The best books on Surfing

We often start by defining our subject. So, before we talk about the books about surfing you’ve chosen to recommend, perhaps you’d start by telling us what surfing means to you. 

Surfing is something I’ve done since I was 10 years old. And for the past 64 years, it has been the life for me… nurturing me, teaching me, sustaining me, enlivening me, and showing me the way to live a life in harmony with nature. It’s so much more than simply riding waves.

Congratulations on the third edition of your book Surf Is Where You Find It. When you were writing these essays for various surfing magazines, did you imagine it would one day be a book?

I’ve always enjoyed a good story. In the process of telling some of my own, I have been encouraged by family and friends to share them. The best way to do that is to write them down. In the beginning, it was mostly for surf magazines and publications like The Surfer’s Journal. When I started working at Patagonia, I shared many of those stories with Yvon Chouinard and it was at his suggestion that we decided to compile them into a book.

“A teller of tales rises to the call of duty by reciting the mythical deeds whenever possible.” That’s the self-described core of your approach in Surf Is Where You Find It. Let’s start with the mythical deeds of larger-than-life Greg Noll, in Da Bull: Life Over the Edge. There are many remarkable surfers in the pantheon. Was it Greg’s big-wave pursuits or his career as a shaper that prompted you to highlight him? 

It was neither his surfing nor his shaping, it was his personality that drew me to Greg and his book captured a lot of that. Through a mutual friend, Gordon ‘Clark Foam‘ Clark, Greg and I became great friends and spent a lot of time together over the years. He, Clark, and their generation of surfers were the ones I looked up to from the time I started surfing and then over the years as I became friendly with many of them.

I understood how much their contributions—just doing what they loved—doing laid the groundwork for surfing becoming what it is today. Greg paddled into his last wave in the winter of 1969 and rode that wave gloriously till the end of his life.

You took Lightning Bolt from being basically a workshop for your own personal quiver to a landmark surfboard company. How would you characterise the revolution in the industry—the before and after of mass production? 

Surfing, from the beginning, has had a tremendous influence outside of itself… making a big impression on people who have never done it—and in many cases, never will. By the same token, it has also prompted many to try it and find their lives changed forever, becoming surfers just like the ones that impressed them the first time and in the process discovering what a beautiful thing surfing is. This has caused surfing to continue growing at an exponential pace and the business of surfing to become a very large industry in a relatively short period of time… because, as the surfwear companies realised, many people still found a compulsion to look like surfers even if they weren’t. It was cool, and that sold a lot of shirts, pants, shorts, and jackets.

As for the surfboard part of the industry, and Lightning Bolt surfboards… surfboards have obviously always been the foundation of the industry of surfing, but after the Bolt Corporation used the image that the surfboards created as their promotional vehicle, that was the beginning of this other industry that wasn’t within but rather without the surfboard part—’without’ because, from a monetary standpoint, it grew so far beyond the surfboards that it was another whole thing altogether. When the Bolt Corp. went down, so did Lightning Bolt Surfboards—but in its place, first OP, then Quiksilver, then Billabong, RipCurl, O’Neill, Gotcha, Volcom, and others rose to prominence, creating a gigantic marketplace and successful business of surf stuff that was entirely different and in many ways, unconnected to the surfboards… what, in the beginning, used to be the only industry of surfing.

“Surfing is so much more than simply riding waves”

Of course, the demand for surfboards for the growing surfing population put a lot of pressure on the local surfboard builders of the areas and countries of surfers. This led to an emergence of overseas production: surfboards made in Asia and other places with less costly labor. Production continued to improve to where it began to rival the quality of local surfboard producers. Now it is an accepted and legitimate source of good surfboards.

“The best thing about surfing is talking about it afterwards,”’ as the adage goes. Reading these surfing books, I imagined coming around the campfire to hear your stories, maybe after a chilly Atlantic outing like the ones we get around these parts at this time of year. I got a similar feeling reading William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days. Was his book a model for the revised edition of Surf Is Where You Find It? Both books seem to ask: What does it mean to live a life well?

For both Finnegan and I, surfing, initially, was an identity when were searching for one, and then we discovered it made us feel better about ourselves. It wasn’t fiction, it was real… and we wrote about that. Surfing is such a kinetic medium, it can be hard to capture in words. Maybe that’s why film and photography seem to be the foremost media for telling surf tales. And yet, Finnegan’s descriptions of waves are stunningly vivid.

William Finnegan writes about finding “brief, sharp glimpses of eternity” on his surfboard. After seeing your recent film by Stacy Peralta, I’d venture to say that you’ve come to see surfing as a spiritual pursuit. Or perhaps that’s what it always was for you. Is that fair? 

For every surfer—if they remember, and most do—their first wave touches something deep inside them in a way that is very difficult to put into words. It generally compels them to continue doing it… to find that feeling again, and in the process discover a whole world unlike any other. Like an onion, backwards, the layers are added over that first, pure impression.

“For every surfer, their first wave touches something deep inside them in a way that is very difficult to put into words”

Surfing is many things; one of the first after one finds that one wants to continue at it is to try to get better doing it, and that in itself becomes all-consuming. I think the first twenty years I surfed was just a test to see if I was really interested—because only then did I begin to see and start to understand that I had learned some deeply profound lessons about life.

Shaping, like surfing itself, seems to be an oral tradition. One of the boards in our club quiver was shaped by your son. I love that the tales, as well as the techniques, are passed down the line, generation to generation. Mickey Munoz—who features in your next book recommendation, No Bad Waves—followed theories of flow and boatbuilding which he incorporated into board design and shaping. How has riding many different crafts—surfboards, standup, kiteboards, windsurf, snowboards—figured in board design for you?

Most surfers, and especially the ones who shape their own boards, are redesigning, refining the board they are riding, trying to better understand how to dance with this partner as they follow the music that is the wave. That wave, like music, is always changing, so the challenge is to connect yourself with a flow that smoothly brings all three together. With a surfboard, it’s the most simple—yet, ironically, perhaps the most difficult. With stand-up paddle boarding, you add the paddle and more board. Windsurf… board and sail. Kiteboarding may be the easiest but with the most consequences when you lose the flow. Snowboarding is easier yet because it all holds still for you while you ride it.

Mickey Munoz is a storyteller, like you. The book is like a collection of aphorisms that tie together many chance encounters with other buccaneers, drawing wisdom from them. What’s your favourite ‘Munoz-ism’?

Mickey has kept paddling with more enthusiasm and energy than anyone else his age in my lifetime of surfing… and I mean this in a literal as well as figurative way. Surfing to Mickey Munoz is all about having fun and if, as Duke Kahanamoku said, the best surfer is the one having the most fun, then Mickey is the best and has been for the 50 years we’ve been friends.

Your selection of surfing books highlights storytelling, but it also highlights enterprise. Yvon Chouinard recently made headlines by giving away all of the shares in Patagonia to a trust that will use future profits to safeguard against the climate crisis, saying: “Earth is now our only shareholder.” His book, Let My People Go Surfing, is an autobiography, business handbook, and manifesto all in one. Which aspect of it do you most relate to?

That this incredible person is a surfer before everything else. This is perhaps the biggest affirmation that surfing is not a waste of time and that life is a lot more simple than we give it credit for.

What’s the plan for your next adventure with Yvon? 

Something appropriate, like going surfing and riding some waves together.

Our final book is Waterman: The Life and Times of Duke Kahanamoku, by David Davis. Growing up in Hawaii, Dane Kahanamoku must have loomed larger than life. The Duke was born in Hawaii when it was still an independent nation, so his life spans a critical historic trajectory. What does the Duke represent to you? 

The Duke remains larger than life as a true ambassador of the Aloha Spirit in life, especially in surfing. “The Aloha Spirit is the coordination of mind and heart within each person… Each person must think and emote good feelings towards others.” That’s one definition. We live in a world that has become more complex and faster moving with our attention often drawn towards the negative rather than the positive aspects and thoughts. We can reset our intention to be more like Duke and in doing this, find a sense of peace and harmony with our natural world.

This book is a fascinating glimpse into the early twentieth-century history of Olympic swimming but also addresses broader themes like amateurism and racism in sport, and the commodification of surfing. His history should be taught in schools in Hawaii. In fact, it should be on the syllabus throughout the country and abroad. It is our duty to try to be better, to live with Aloha as Duke did.

Surfing makes you feel good, being a jerk doesn’t. Good most often wins out over bad and if it doesn’t, then usually they stop surfing and find something else to do.