February 2006 Issue
Living Up To The Hype
By Chuck Graham, Photos by Terry Lilly and Jeff Gill
You can never trust a swell forcast, especially the ones that are hyped to death, but December 21-"Big Wednesday" was worth remembering.
Swells like this one do wonders for everyone. All the spots are working, including the ones that break only a few times per winter. The crowds are spead out and there's more people gawking on the beach than there are waves being ridden.
It's days like this that make you feel good to be a surfer. So instead of a lengthy story, we're letting the photos do the talking. Some of the region's best surf photographers have been kind enough to supply us with their images of an epic day.
Where were you?
For more spectacular photos, pick up a free copy of Blue Edge at your local surf shop.
Posted February 2006 Blue Edge Magazine. All rights reserved.
Photo Essay with Jody Helzer Pesapane
By William M. Tover
Even though she was born inland, in Glendora, California, Jody was destined to become a water child.
At the age of three, Jody's parents moved to Huntington Beach where Jody first became acquainted with the ocean. By growing up by the beach and spending lots of time playing in the sea, Jody acquired the image of the quintessential, healthy, blonde beach girl. To most people, she probably seemed destined to be the next "Coppertone Girl." NOT! This water girl's destiny was taking her to deeper depths where her play pals were to be sharks, manta rays, whales and dolphins.
Her high school photography class planted the seeds that were eventually going to bloom into an adventurous and fulfilling career as an underwater filmmaker. Jody's photography teacher steered her towards the Brook's Institute of Photography, complimenting Jody for her natural, photographic talents. Pesapane loved playing on the sea, but upon viewing a Brooks’ undersea video, Jody knew from that moment on how she was going to live her life. She would combine her love of the ocean world with her fledgling passion for the film arts. Pesapane wasted no time in preparing for her future.
She entered Brook's Institute and received her scuba diving certification in 1993. Three years later Jody graduated with a multimedia major. With her newly acquired degree, she set off for Australia where she spent six months working on boats, diving, traveling and filming sharks and marine mammals. Before returning home, Jody was really happy to have accomplished her goal: to produce a promotional shark reel that she could use to sell herself as an undersea media arts professional.
When asked why she is so attracted to the undersea world, Jody responded that it's an environment that is extremely challenging, very mysterious, and very surreal. Jody experienced all of these things while she was employed by the Discovery Channel to travel and film sharks three to five months out of each year for three years. Aside from continuing to work as a freelancer, media arts professional and diving instructor, Jody was also hired by a nonprofit, shark research institute operating in Honduras and La Paz, Mexico, as a guide for eco-tourists who were interested in having the experience of interacting with whale sharks. She also tagged sharks and presented slide shows and lectures to educate people about the importance of maintaining healthy whale shark populations for conservation reasons and also as a means to create a tourist industry that focuses on marine life.
With 2,300 dives under her weight belt since 1993 and half of those with sharks, Jody H. Pesapane is focused on the future to continue her own, two personal projects as a documentary film producer. The first film is about the history of abalone diving and the other film is about how people with spinal chord injuries can participate in the sport of scuba diving and not be dependent on any special adaptations. The ocean with its flotation properties acts as a healer for anyone, paralyzed or not, thus creating a sense of equality for all.
To view Jody's website, please go to www.liquidbluemedia.com
Posted February 2006 Blue Edge Magazine. All rights reserved.
Eden's Nectar: The Indian Ocean Dream
By Michael Kew, Photographs by David Pu'u
The only paradise is paradise lost. —Marcel Proust
This island is beyond dreams—Eden could only be. The white man’s first voyage here revealed a bounty of fresh fruit, water, tortoises, coconuts, and birds—one shipmate from that trip called the isle “some earthly Paradise.”
From aloft, its interior appears as velvety green summits wreathed in cloud, veined with waterfalls, eschewing traditional geography of a traditional place. Its white-sand beaches are flawless, fronted by turquoise lagoons, backed by mossy woods teeming with layers of life, home to a million insects and birds and small mammals.
Yet in recent times Eden was hardly hospitable, more of a site for sea wars and infamous corsairs than surf-trekking. Unsmiling men sought these shores not for paradise but for tangible loot. Misery was common in Edenic culture, a displaced colony of lepers, slaves, and exiles governed by harassed tyrants of European regimes.
Today the islanders exist undiluted, relaxed, unambitious, soft-spoken, with skin black as licorice—so black it looks purple. They are affable and polite and lazy, dragging their feet as they walk. They have wide, flat noses and full lips covering horrible black teeth. Smiles come easily.
The men are well-fleshed and unshaven, the women curvy, with enormous breasts. They wear sarongs, sandals, shorts, T-shirts, hats, flowers behind their ears, and their faces carry a smugness intrinsic of islanders worldwide, knowing they live an ocean away from the world’s dysfunction, knowing that their world is truly sublime. What they don’t know, however, is the story of great surf potential in their backyard.
On the arrival wharf was a rickety wooden cart bridled to a battered ox. Flies buzzed around its head, snot oozed from its nose. Its fur was ruffled and dirty, its left horn was broken in half, the rope through its nostrils looked painful.
This cart was our transport to the island’s swell-exposed side, as the island was carless and its roads unpaved. Our Rastafarian driver Pierre—tall, gaunt, somewhat pedantic—steered us through a coconut plantation and onto a rubbly coral road paralleling the lagoon and an unbroken line of whitewater out along the barrier reef. We passed a copra mill with an ox walking in circles, yoked to a wheel powering the mill, smashing coconut husks for valuable export oil.
The road weaved through dense palm and pandanus trees bordered by steep and lush mountains of green. It skirted waterfalls and the shores of three wide beaches; the tide was out, so pirogues sat dry-docked on the flat white sand of each.
Further, we came upon a series of pretty coves flanked by coconut palms and granite boulders. Then a clearing—a corridor of green grass fronting an algae-mottled lagoon—occupied by a trio of grazing white horses, which we petted. Their fur was lustrous and groomed, though Guillaume said there were no people on this side of the island who could care for the animals.
Eventually we stopped to survey a white arc of beach, hot and serene, its only sound was that of waves peeling into a reef pass a half-mile offshore. Nearby was a derelict red pickup truck sagging on frayed suspension, its tires bald and deflated, its windshield cracked, both doors missing.
Behind the surf were two dark men hunkered in a pirogue, low in the water, apparently sinking. In slow-motion they paddled it through the pass and crept across the lagoon to shore; packed to its gunwales, the vessel was loaded with tuna.
One man hopped out of the pirogue as the other tossed a small stone anchor into the knee-deep water near shore. Then both men grabbed a fish by its tail in each hand and trudged up the sloped beach toward us and the truck. Shirtless and shaggy in wet sarongs, the men looked middle-aged, with dreadlocked hair and gray beards. I said “bonzour”—Creole for hello—as they staggered by, arms and faces shimmering with sweat.
“Comman sava?”—How are you? the fatter man asked, grinning at me, revealing his black teeth-stumps. His eyes were blazingly bloodshot.
“Mon byen, mersi,” I said—Fine, thanks.
One-by-one, the men lunged the heavy fish into the bed of the pickup, which appeared to be incapable of supporting the weight of the great catch.
“What kind of fish are those?” David asked.
“Deese good feesh,” the fat man said. His voice was hoarse—talking seemed painful. “Deese good fo’ eat.”
“Where are you taking them?”
“Le marché”—the market.
An hour passed before the boat was emptied and the truck was loaded with a slimy, shiny heap of dead fish. They were big and plump and all looked alike. The men got into the cab of the truck. Remarkably, its motor started with the key’s first turn.
“Orevwar,” croaked the fat man—Creole for goodbye.
We waved back, and then they were gone. David wondered if there was a town nearby, but it was of no real concern: this beach was heavenly. Its lagoon was clear and warm, lapping up onto soft, powdery white sand between granite boulders. Palms and takamaka trees bordered the beach, offering shade from the fierce afternoon heat. And out there along the north side of the pass was a perfect, unsurfed right peeling into the clear, blue channel.
It was a classic thirty-foot-long cargo sloop, relic of outdated commerce, unsuitable for distant trips but fine for a surf-seeking island sail. Guillaume, our lively chaperon, had borrowed the sloop to access a nearby beach that was unreachable by land.
“A surf spot?” I asked.
“You wait and see,” he said.
From our boat, the beach looked charming—we expected photogenic privacy and some good snorkeling, not the solitary wonder of an empty, tropical Rincon Cove. And so it went.
Late afternoon. Mary straddled her longboard atop an incandescent mirror, her back and shoulders warmed by sun dropping into mountain silhouettes. Waiting for waves, her legs dangled in an exotic aquarium: snapper, angelfish, butterfly fish, chromis, fusiliers, wrasse, trumpetfish, pipefish, needlefish. Flying fish skipped across the surface, chased by barracuda.
My first wave: the tube’s almond eye reflected everything. Into the glare, it was a funnel of resplendence, in slow-motion—the mountains, the sinking sun, the deserted beach fronted by tranquil lagoon.
Between waves, all was Edenic. Above, fairy terns flitted; around, green turtles floated; behind, the palmy beach awaited.
Soon the natural light darkened, morphing from saturation to a wash of pastels, sea and sky glowing violet and ocher, the play of light distracting me from an approaching swell.
Like the others, this set was perfect. Purply and tapered, the first wave humped onto the reef and effortlessly let Holly in. She hopped to her feet; a predictably hermetic backside barrel followed, and the technique—perfected from cold dedicated hours at El Porto—was innate.
My last wave: another tube, this one inky and narrow, like a teardrop. Then I turned shoreward and paddled in. Large fish—perhaps the kind those fishermen had caught—blurped out of the water, snatching baitfish, my hands sinking into schools of them, the whole lagoon alive, reflecting coolly into my sunburned eyes.
Pinpoint the surf discoveries you remember best. Perhaps it was Indonesia—Uluwatu, Grajagan, Lance’s Right. Perhaps it was Tavarua, Mundaka, Cloud Nine, or Supertubes. Or maybe it’s desert sand that intrigued you: Red Bluff, Chicama, Scorpion Bay. Or hypothermia: Lofoten, Seaside, Thurso East. Or emerald Indian Ocean dreams of Pasta Point, Kumari, and…..Santosha.
The looping lefts at Mauritius’ Tamarin Bay inspired the nucleus of Larry Yates’s seminal 1974 article about the “Forgotten Island of Santosha,” which reassured each and every one of us of our own mental utopia. The concept sent urban-weary surfers into a scattered frenzy, pining abroad for this “Santosha,” knowing that it existed, but not knowing exactly how or where.
Australian Kevin Lovett found his at Lagundi Bay on the Indonesian island of Nias. After sailing along Sumatra with partner John Geisel and hard-core traveler Peter Troy, Lovett endured remarkable hardship and garnered personal growth to discover one of the world’s best waves, his reasoning published in The Surfer’s Journal:
“Recurring images of pristine tropical environments, swaying palm trees and perfect surf seemed to fill my every waking moment from the time I read (‘Santosha’). The author…drew a red herring across the trail to the site of his experience by describing ‘Santosha’ as not really a place, but a state of mind….Was the Surfer’s Dream just a state of mind? Was there no physical basis for its existence?”
Of course, Eden—our discovery—is what you make of it. It could be purely mental, or it could be an actual place. Chances are you’ve never even heard of it, anyway—an unmodern island, sunny and slow, off the radar, sunken into the periphery of an equatorial ocean theater long revered for its treasure, its piracy, its mystique. But not for its surf, which, if you adhered to common belief, remains nonexistent. Eden isn’t Mauritius, Yates’s fantasyland of yore. Eden is, however, Santosha’s conceptual twin.
“Santosha really isn’t a place,” Yates wrote. “It’s a state of mind. A forgotten state of mind.”
And, like Yates, we stumbled into a paradise through serendipity. We had reached the end of the road in terms of nirvanic wanderlust, facing us there, in Eden.
What was once abstruse became absolute. Like Lovett and Yates, we sought, so we traveled. Eden prevailed. How romantic it was, a gift to share with rest of the world, something we fled, but ultimately returned to, ultimately enlightened.
Posted February 2006 Blue Edge Magazine. All rights reserved.
Renny & Lauran Yater
By Michael Kew, Photographs by Branden Aroyan
Renny Yater
A master shaper, Reynolds “Renny” Yater is perhaps Santa Barbara’s finest surf legacy.
Since his 1959 arrival from Laguna Beach, Yater, 73, has maintained unparalleled consistency and an unflinching dedication to a product that, at this moment, in a shaping room off Milpas Street, could be enduring Yater’s finesse for the fruits of yet another fine winter swell. After all, Santa Barbara is renowned for such—Yater’s known for more than five decades.
Likewise, Southern California’s surf cognoscenti has known of Yater’s boards for roughly the same amount of time, from back when Yater worked for Hobie Alter and Dale Velzy, preceding Yater’s fateful, permanent pilgrimage to our “Western Riviera,” where he eventually established Santa Barbara Surf Shop and fished for winter lobster between Ventura and Point Arguello.
Yater dually harvested the clean, green winter waves at Rincon and Hammond’s, also venturing deep into the empty coast of Hollister and Bixby ranches, which quickly became off-season summer staples. But it was Yater’s innate board building talent that eventually bridged his gap between summer and winter at a time when Santa Barbara was truly one of surfing’s backwaters, a world away from his native Laguna Beach.
That was in the 1960s. Today, Yater’s boards are still revered, and rightly so. If you ride one, congratulate yourself.
You were 27 when you moved here. Back then, fishing came before surfing?
Yeah. It occurred to me after I came up here, ‘What am I going to do in the summer?’ So I thought, well, I could always pull (the fishing) back and make some surfboards. Dick Perry and I rented a place down on Anacapa Street and we made boards for local guys. Well, that was about all eight or 10 of them. That was it. We flooded the market! (laughs)
Now you’re 73 and you no longer fish for a living. What about a retirement from shaping?
I’m not doing as much because we subcontract out all the fiberglassing. I don’t do any of that. Everything’s subcontracted.
All that fun stuff you don’t want to do.
Yeah. So I’ve backed off on a lot of the work. If you go back 20-25 years ago, I did hand-shaping, glassing, retailing—the whole works—and fishing. It was a pretty heavy menu.
So you’re semi-retired now.
Yeah, I am. Lauran does a lot of it. So you might say I’m backing out slowly.
What would you like to be remembered for?
Oh, I don’t know. The fact that I went through all this and managed to stay in all this time (laughs). Very few guys did. Most of them bailed out.
You’ve been in the surfboard industry continuously since when?
Since I first worked for Hobie, I would say. That was about ’54. Building the first surfboard all the way through probably in ’52 or ’53. All the way through, the whole finished product. Had to be somewhere around ’53.
What’s next for Reynolds Yater?
Well, I like to do these more exotic projects, like the abalone boards. Just veer off more to that direction. Eventually, you develop a sport to its maximum of ability. Like the shortboards now—how much smaller can they get? The good thing about it now is finally you’ve got to a point where there’s a board for the surf. You quit trying to ride a real hot-rod surfboard in crappy surf. It just doesn’t work. So that’s really known now. That’s why you’re seeing heavier longboards come back into style, because they work good in a lot of surf. They work better.
Lauran Yater
Heir apparent to his father’s talent, 45-year-old Lauran Yater knows what makes a stellar Santa Barbara surfboard.
Always in the right place at the right time, Lauran believes his shapes are a collective cache of creative yet calculated pointbreak research, whether he’s streaking on the wave of the day at Rincon or garnering feedback from another satisfied customer while shopping in Trader Joe’s.
Skilled in virtually all genres, Lauran’s feet are planted firmly in both the past and the future of surfboard design. Influenced by his father and other notables like Bob Duncan, Marc Andreini, and Bob Krause, the environment into which Lauran was born—his dad’s surfboard factory—couldn’t have been more convenient for his blossoming mind, evident to us with one glance at his boards in the Beach House or while riding the wave of the day at Rincon—assuming Lauran lets one of us have it.
Did your talents arise from your genes?
No doubt about it. I surf a lot like my dad; he knows how to trim really well. He can find the trim spot on the board and come from behind, and that’s what he’s known for. In fact, I was out surfing Rincon one day and I got locked into this really good tube; I came out and kicked out. This guy, an artist who lives in Hope Ranch, just looked at me and said, “You know, for 20 years I’ve been looking for a guy who surfs like your dad, and I finally found somebody. It’s you!” (laughs)
Do you take credit for any one design?
Most shapers tend to shape boards for their area, and that’s basically all I’ve done. I’ve gone to Hawai’i, seen what it’s like, but I don’t surf over there. I’ve learned all the stuff I’ve learned off of other people and just gone to what I like the looks of and tried to do my version of what I think a good board is.
What are the best aspects of your shaping ability?
I probably spend too much time in detail, as far as what I get paid for, so the customer gets his money’s worth. There’s no doubt about that. A guy can bring in a favorite and I’ll spend three days duplicating the thing to get it to work better, not by mistake, but by doing a really good copy. Just paying attention to detail.
How has your father influenced you?
His longevity and his strength, showing up and working, always being there.
How do you differ yourself from your dad?
He’s more stern. I guess I’m a little more looser, more of the artist type, a little more floatier, whereas he’s just really solid. Extremely solid. I take after my mom more.
What’s next for surfboard design?
There’s so much new stuff on the market right now. The fact that about seven years ago, the surfboard designs went wide open as far as you can walk down the beach with anything and it’s okay. In fact, it’s cool to switch boards and ride something different during the day—go from a longboard to a twin-fin. It really opened things up and made everything kind of more relaxed. It’s neat, because now everybody’s working on all this new stuff. There’s not a whole lot of new designs that are coming out of it—they’re just being perfected.
Posted February 2006 Blue Edge Magazine. All rights reserved.
February Calendar
Saturday, February 4
The Ventura Surfrider and the Santa Barbara Channelkeeper meet on the first Saturday of every month for “Stream Team” from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Team recruits and trains community members to take part in monthly water quality monitoring. Plan on getting your feet wet. Free pizza and drinks are provided. Call 648-4807 for more information.
Make art from scrap with the Community Environmental Council. The CEC takes materials that would normally be thrown away and recycles them into art supplies for the community. Join them a 10 a.m. at 302 E. Cota St., and check out www.communityenvironmentalcouncil.org for complete schedule of events.
Sunday, February 5
Swim with the Oceanducks along Butterfly Beach for their “Four Palms to Red Hut” swim every Sunday. Oceanducks is a non-profit organization established to encourage ocean swimming as a way to good health and spirit. Meet at the stairs by the Coral Casino at 9 a.m. For more info, log onto www.oceanducks.org.
SB Channelkeeper’s Goleta Stream Team meets on the first Sunday of every month at 10 a.m. in the Kmart parking lot in front of the garden center. Be prepared to get your feet wet. Free pizza and drinks provided. Call 563–3377 or visit www.stream-team.org for more info.
Tuesday, February 7
Get involved and learn what's happening in your community at the Ventura Surfrider meeting at 6 p.m. in the Foster Library (651 Main St.), Topper Meeting Room. All those who want to learn or lend a helping hand are welcome. For more information, call 667-2222 or visit the website at www.surfrider.org/ventura/
Thursday, February 9
The Santa Barbara Surfrider Foundation has general meetings on the first Thursday of every other month at 7:30 in the watershed resource center at Hendry’s Beach. For more info email srfrdrsb@rain.org
Yoga/Surf Session for Women, every Thursday from 9-11 a.m. Start with a pre-yoga session on the beach and then get coached to step up your surf skills. Call Monica at 681-9293 or Angelica at 451-8213.
Saturday, February 18
The Ventura Surf Club will be meeting for the Big, Bad and Ugly Surf and Turf today and tomorrow at the Estero Bay Surf Club in Morro Bay. For more information, visit www.venturasurfclub.org
Tuesday, February 21
The Ventura Surf Club will be meeting today at Yolie's Fresh Mexican Grill, 26 S. Garden. As a club member, you are able to surf in all intra-club, coalition and other contests. Meetings start at 6:30, visit www.venturasurfclub.org for more information.
Thursday, February 23
The Santa Barbara County Surf Club meets on the last Thursday of every month. Anyone who wants to learn more about the SB surfing community is welcome to the meeting, which starts at 6 p.m. at Rusty's Pizza on Cabrillo and Bath St. Visit www.sbsurfclub.com or call President Debby at 569-1029.
Saturday, February 25
Contest #8 of NSSA's Gold Coast Conference Explorer Season will go down today at Campus Point, Santa Barbara. For more information, log onto www.nssa.org.
The “Destination Point” Surf Movie Tour will be coming through Santa Barbara this weekend to the Victoria Hall Theatre. “Destination Point” was filmed in Tavarua, Hawaii, California, Indo and Mexico, and stars Bobby Martinez, Tom Curren, Ratboy, Flea, Barney, Kelly Slater, Malloy and Iron brothers, and more. This film was made by young local Josh Pomer. For more information, visit www.thesurflab.com.
Join Angelica Keets of Surf Happens and Monica Mesa of ChakraSea Yoga for the Yoga and Surf Clinic for Women. You will learn and practice a surf specific sequence of Yoga postures you can integrate into your pre or post surf session, and get coached to step up your surf skills. Date and location may change, contact Monica at yogamom3@yahoo.com for updated information.
Sunday, February 26
Mark your calendears for Santa Barbara's first Steelhead Festival, an all-day event that supports our local watersheds and the fish and wildlife that depend on them. The Community Environmental Council believes that by raising public awareness, they can gain support for protecting the watersheds and improving creek habitat so that the steelhead trout can return to our waters. The festival will begin at 10 a.m. at the Santa Barbara Zoo. Visit www.communityenvironmentalcouncil.org/index.html for more information.
Posted February 2006 Blue Edge Magazine. All rights reserved.
