartender at a Longbeach restaurant to ensure a schedule that would keep him in the water as much as possible.
Then, in 1983, he and his wife Daren had a son, and a job that was a little more secure became a necessity. With his reputation as a surf forecaster firmly in place, it wasn’t long before he was approached to found a service based out of Orange County. It was a phone reporting company, and it was called Surfline. The number was 967-SURF, and for many that used it, it was a lifeline. There were a few competitors, but none managed to stick it out for too long. They used a variety of sources to form their forecasts, including Navy information, contacts in Australia, and short wave radio, to name a few. But it was still a difficult game to play, and no one had it figured out like Sean.
After two years, Surfline had built traction. Sean’s predictions, based on a mixture of science and foresight, were proving to be a valuable commodity so he left to start his own rival company called Wavetrak. It became so successful that in four years, he purchased his old company and merged the two, effectively cornering the expanding market.
The arrival of the Internet on a grand scale plays almost as big a role as Collins in the forecasting story – although without Collins, it would probably be told a few decades later. In the mid-nineties, banking on the success of the new medium, Surfline.com was launched, and in February of 1996, the first surf cam was installed, forever altering the way we surf. The camera took stills at Huntington, and by December of 1997, the first streaming cameras were introduced at Pipeline and Huntington.
Sean Collins’ forecasting genius and persistence in making his services digestible and available to all have arguably enabled more barrels of a lifetime than possibly anything else in surfing technology. Who said technology had nothing to do with surfing?
