As things stand going into the final weekend of the ISA World Masters, Team USA currently leads the standings and is well positioned to potentially top the podium with a gold medal. With a drained out, mid-morning tide and the contest temporarily on hold at Nicaragua’s Playa Colorado, ESPN Surfing…
On June 21, Lib Tech co-founder Mike Olson made the drive from Mervin Manufacturing to the Cleanline surfshop in Seaside, Ore., to personally deliver the first batch of Lib Tech Waterboards. It was a big day for Olson, for a couple of reasons. You see, he used to work at Cleanline, as their ding-repair…
What kind of Americans are surfers? 2012 4th of July Gallery Surfers and the red, white, and blue. Gallery Hard to say. We’re not really a homogeneous group within this country that you can label one way or another. Many conscious folks go left on every wave and then there are waterborne…
In order to chase a swell one has to be willing to sacrifice everything. This last swell at Cloubreak was worth every sacrifice in the world to me. Although not as big as the infamous Volcom Fiji Pro swell, it stacked up equally in other ways. Gallery Kelly Slater, Joel Parkinson and Alex Gray…
“Ten years from now I feel like I could still be winning contests.” Kelly Slater said that four years ago in 2008 a day after winning his ninth world title at the Billabong Pro in Mundaka, Spain. He was 36 years old and had just capped off the most dominant season of his career, having […]
The ingredients for the Tropical Storm Beryl cocktail were first stirred over Cuba early last week — warm subtropical waters, sugar, convection, mint —until she picked up enough steam to become the second named preseason system of 2012. By Wednesday, still fairly tight to the coast of south Florida,…
With the completion of the Billabong Pro Rio and Joel Parkinson taking second place to John John Florence, Parkinson is now in the No. 1 spot on ASP World Tour. At 31, he has four runner-up finishes (2002, 2004, 2009, and 2011) but has yet to collect a World Title for himself. Does all this […]
It’s funny that modern surfing is considered a “culture” in an anthropological sense. Studying Hawaiian surfing, or any aboriginal peoples as a culture seems to make sense. But the idea of long hairs who owned three pairs of shorts, traveling about, sleeping in cars and chasing waves as a subject of…
Chances are if you’re from the States you haven’t heard much about Romain Cloitre, let alone seen his surf talents in action, but to be sure, dude rips. Part of a hard-charging, full-on crew from the south Indian Ocean that’s quickly catching up to more global powerhouses like the United States and…
Skateboarding is a baby compared to surfing. While we’re celebrating the Z-Boys of the 70s and the Bones Brigade of the 80s as our pioneers, surfing was already huge in America for three or four decades by that point (I’m not even going to get into how it dates all the way back to the […]