Mellow waves, post-COVID surf craze, and a contest on the south side of the Huntington Beach, Calif. pier is what Dan Verner attributes this level of chaos to. To the casual observer, no, that’s not how surfing is supposed to look. In fact it looks like the kind of day I might not to surf at all, or search for a less-crowded peak down the beach. In Dan’s case, it was a day to whip out the camera instead of the surfboard.
Dan’s a Huntington Beach local, so he’s seen it all through the years, but “it’s been a full-on circus here post-COVID,” he told us. And a full-on circus is right, at least from the spectator’s point of view. To be in the thick of things would probably feel like a fight for sheer survival, let alone waves.
