Tag Archives: surfing

Gratuitous Surfing Videos for Summer 2017

The Dock from STAB on Vimeo.

The Dock

INTO BLISS – Jordan Rodin from David & Douglas on Vimeo.

Into Bliss

Culture Shifters: Jake Burghart (Director of Photography @ Vice) from Mike Pagan on Vimeo.

VICE’s Jake Burghart

(I learned to surf in Hawaii during the summer of 1968. I did so on a Hobie with a mahogany stringer, and, then graduated to my cousin’s new Greg Noll red fiberglass long board. It was all long boards back in the day. The last time I surfed was on a vacation trip to Hilton Head in 1970.)

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Eat or Be Eaten

World Surf League Pe’ahi Challenge

These waves are over 25 feet, with most of them in the 30-40 foot range. If you wipe out and end up under the break, you can be driven 30+ feet under the surface. Big wave surfing is, it is said, at once extremely dangerous and exhilarating.

The two summers I surfed, first in 1968 (mostly off Honolulu Oahu, or Barber’s Point,) Hawaii, and the next summer, 1969, in South Carolina and Virginia, the biggest wave I tried to ride was a 10+ piece of hurricane surf off of Hilton Head. I crashed and was so impressed by the burn that I swam to shore, waited for my big old Hobie board to wash ashore, and, literally, called it a summer. Oddly, the closest call I ever had was on a tender little five footer at a spot off of Honolulu called Ones and Twos. A soldier on R&R from Viet Nam, who had rented a board probably to go surf for the first time, kicked it my way while missing his take off. I spotted it zeroing in on my head, dove away and crashed into the coral reef.

My pal Teddy had already warned me that there were a lot of servicemen out on the breaks convinced surfing wasn’t so hard that it couldn’t be mastered in a day.

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Surf Forever

One Hour of San Diego Surfing Time Collapsed: San Diego Study #4 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.

This video was created from one hour of source footage shot from a bluff in San Diego the morning of Jan 21, 2014. I was interested in exploring the manipulation of water and to see how the movements and patterns from surfing interact. For more information about this video please visit cysfilm.com and MOPA.org
Shot on a Canon C100 + Atomos Ninja in CLog, with a Canon EF 100-400 f/4.5 L lens at 24p. The post work was done in After Effects.


Thanks Cy.

The once a summer–posted to the explorations blog–surfing video, posted annually because I was an enthusiastic goofy-footed surfer during the summers of 1968, 1969 and 1970 at, respectively, the breaks of: Oahu, Virginia, South Carolina. Then, crossing it off my bucket list, I soon became a long-haired hippie.

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The First and Last Surfing Video of This Summer

Theatre of Sport: Bali from SURFING Magazine on Vimeo.

Hey, while surfing Vimeo…

In prior posts. (here and here,) I tell of my very brief surfing moments during the summers of 1968 and 1969.

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Pipes

I have witnessed beautiful tubes twice in my life. The first I saw was in 1962, at Point Santa Clara in Panama. I was seven and my dad bravely went body surfing. I vaguely recall he wasn’t out in the shore break for long, for the ripe barrels aggravated a fierce undertow. The rest of the family watched from the beach.

The second time was during the first summer of my two season surfing ‘career.’ My cousin took me to Makaha, on the west coast of Oahu. We had our boards, but the surf, running about 6+ feet was beyond my nascent skills, so we looked but did not paddle out. Yet, the break was gorgeous. Sometimes it pops up in my dreams.

I did manage to insert myself into the tube of a wave exactly once, on a lucky takeoff on a nice playful wave at a break called Ones and Twos off of Waikiki. But, young goof foot couldn’t keep the ten foot fiberglass and redwood Hobie there for long, and so I chopped through to the bottom to scoot out through the wash.

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ENDLESS SUMMER

I would have been a surfer. Had I grown up near the waves. Alas, Cleveland.

During the height of the Viet Nam war, I spent the summer of 1968 with the family of my Uncle Colonel Pat in Hawaii, on Oahu. It was quite an adventure. I learned to play poker. I was 13. But the highlights came almost every day, when I ventured into the breaks at Barber’s Point and at a spot–Ones, Twos–off of Waikiki, with my cousin Chris and a neighborhood lad, Teddy. (The neighborhood was Fort Kamemeheha, situated at the mouth of Pearl Harbor, and located a half mile off the end of Hickam Air Force Base’s main runway.)

I was goofy foot and an excellent swimmer. Being a good swimmer came in handy because I spent a lot of time chasing after the 7 foot long Hobie board. The break at Barber’s topped out at about four feet. We made several forays into the summer break off of Waikiki. The size of the waves was similar but the waves were steeper. One day my cousin told me the break was close to six feet. He shunted me off to the edge of Ones, and there I had my only close call, when a soldier on R&R loosed his board right toward my head, forcing me to duck, then abandon my take off. This happened in about three feet of water on top of a coral reef. I just managed to escape getting a rub job from the reef. The other guy’s board missed the side of my head my inches.


Billabong, Teahoopu, Tahiti

The next summer my aunt and uncle had moved to Virginia. I visited, and we made one trip to Virginia Beach, but the boards stayed on the car because the conditions were much better for body surfing. Then, during the next summer of 1970, with a red Greg Noll board of my cousin’s that I had a share in, I vacationed with my family at Hilton Head. There the swells rolling in from all the way across the Atlantic didn’t offer much of a sturdy up-welling and break, so the only surfing, such as it was, happened in the roiling wash. Until a hurricane blew by in Florida, tripling the size of the waves, and causing the 8-10 foot swells to become steep enough to ride down, like sledding on a snow hill. But, it became immediately apparent that their ferocious all-at-once close out, close to shore, involved way too much water for me, intrepid and fearless as I was, to safely surf.

And that was the last time I paddled out into anything.

Lots of surfing videos on Youtube. (Search: Billabong Odyssey | example | mini-documentary) One thing I’m mindful of is that these monster waves in the following videos are breaking in very shallow water, say, a 30-60 foot wave breaking in under 8 feet of water. Scary.

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