Surveying the landscape along Bunker Hill, I stopped to photograph another border monument walled into Mexico. Before the fences and walls, the monuments marked the border. I'm actually standing on U.S. soil but on the Mexican side of the wall.

Like a guest registry, the wall is marked with the names and nationalities of the people who crossed it. I am copying down some of their messages, including one from a guy who loves a woman named Aurora very much.

The wall has been described as a "roller coaster" for the way it climbs and dips with the landscape. Here's its final descent into the ocean.

With the Tijuana police on his tail, a man jumps the fence into the U.S.

I'm looking for the migrant who just jumped the fence. The Border Patrol is there on a quad, but the migrant escaped. He wasn't really trying to get into the U.S. though. He was evading Tijuana police who often extort migrants for whatever money they have. I saw the man back on the Mexican side a while later.

This is artist and border documentarian Maria Teresa Fernandez. Compassionate and brave, she's dedicated a large chunk of her career to covering life on the margin.

On the stands now! I profiled the Gulf Coast’s most prestigious surf dynasty, the Spencers. In response, Sterling Spencer created the video montage linked above. Getting a written response is cool, but a video is way better. Check the cover:

Fergal Smith skating over about a foot of water.

The assignment given to photographer Grant Ellis and I for the Big Issue, was to simply fly to Madrid and meet up with manic traveler Kepa Acero. From there, we would go anywhere the surf would take us. Cabo Verde and other Atlantic islands were on our minds. Africa was a distinct possibility. But the charts told us to head for Ireland. There, we linked up with the locals and were introduced to some of the scariest waves on the planet. Check it out in Surfer’s Big Issue.

“I don’t know how other people felt about ‘The 20-year Surf Trip’ by Kimball Taylor, but I thought it was the best thing I have read in SURFER or anywhere else for many years. Do you have more of the same thing? Any more pieces similar to that from Kimball Taylor? If so please publish them! Fascinating reading! A really intelligent writer!” –Susan Hewitt, NYC

Celtic pointbreak dreamland.

For a number of reasons, I spent most of February and March living in Galway, Ireland. When the winds went wrong, I stayed inside and wrote. When things cleared up, I jumped into the diesel Ford and logged some kilometers. Navigating Ireland is tough. I must have passed this little gem two dozen times before it’s existence hit me.

Keep your eye out for my piece on Ireland in Surfer magazine’s “Big Issue” due out in June.

Volume 20, number 6 contains "The Bicycle Tour," by Kimball Taylor

After researching 1960s Banzai Pipeline, Kimball Taylor’s interest in Bob Simmons’ 1953 bicycle trip from Makaha to Sunset Beach around Kaena Point piqued his interest. Rather impromptu, Taylor sets out to replicate Bob’s trip, even down to an old, rusty bike in favor of a newer, easier ride.

New Yorker Writer Bryan DiSalvatore on Kimball’s The Bicycle Tour: “I loved the no-bullshit first page, these roaring, feuding dinosaurs, still pissing on the shrubbery after all of these years. The quick-shots of Noll and Edwards–to me these, oh, documentary shots, as opposed to the air-brushes we’ve had for years, prose wise, are essential . . . I thought his, Kimball’s, prose soaring.”

Keep your eyes peeled for it.

 

Sean Mattison, the mastermind behind Slater’s “nubster.” Courtesy: Mattison

It’s live: we read the wind in textures, we hear the sounds, place ourselves in the moment, measure ourselves against it, and we make our opinions known to anyone who will listen — but the truth is, there’s close to nothing a webcast fan can do to influence the on-site action of a world tour surfing event.

Yet it’s not impossible. In August Sean Mattison — former pro surfer, USA team coach and design geek of note — rolled his ankle while deploying a power snap in front of one of his young athletes, Courtney Cologne. The embarrassment healed better than the sprain. “Anytime I tried to do anything,” he said, “it’d swell up.” So a strong part of his rehab regime included watching every competition webcast, heat-by-heat, sitting in his kitchen, his ankle propped on a stool. Beginning with the U.S. Open, it turned out to be a pretty full contest schedule. Mattison told himself that he was studying heats to the benefit of the elite teen surfers he coached. They might find themselves in similar competition some day. But there was a part of Mattison that was just fanning-out as well.

Around about the initial rounds of the Billabong Pro in Tahiti, Mattison’s design mind kicked in. He’d been an early proponent of the twinzer, having worked with Mike Hynson on a quad fish series that developed into the popular Blacknight model. Afterward, Mattison designed another hit called the Shadow for his own brand Von Sol. Following shapes amalgamated performance short board tails with fish-like dimensions. In pushing twinzers to thruster-like performance, Mattison realized it was always a trade-off. “We like how quick on a rail and how fast twinzers are, but they can be squirrelly.” So, he’d been experimenting with this tiny, half-moon keel in the back — about an inch and a half tall — which smoothed the ride but retained the quad’s best properties. The addition made his boards a ridiculous throw-back, however, the maligned five-fin.

As Mattison watched Kelly Slater tackle big Teahupoo on a quad, he paused. Throughout the year Kelly had been switching back and forth between thrusters and quads. Maybe, Mattison’s little fin would create a middle ground for the champ. Mattison awoke one night during the contest window and decided to email Slater. Mid-email, he stopped. What if this backfired? The best case? The champ tries fin. The worst case? The champ tries and hates the fin. What if it’s mocked as a joke from the ’80s? His stock as a designer could plummet. Still, Mattison couldn’t stop himself, he felt inspired, and he pushed send.

To Mattison’s surprise, Slater got right back to him. “Sure, I’d love to try it,” he wrote.

“Where should I send it?” Mattison asked. “San Clemente?”

“No, New York, there’s gonna be waves.”

The designer sent a couple of the “Nubster” fins to Slater via a friend in New York. By then Slater was working his way through the early rounds in Long Beach on his straight quad. The way the draw worked, Slater was meant to come up against Bobby Martinez. But then something spectacular happened. In a post-heat, post-win interview, Martinez let his fans know what was on his mind in full color commentary and got disqualified for it. This gave Slater the rest of the day off. That evening the champ screwed in Mattison’s nubster and went for a free surf. Rumor has it that Martin Potter saw Slater looking dangerous.

In the morning, Slater responded to Mattison’s original email. “No joke,” he wrote. But on the following webcast Mattison didn’t see the fin. He didn’t see it, that is, until Slater blasted a huge alley-oop in his fourth round heat with Josh Kerr and Jadson Andre. Suddenly the fifth-wheel was noticed by everyone. It becomes the talk of the contest, it’s mentioned in the New York Times and the webcast introduces the keel with tight zooming focus. In a post-heat interview Slater calls out Mattison, mentions a heat back in 1982 when Mattison should have defeated David Eggers, and thanks him for the fin. And there’s Mattison 2,800 miles away, sitting in his kitchen with his swollen ankle propped on a stool. “It made me feel like I took a ride with him,” Mattison said.

As director of a conservation organization, Serge Dedina puts in a lot of field work along remote coasts. Photo: Kimball Taylor

“Tourism and surf travel are not the same,” said Reef co-founder Fernando Aguerre, “Tourism is like a whorehouse, the best beds go for the biggest money. Surf travel is different.”

Aguerre was letting loose at the first- ever “symposium” on surf travel and philanthropy held September 17. An academic conference or “intellectual jam session” built on speeches, panel discussions, and lectures, the symposium was a gathering of people with deeper interests in surf destinations and their communities. The inaugural event had been established by San Diego State University’s Center for Surf Research — in itself a new and unique entity — and drew a who’s who of surf explorers, environmentalists and humanitarians. Wilderness conservation organizations like Wildcoast shared a venue with humanitarian outfits like SurfAid — whose work toward defeating malaria in the Mentawai islands set the gold-standard for surf-themed aid work. The common thread, many discovered, was the need for healthy breaks and healthy host communities.

What was clear from the outset was the recent surge and variety of non-profits emerging to address them. “I would describe it as a social movement,” said Dr. Jess Ponting, Director of the Center for Surf Research.

Ponting is an Australian native whose personal surf travel and education converged in a focus on “sustainable surf tourism.” He holds the first-ever PhD in that field and has worked in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Mexico and Fiji — where he wrote a surf tourism master plan for the Fijian government. Ponting convinced SDSU to house the new non-profit center in its L. Robert Payne School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

Much of the symposium meditated on issues concerning the impacts of surf travel. Speaker and SDSU alumni Rusty Miller was one of the first to surf Bali’s Uluwatu and thus a star of Alby Falzon’s “Morning of the Earth.” After that iconic discovery, Miller kept in touch with Bali and said that for, a time, tourism and the needs of local people created a good balance. But there came a point, Rusty said, “when visiting surfers ceased to engage in the host community” — and that’s when they lost the plot.

Fernando Aguerre created an analogy about a small surfing village holding a perfect wave. He described the village’s development, from a handful of visiting surfers to full hotel and restaurant service to a bustling metropolis, and then he gave the village a name: Cabo San Lucas. This process has been recreated so many times at now famous surf zones that it was interesting to hear from young non-profit directors working in small but growing communities. Zack Parker’s Walu for example, is dedicated to improving hygiene and living conditions in coastal communities of Papua New Guinea.

Some of groups represented were spin offs of major apparel manufacturers like Quiksilver and Reef. Another sector of community work was represented by Jon Roseman of Tavarua, whose resort has developed a more comprehensive medical infrastructure for neighboring villages. The challenges for the remainder, mostly young non-profits focused on community development, were laid out by experienced directors. Wildcoast’s Serge Dedina pointed out that the commercial surf world may seem large, but it is only a seven-billion dollar industry, about the size of the dry cleaning industry in the U.S. For the new non-profits to prosper and do good work, they need to get busy with the “non-sexy, non-fun” things like diversifying financial support and building strategic plans for both the short and long terms.

“To my mind, one of the worst things that can happen is if a non-profit starts work in a community and then picks up and leaves a year or two later. Commitment to the long term is the only way to be effective,” said Tavarua’s Jon Roseman.

Dr. Ponting said that part of the appeal to surf-themed non-profit work is that surf travel is “a kind of nirvana that can actually be attained.” To make it do lasting good as well is an obvious attraction. “Surfers who get involved with the communities they travel to have their minds blown and their lives changed,” said Ponting. “A certain portion of those people need to go deeper.”