Has it killed your stoke? Answers will vary. Photo: Jeremy Bishop//Unsplash
Much of the online commentary swirling around last month’s WSL’s World Championship Tour finals at Lower Trestles was quite predictable. Like, “Nobody can beat barrel-dodging Filipe Toledo at Lowers so why not just give him the trophy with an asterisk?” Or, “Carissa was robbed last year and she’s leading the ratings so it better not happen again.” And, “Griff has found his Zen center and he’s ready to fulfill his hometown destiny.” Not so predictable, however, was the amount of commentary, and number of viewer comments, focusing on, of all things, surf forecasting.
Everybody (at least everybody even marginally interested in professional surfing) seemed to have an opinion as to the veracity of the event forecast, as it directly related to the validity of the contest. It was as if the forecast was the 11th character in this cobblestone drama, with bets being placed on whether they’d win, place…or not even show. One “high performance surfing’ website even ran a feature in which they queried a half dozen respectable forecasters as to their predictions, as if daring them to make the call, with the scale varying from three-foot to 12, depending on who was asked.
All this made providing surf forecasts seem more essentially vital, and more perilous, than any other time in surf history. Begging the question, just how did the hyper-accurate surf forecast become such a pervasive component of modern surfing? And is that a good thing?
Surf forecasting, or at least attempts to accurately predict the arrival of rideable waves, is nothing new. In ancient Hawaii, for example, an entire kahuna class developed along Waikiki’s fertile crescent, dedicated not only to analyzing and predicting surf conditions, but actually calling the waves up through the application of ritual chants:
Ku mai! Ku mai! Ka nalu nui mai Kahiki,
Mai popoi ka uli, kaikoo loa
“Arise! Arise! The great surf from Kahiki.
Come, break, deep blue sea, the long heavy surf.”
In addition to the chanting, surf kahunas operating at a special heiau located at the foot of Leahi (Diamond Head) studied pertinent natural components like ocean currents, wave refraction, sea bird behavior and weather patterns, all in the pursuit of predicting suitable surfing conditions. One particularly delightful academic theory even has these loin-clothed forecasting progenitors putting kites up when the swells arrived, signaling to surfers living in distant Honolulu that the surf was up.
Like so many other aspects of early Hawaiian life, this sort of arcane expertise was eventually lost following the arrival of the first European, for whom the idea of surf science was no doubt unfathomable (“You heathens do this stuff for fun?) And it wasn’t just the Calvinist missionaries – well into the early 20th century mystery prevailed when it came to the waves when and where. Consider the venerable tome Hawaiian Surfriders 1935 by Tom Blake, in which the otherwise critically-thinking surfing innovator assigns a particularly fine run of high surf to a recent Japanese earthquake.
For almost 40 years after Blake and the boys enjoyed their “earthquake” swells, surfers gave little thought as to accurate swell forecasts, perfectly satisfied with less detailed, primarily anecdotal data like “Pipeline breaks in the winter,” and “Malibu’s a summer break.” This began to change with a proverbial pebble dropped in the bucket – two pebbles, actually.
The first was a feature in a 1974 issue of SURFER magazine, in which Newport Beach photographer and mat rider Woody Woodworth advanced a very detailed correlation between Mexican chubasco hurricanes and big south swell barrels at seldom-breaking Newport Point. Lots of charts, with compass bearings and swell window graphics, sailed right over the head of most surfers at the time, having had adjusted to just showing up at the beach and hoping there were waves. At the same time Seal Beach surfer Sean Collins was doing his own deep dive into wave and weather science – with an eye on both hurricanes and Southern Hemisphere swells – all to better predict when might be the best time to head south of the border and into the Baja desert, more specifically to the perfect point surf at Scorpion Bay.
Collins’ journey has been extensively documented, from Baja road warrior to one of the most influential characters in surf history. Beginning in 1985, after Collins first commoditized his meteorological acumen with the introduction of WaveTrak, a pay-per-call surf report based on National Weather Service buoy data and commissioned beachside observers, the weather-wise guru relentlessly innovated, quickly moving though the simple “daily surf report” stage to the newly-coined Surfline prediction model, quite literally inventing modern surf forecasting as he went. Enter the internet, and the whole ‘goin’ surfin’’ paradigm shifted as seismically as, well, as a Japanese earthquake.
Over the decades, and as more and more forecasting sites sprung up in Surfline’s wake, surfing mindsets have changed in direct proportion with the evolving forecasting technology – and not always for the better. The highly critical commentary surrounding the WSL finals forecasting, for example, reveals that as surf forecasting has become more sophisticated [read: more accurate] anticipation has been replaced by expectation: not that the waves will be good, but that the forecast will be right. As if the forecasting site’s product isn’t pertinent data, but the waves themselves. Waves that more and more surfers, apparently, are expecting to be delivered on time.
I’m of the opinion that a little of surfing’s magic has been lost here. Before we were being told exactly when, where, how high and for how long, we were so grateful when we’d show up at the beach and discover there were waves to ride. Now, having grown so dependent on the forecasts, more often than not, we’re like spoiled children who didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas.
Reactionary? Yeah, a bit. And I’m certainly not saying that accurate surf forecasts aren’t a great thing. What I am suggesting, however, is that occasionally, just every now and then, you grab your board, drive down to the beach, and see, with your own eyes, what the waves look like. Knowing full well that you’re going out no matter what.
Stoked.
