"The most important thing for me has been to be at the beach, to be able to surf."

The Academy-nominated surf movie icon Bruce Brown, director of The Endless summer although he almost got the Oscar for the moto documentary On Any Sunday, was forty-three when he split Orange County and bought 42 acres on the Gaviota coastline, a little north of Santa Babs.

Gaviota is one of those joints that hasn’t fallen under the jackboot and bulldozer of developers and, even now, is still the longest stretch of rural coastline in southern California.

Seventy souls inhabit Gaviota, either ranching, working organic farms or rehabilitating wretched little mammals at The Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute.

What remains of industry has either been shut down or is in the process of being decommissioned. The old Chevron gas plant has gone and the Gaviota Marine Terminal is being turned into public space.

A pretty little slice of heaven.

Bruce and his wife Patricia lived in a trailer on the site at 15550 US Hwy 101, Goleta (Gaviota), while they built the house, which Bruce lived in until his death in 2017.

Now, the fam is selling the four-thousand square feet four-bedroom joint for a little under five million.

The garage is as big as the house, it has direct access to the beach and is real close to a point break called Brown’s, as well as to Hollister Ranch.

Maybe the best part of the Endless Summer ranch is the spirit of Bruce Brown that fills the joint. This isn’t a place you go to be chained to your little Apple laptop or telephone.

“I worked hard from ’58 to ’71,” Brown told the WaPo in 1991, as he flicked the ash into a conch shell ashtray from one of the fifty or so Winstons he smoked every day. “My outlook has been, why work if you don’t have to, if you don’t want to? The most important thing for me has been to be at the beach, to be able to surf.”

Epic.

(Looks like someone has already thrown down an offer on the place; if you’ve the cash get in there and gazump ’em!)

Major World Surf League Baseball.

Oh I will not be shy about my love of baseball, no for not one second. It may not be the “sport of kings” but baseball makes much sense as there are no heats, judges in towers, excellent ranges, Joe Turpels. No, no, no and no. There are, on the other hand, time-less innings, hearty men swinging lumber and throwing cheese, dingers and Vin Scully.

Baseball is a fantastic game and even though I am on European soil, I check in daily with my San Diego Padres to see how they are faring. Greater Southern California has two other teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Neither are as good as the Pads but the LAAofA drew slightly closer with the unveiling of a new surf-inspired uniform.

Per the press release:

The Angels new City Connect uniform focuses on the region’s heavy surfing-inspired history, dating back to the 1950s and 1960s with vintage surf style lettering, striping, and number decoration in red on a cream-coloured uniform.

“In Southern California, there are few things more synonymous with summer than days at the beach and nights at the ballpark,” said Los Angeles Angels President, John Carpino in the press release. “Our City Connect uniforms look to celebrate those traditions by bringing the local beach culture to the Big A.”

Across the front of the jersey is “Angels” scripted out in red with a large silver halo around the top of the “A” and a red tail. The scripted “Angels” is done so in a lettering “inspired by vintage surf brands”, the end of the tail reflects the end of a “fish tail” surfboard (appropriate as the club of Mike Trout and Tim Salmon, the Angels proudly note).

Below the scripted lettering is the player number in a Pacific Ocean-inspired navy blue and trimmed in silver. This number is designed to resemble the font used on the sides of local lifeguard towers. A red diamond houses the number, another nod to vintage surfing brands.

Don’t even get me started on how much I enjoy fish tails.

Shakas all around.

Justice calling.

There is rotten and there is lousy and there is also next-level bull roar. Now, it is one thing to borrow a surfboard, another to not return, full trash to straight steal but to steal from someone who has lost usage of their very legs and had one customized to compete in the adaptive surfing championships?

Well, next level bull roar.

But let us travel, together, to Hawaii where the aforementioned just so happen to take place ahead of the Access Surf’s Hawaii Adaptive Surfing Championship.

A burglary at the Ewa Hotel in Waikiki has left one competitive surfer beached.

Spike Kane was set to hit the waters of Waikiki Beach this week for Access Surf’s Hawaii Adaptive Surfing Championship, but Sunday morning, he found that his custom made board was gone, Kane spending the rest of the day searching for answers.

“We checked to make sure no staff had moved it and then they checked in the storage room.” Kane told Hawaii News Now. “We went all around the property, couldn’t find it.”

Kane says that Hotel security showed him footage of two individuals on a moped taking his board at about 9:00 p.m. Saturday night from the Hotel garage.

Two individuals sharing a moped is bad enough (unless they are both deeply enmeshed in the ska life).

Two individuals sharing a moped and stealing an adaptive surfboard?

Utterly rotten and I trust Hawaii to take care of this nasty business.

"The 'don't tell' policy for surf spots is an extension of surf nazi culture, the legacy of Miki Dora. Its roots are in racism and colonialism.”

Readers of the New York Times have reacted with pearl-clutching horror at a story on surfing’s culture of protecting secret spots from exposure on social media.

“Publicizing certain surf spots, and especially ones off the beaten path, is similar to violating the first rule of Fight Club,” writes Adam Elder in The (No Longer) Secret World of Surf Spots.” You just don’t talk about certain surf spots. For years, surfers, surf magazines and surf photographers mostly lived by that unwritten law in order to keep surfing’s secret spots secret. Don’t take photos, and if you must, don’t identify it by anything more specific than the region, the country or even the continent.”

Devon Howard, the former commissioner of the longboard World Surf League, handsome as hell, keeper of a beautiful upswept hairdo, holder of dangerous opinions, provides a useful analogy. 

“There are people who feel like they’ve tended a garden for years, and then you come in with a dirt bike and do some doughnuts and peel out in it, kicking up dirt in their face.”

The Times, a cherished weapon in the left-winger’s arsenal against the tsunami of racism and transphobia sweeping the US, also quotes Chris Burkard, Journal photo editor Grant Ellis and Canadian surfer Josh Mulcoy.

Readers reacted with horror over the concept that keeping a few surf spots under the radar might be a good idea citing it as a white ideal, a vestige of western colonialism with National Socialist overtones.

A small sample of the 300-plus comments.

The “don’t tell” policy for surf spots is an extension of the surf nazi culture, the legacy of Miki Dora. Its roots are in racism and colonialism. 

Only a damaged individual refuses to share a gift bestowed upon them by nature. Lacking the tools of friendship, they select violence to deal with uncomfortable change.

Anyone want to bet how many non white and female surfers were let in on the secret wave spots? Not very many, I’d guess. This reads, to me, like a white men’s club suddenly mad they have to share.

I’ve always thought surfers who think a place belongs to them as thuggish. You didn’t pay to privatize that area for you and your friends.  You don’t own title to it.

Loving the sport of surfing requires inclusivity, and gatekeeping public areas for the sake of your own sesh and at the expense of the development of other surfers is childish and selfish. 

The concept of Wilderness is a myth that is part of our colonial legacy. Humans have always been a part of the environment, but the large scale removal and extermination of indigenous people has contributed to the idea that Westerners are discovering “remote, wild places.” Better to think of them as intentionally depopulated places.

Other than native Pacific Islanders there is no surfing culture that merits the hoo-ha described here. Rich white surfers are going to bump elbows and and I don’t care.

And, this real good for it’s a difficult one for the Times reader to process. ie. bad locals, but locals probably indigenous to islands ergo good, fighting bad, but so is police intervention, defund the police etc.

Surfing Waikiki one day on a long board, I was attacked by a local who did not like the fact I was on a long board in his surf break, even though there were plenty of open rides. I fought back as he and his friends pummeled me. I was able to paddle away but they still followed me to the beach, and then tried to pummel me again. Luckily the police were around.

Where do you stand?