Introduction
Modern life traps you in predictable routines and comfortable complacency. You find yourself seeking a deeper engagement with the physical world that standard comforts cannot satisfy. You want to understand how a single, consuming passion can organize an entire life.
William Finnegan shows how a lifelong pursuit of waves transforms into a global map of obsession, coming-of-age, and the relentless search for wild places. Surfing operates as an entire ecosystem of travel, danger, and subculture rather than a mere hobby. You learn that mastering the ocean requires a total surrender of conventional safety.
The memoir follows a chronological journey from early boyhood initiation to seasoned maturity. You move from the racially charged lineups of Honolulu to the point breaks of California and the radical shifts of the shortboard revolution. You travel through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe while balancing nomadic freedom with the demands of adult life.
- How do you survive the intense localism and hostility of foreign surf breaks?
- What happens when a recreational obsession crowds out conventional career ambitions?
- How does the relentless pursuit of heavy water shape your relationships and worldview over decades?
- Can you maintain a wild surfing life while entering middle age and building a professional career?
1. Honolulu and the Fear Line
Moving to a racially charged Honolulu as a teenager forces you to navigate intense social hostility and master complex tropical surf breaks.
At age 13, you arrive in Hawaii and face a starkly racialized minority where white students are called haoles. You experience daily intimidation and physical harassment from local mokes at Kaimuki Intermediate School.
A student named Freitas repeatedly hits you on the head with a two-by-four in wood shop class while the teacher ignores it. You eventually find a degree of protection by joining a local white gang known as the In Crowd, adapting to local pidgin speech to survive.
Racial Minority Experience
Modern surfing in Hawaii descends from an ancient tradition called he‘e nalu that was nearly destroyed by colonial demographic collapse.
- The estimated Hawaiian population fell from 800,000 in 1778 to 40,000 by 1893.
- Calvinist missionaries began arriving in the year 1820 to impose a cash economy.
- Duke Kahanamoku kept the surviving practice alive by winning a 1912 Olympic gold medal for swimming.
Hawaiian Surf Complexity
Hawaiian surf breaks differ dramatically from California spots due to shifting trade winds and variable swells. You try to surf Cliffs near Diamond Head twice a day, learning to navigate blown-out morning conditions and find speed pockets on the shallow reef.
The ocean serves simultaneously as a refuge and a hostile wilderness. Surfing maintains a psychological boundary defined by mortal danger, requiring you to constantly measure your limits against an indifferent ocean.
You face terrifying sets at big-wave spots like the Bomb and Rice Bowl, experiencing visceral panic in the impact zone. You must stay calm and know your physical and emotional boundaries when a large swell produces a dangerous close out.
2. California Coast and Apprenticeship
Early Southern California beach culture and rocky point breaks provide the foundational physical discipline and local knowledge required to read waves.
San Onofre Learning
Early California surf outposts like San Onofre provided an ideal, low-pressure environment for beginners to transition from bodysurfing to standing on a surfboard. San Onofre offered long, slow, and mushy waves that allowed novice surfers to experience the sensation of sustained speed and momentum without the violent concussions of steep beachbreaks. Because boards were large and heavy in the early eras, riding straight toward shore was the standard initial technique.
You rode your first waves standing up at age ten on a borrowed green board at San Onofre, marveling at the clear turquoise water streaming beneath your feet.
C Street Apprenticeship
Developing true competence at a local surf break requires a long-term, fanatical study of local oceanography, wave patterns, and social hierarchies. Surfers spend years wiring a spot by observing the intricate interactions between tide, wind, swell direction, and bottom topography. This meticulous local knowledge is matched by learning the unwritten rules of the lineup and earning the respect of veteran regulars.
You and your friend Rich Wood spent exhaustive hours studying the complex, kelpy waves at California Street in Ventura, eventually earning curt nods of acknowledgment from the older locals. Your father bought an old duplex rental unit near the beach in Ventura for eleven thousand dollars.
Wave judgment in surfing relies on an intricate, subcortical synthesis of environmental cues and accumulated experience that largely defies verbal explanation. Deciding where to position oneself in the lineup involves rapid calculations based on previous swells, water color, surface texture, and crowd behavior. These split-second decisions mirror the instinctive navigation methods used by ancient mariners.
The fundamental core of surfing is an engagement with the raw, beautiful violence and immense power generated by breaking waves. While social dynamics in the lineup involve a simian dance of dominance and submission, the true test of a surfer is how they confront the raw energy of the ocean. As waves gain power, surfers must choose whether to recklessly test themselves against the juice or avoid it out of fear.
3. The Shortboard Revolution
The late sixties introduction of shortboards replaces traditional longboards, turning famous breaks into crowded arenas and unlocking deep barrel riding.
Pioneers like Bob McTavish, George Greenough, and Dick Brewer built boards with V-bottom hulls and deep chines. You could now generate immense acceleration out of bottom turns and navigate hollow sections that previously ended your ride.
The author watched Bob McTavish ride an eight-foot wave at Rincon at high speed, executing rapid turns past the crowd all the way to the cove on an outlandishly short, V-bottom board. Your first shortboard was a 7'0" Dewey Weber Mini-Feather.
Shortboard Mechanics
Shortboards prioritized speed, ultra-maneuverability, and vertical turns over traditional nose-riding. You could perform drop-knee cutbacks and pull tightly inside the inner chambers of breaking hollow waves.
Fitting inside these barrels offered a powerful new dimension of surfing. You faced a new code of high risk and physical danger:
- falling off inside shallow reefs resulted in violent collisions with the ocean floor;
- unguided boards became dangerous projectiles during wipeouts.
While exploring K-181, a remote Baja reefbreak, the author pulled into a deep barrel and collided with his friend Bill Becket, who had ditched his board while caught inside.
Counterculture and Rebellion
The surfing subculture intertwined deeply with 1968 counterculture, adopting anti-war stances and a rejection of traditional authority. You experienced a period of youth insurrection where skepticism toward the government and police permeated daily life.
Surfers actively dodged the draft, and famous surfers sought to go underground to evade authorities during the Vietnam War period. Dedicated wave-chasing served as an antisocial, egocentric escape route from conventional achievement and citizenship into a modern nomadic frontier.
You routinely slipped away from obligations, using surfing as an excuse to escape landlocked drudgery and seek solitude at distant breaks. The relentless pursuit of perfect, lonely waves transformed you into a latter-day barbarian who prioritized egocentric freedom over social responsibility.
4. Maui and Honolua Bay Obsession
Dropping out of conventional life to live in Maui leads to total immersion in remote waves like Honolua Bay and tests personal relationships.
You pay 19 dollars for a flight from Honolulu to Maui after dropping out of college. You move to Lahaina, sleeping on the beach before securing a free car and cheap, roach-infested housing. Bryan Di Salvatore lends you his turquoise 1951 Ford named Rhino Chaser, which he originally bought for 125 dollars. You survive on a monthly emergency food-stamp ration of 31 dollars for two. You work at a local bookstore called Either/Or, while Caryn works as a waitress and you pay 100 dollars a month for a room at Harry Kobatake's rooming house.
Honolua Bay Discovery
When north swells finally hit Honolua Bay, you and Domenic surf alone for hours on immaculate six-foot waves, experiencing intense physical exhaustion and awe. The wave offers a flawless structure that tests your technical skills and makes you realize you want nothing else. You scavenge for moldy bread and mango rinds, postpone a grocery run to Lahaina, and surf Honolua Bay completely alone on your first morning there.
Ingesting psychedelics while confronting massive, chaotic natural elements can induce severe disorientation and psychological distress. You drop acid before dawn with Becket and drive to Honolua Bay, only to discover a massive, disorganized north swell closing out the entire bay. Tripping heavily after having dropped acid six or eight times before in your life, you paddle out into chaotic whitewater, struggle against being swept into a dangerous cave, and barely survive a violent wipeout. Leslie Potts gives you a ride in his car while you are recovering from your disastrous acid trip and discussing your wrecked surfboard.
Relationship Dynamics
Headstrong lifestyle choices and unshared burdens can gradually erode a young, codependent relationship. You and Caryn have been deeply fused since high school, acting as monogamous outcasts among countercultural peers. However, your relentless wanderlust, disregard for conventional planning, and single-minded obsession with surfing drag Caryn into homelessness, poverty, and isolation. This total absorption in the surf lifestyle ultimately destroys your relationship, leading to an abortion and your eventual breakup. Caryn eventually leaves you and takes up with Michael the glasser, leaving you heartbroken and isolated in Lahaina.
5. The Search in the South Pacific
Leaving stable employment behind, you set out on an open-ended expedition across Polynesia to chart unridden reefs and remote swells.
Working seasonal freight trains for the Southern Pacific as a brakeman provided good pay and physical tests. However, you felt a mandatory calling to abandon American life, postpone adult decisions, and search for unridden waves in the South Seas.
In 1974, at age twenty-five, you saved five thousand dollars and packed a custom-made 7'6" single-fin travel board before flying to Guam with a one-way ticket.
Oceanographic Mechanics
Finding ridable waves in uncharted remote regions requires specific geological and meteorological alignment between south swells and trade winds. Southern hemisphere winter storms generate big swells, but prevailing southeast trade winds create destructive onshore chop. You must search for reefs and offshore canyons that bend south swells into the wind while maintaining wave power and deepwater escape channels.
In Western Samoa, you analyzed charts and explored the south shore of Upolu and Savai'i, an island measuring forty miles by thirty miles, to find workable waves like Mach Two and Uo's.
Tavarua Discovery
Explorations in Tonga offered tantalizing surf potentials alongside severe logistical hazards, dangerous marine life, and encounters with expatriates. You explored islands like Eua, located twenty miles southeast of Nuku'alofa, encountering extremely shallow reefs, ferocious currents, and toxic dadakulachi sea snakes.
At Ufilei on Eua, you rode a ferocious, thick left near an exposed lava slab, paddling out through a gap in the reef that was only four feet wide.
The ultimate discovery of the trip was Tavarua in Fiji, a mechanical, world-class left-hand wave hidden behind a barrier reef. After false starts in muddy river mouths and misleading directions about the Yasawas, you located a classified World War II chart. Using binoculars from a village hillside on west Viti Levu, five miles away from the target, you spotted an unearthly, perfectly tapering left.
- You camped on the uninhabited island of Tavarua.
- You slept on a fish-drying rack to avoid venomous banded sea snakes.
- Bryan counted 117 fresh snake tracks across the beach in one morning.
- You surfed an exceptionally fast, hollow wave on August 24 when the swell reached double-overhead.
6. Australia and the Cultural Context
Encountering Australian egalitarianism and punishing pointbreaks like Kirra exposes you to intense physical tolls and the frictions of literary collaboration.
You buy a 1964 Falcon station wagon for three hundred dollars to travel the coast. Working as a pot washer in a casino fifteen minutes walk from the bungalow, you observe an unusual social atmosphere. A fellow kitchen worker named Billy McCarthy is a forty-year-old former professional saxophonist and perfume factory foreman who works happily as a nurseryman and restaurant hand without any sense of social embarrassment.
Kirra Wave Mechanics
Kirra operates as a uniquely punishing, fast, and hollow right-hand pointbreak breaking over a shallow sand bottom. You must navigate a wave that requires intense paddling against a strong downcoast current and precise takeoffs to survive the Butter Box section.
The wave offers three hundred yards for an empty racetrack ride when conditions align. You watch world champion Wayne Rabbit Bartholomew execute a master class in barrel riding at Kirra, moving too far forward on his board and making small adjustments to stay inside the tube.
Local hazards are severe:
- A local surfer is attacked by a shark and requires one hundred and fifty stitches.
- The heavy exposure brings medical problems known as surfer's ear.
Physical Cost
Long-term exposure to intense tropical sunlight and freezing ocean temperatures inflicts severe, cumulative physical damage on your body. Decades of heavy surf lead to medical issues that eventually require surgical intervention.
Nearly every surfer around you suffers from pterygia clouding their eyes. You experience the physical toll of exostoses, requiring three operations for surfer's ear from your years in Santa Cruz.
Collaborating on writing exposes deep aesthetic divergences between lifelong friends whose initial bond was formed over shared literary tastes. While attempting to write an abrasive article for an Australian surf tabloid called Tracks, you and Bryan Di Salvatore clash after eight years of knowing each other. One of you prefers transparent, accurate prose while the other remains enamored of showy originality. You argue over nearly every line, leading you to throw a crumpled ball of paper at your friend in frustration.
7. Expeditions through Asia and South Africa
Traversing the Asia Trail and teaching under apartheid in South Africa broaden your political awareness before nomadic travels reach a breaking point.
Lagundri Bay Peak
You navigate the famous Asia Trail to find complex coral reefs and world-class waves. At Uluwatu in Bali, low tides cause water to completely drain off the reef inside the Racetrack section. This leaves surfers with no water to dive off or pull out, relying entirely on luck to avoid severe injury.
You catch the deepest backhand barrel of your life at low tide when all the water drains off the Racetrack. This results in a terrifying survival move driven purely by stupidity and luck.
Further travels bring you to Nias, ten miles from Teluk Dalam, on an island with a population of five hundred thousand. The right-hand reef break at Lagundri Bay provides an immaculate, ruler-straight wall that peels without sections. You reach a peak as a surfer at age twenty-six on Nias, utilizing the extra-tall end-section to bank off the top from unprecedented heights and feeling completely immortal.
Grassy Park Teaching
Your nomadic path shifts toward profound political engagement when you take a job in South Africa. Working as a teacher at Grassy Park High School in a coloured township under apartheid, you replace the state-mandated propaganda syllabus with open discussions and a careers program until student boycotts erupt.
When student boycotts against apartheid erupt nationally, your students plaster Grassy Park High with banners. They hold alternative curricula led by student leaders like Cecil Prinsloo.
Two hundred thousand students refuse lessons during the national boycott. This intense exposure to gutter education and state repression alters your ambitions permanently.
Extended nomadic travel eventually reaches a breaking point where political awakening and professional ambitions necessitate a return home. Experiences in South Africa shift your focus toward politics and journalism. You pay twenty-nine dollars a month for rent in a jungle house in Sri Lanka before your journeys finally collapse. Mandy Sanger is detained by the Special Branch, and Sharon breaks off their relationship definitively while working in Zimbabwe. You leave The Struggle behind and return to America.
8. San Francisco and Ocean Beach
Surfing the exceptionally complex and punishing beachbreak at Ocean Beach demands iron dedication and deep psychological endurance.
Ocean Beach Complexity
Ocean Beach in San Francisco is an exceptionally unpredictable, complex, and intimidating beachbreak due to heavy groundswells and powerful tidal currents. Unlike surf spots with physical obstructions to define breaks, this shore has constantly shifting sandbars. It receives massive North Pacific groundswells combined with the massive volume of water emptying from San Francisco Bay.
These dynamics make the area as daunting as advanced theoretical physics or continental philosophy. You navigate four miles long for the beach break using precise local reference points. Locals do not simply say they surf Ocean Beach, but identify specific street-name lineup markers like Judah, Taraval, or Sloat.
Paddle Out Ordeal
Paddling out through the impact zone at Ocean Beach on winter days is an exhausting, terrifying ordeal that requires navigating relentless multi-layered whitewater. You face a grueling physical barrier where the inside bar unleashes punishing waves. This traps you in a perpetual cycle of physical struggle against strong currents and near-panic.
On big days, you confront extreme hurdles:
- six or seven walls of onrushing whitewater to cross;
- terrifying trough moments during hold-downs;
- immense volumes of water moving from four hundred square miles of San Francisco Bay filling and emptying twice a day.
Getting caught inside on a heavy day feels like trying to swim up a waterfall with no option to turn back.
Mark Renneker exemplifies the absolute extreme of surf dedication, maintaining a meticulous multi-decade logbook and treating surfing as a vital life path rather than a casual sport. He kept a detailed record of every surf session since 1969, noting wave size, swell direction, conditions, and equipment, with his longest absence being just three weeks in 1971. He stores at least ten surfboards in his garage and relentlessly drives himself and others into dangerous big-wave conditions.
Bill "Peewee" Bergerson represents the understated antithesis to Mark Renneker, serving as San Francisco's smoothest and most respected big-wave surfer through quiet local mastery and iron nerves. Peewee maintains an extremely low profile as a locals' local, surfing big waves only when clean.
9. Madeira and the Dual Life
Discovering heavy Atlantic pointbreaks in Madeira provides a vital psychological escape from the horrors of international war reporting.
You find that isolating island locations in the North Atlantic can yield world-class big-wave pointbreaks that present extreme hidden dangers. Drawn by a surf-magazine photo, the author and Peter Spacek traveled to Madeira in November 1994 and discovered powerful, heavy reefbreaks and pointbreaks with sheer cliffs, deepwater swells, and treacherous shorebreaks that harshly penalized mistakes. Madeira sits 600 miles southwest of Lisbon in the North Atlantic.
Peter and the author found a consistent reefbreak they named Shadowlands beneath a nearly 3,000-foot cliff where the winter sun never reached.
Madeira Discovery
Surfers often channel underlying competitive tension into lighthearted, quirky rivalries and humorous documentation. Peter Spacek maintained a running, self-mocking box score of their sessions in his illustrations, chronicling barrel counts, injuries, and close calls with deadpan irony.
- At Ponta Pequena, Peter illustrated his narrow escape from a deadly shorebreak entrapment in drawings titled Undesirable Situation No. 002.
- A typical box score from these sessions recorded statistics like 1.5 barrels vs 5 barrels.
- You navigate these heavy breaks using an 8'0" squashtail thruster gun.
Destruction of Jardim do Mar
Coastal engineering projects can completely erase world-class surf breaks by burying natural reefs under thousands of tons of landfill and concrete. Ignoring protests from surfers, environmentalists, and locals, the regional government dumped rock, dirt, and an ugly seawall of rectangular concrete blocks along the waterfront of Jardim do Mar, destroying the famous wave and burying local tidepools.
Will Henry and other activists organized protests and marches in Funchal and Jardim do Mar against the coastal destruction, but the project went forward under Governor Alberto João Jardim. When the author returned with his family in 2003, workers had dumped 10,000 tons of crushed rock burying the natural shore to construct a seaside roadway.
Surfing can serve as a potent psychological antidote and emotional reset for individuals exposed to the horrors of war reporting. You frequently use surfing in remote or uncrowded locations as a physical and mental escape to process the trauma and suffering witnessed during reporting assignments in global conflict zones. At 44 years old, the author balanced these intense periods of journalism and surfing, occasionally taking 5-day surf dashes to Nova Scotia with Bryan.
10. New York City and Maturing Obsession
Balancing life in New York City with winter surf sessions and aging physical routines proves that surf fever persists into maturity.
New York Surfing
Surfing in New York requires mastering winter nor'easters, online forecasting tools, and accepting brief surf windows. Despite West Coast snobbery and harsh winter conditions, New York offers high-quality surf driven by nor'easters. Modern wave-chasing from the city is enabled by real-time buoy data, wind reports, and webcams, requiring flexible work and advanced wetsuits.
The author and dancer John Selya surfed an ice storm off Laurelton Boulevard in Long Beach during heavy overhead winds and a hideous current.
Aging and Performance
Aging surfers must maintain rigorous physical routines simply to slow the rate of physical decline and manage pop-ups. As the author ages, he finds that fitness routines like daily basement pool swimming are essential to prevent physical degradation and maintain the paddling and pop-up capacity required for shortboarding.
The author swims a mile a day in a basement pool on West End Avenue to maintain fitness and avoid a longboard-only existence. Impatience and regression can lead aging surfers to take dangerous, uncalculated risks in heavy waves. Pushed by lingering impulses and the sight of skilled younger surfers, the author paddles out on an inadequate board into heavy, mountainous waves at Makaha, resulting in a terrifying near-drowning.
At Makaha on Oahu, the author got caught inside by 10 to 15 feet reported wave size set waves, ran out of oxygen, and had to climb his leash to survive.
The final years of aging parents bring profound grief, the dismantling of family anchors, and a confrontation with mortality. Following his father's death from Parkinson's disease, the author watches his mother suffer from respiratory disease and a broken pelvis, ultimately leading to her passing and the scattering of their ashes at sea.
The author's father died in November 2008 in his mother's arms after a long battle with Parkinson's disease following 56 years of marriage for the author's parents.
Conclusion
Surfing functions as a lifelong organizing principle that shapes character, resilience, and your fundamental perception of the world. The pursuit of waves transforms from an adolescent obsession into an intricate global map that guides your movement through decades. By tracking swells, mastering dangerous breaks, and accepting the constant risk of injury, you develop a rare physical discipline and mental clarity. Waves remain indifferent to human concerns, and learning to read them teaches you humility in the face of immense natural forces. This demanding hobby offers a coherent structure for an entire existence, bridging the gap between wild youth and mature responsibility.
You can apply the lessons of a surf-driven life to maintain passion and physical endurance across changing life stages by following these rules:
- Commit fully to your primary obsession, allowing it to dictate your geography, career choices, and daily rhythms without apology.
- Accept physical decline as a natural boundary rather than an end, adapting your equipment and expectations to preserve your capability in the water.
- Seek out difficult, uncharted environments that demand total concentration, using isolation and natural hazards to clear away domestic distractions.
- Balance the intense individualism of your pursuits with deep human connections, recognizing that shared danger builds unbreakable bonds.
- Respect the power of natural elements by studying local conditions meticulously and knowing when to retreat from overwhelming danger.
- Maintain curiosity about the wider world, using your chosen craft as a vehicle for travel, cultural immersion, and political awakening.
- Integrate demanding physical routines into ordinary adult life, treating time spent in motion as essential maintenance for your mental health.
10 Key Ideas
- Modern life traps people in predictable routines, compelling surfers to seek a deeper physical engagement with the ocean that standard comforts cannot satisfy.
- Moving to a racially charged Honolulu as a teenager forces surfers to navigate intense social hostility and master complex tropical surf breaks.
- Early Southern California beach culture and rocky point breaks provide the foundational physical discipline and local knowledge required to read waves.
- The late sixties introduction of shortboards replaces traditional longboards, turning famous breaks into crowded arenas and unlocking deep barrel riding.
- Dropping out of conventional life to live in Maui leads to total immersion in remote waves like Honolua Bay and tests personal relationships.
- Leaving stable employment behind, surfers set out on an open-ended expedition across Polynesia to chart unridden reefs and remote swells.
- Encountering Australian egalitarianism and punishing pointbreaks like Kirra exposes surfers to intense physical tolls and the frictions of literary collaboration.
- Traversing the Asia Trail and teaching under apartheid in South Africa broaden political awareness before nomadic travels reach a breaking point.
- Surfing the exceptionally complex and punishing beachbreak at Ocean Beach demands iron dedication and deep psychological endurance.
- Balancing life in New York City with winter surf sessions and aging physical routines proves that surf fever persists into maturity.