May 28, 2009

SPF 4987

Filed under: Wave Column — @ 10:32 pm

SPF 4987 OR MORE

By Corky Carroll

 

Summer is just about here and many of you will be heading out into the sun with milk white bodies that are just crying out for a nice golden bronze tan.  I would take it for granted that in this day and age all of you are aware of the dangers of sunburn and over exposure to the sun.  But then it is always best to not take anything for granted, so this is a little advice for those who might be uneducated in the sun domain. 

 

A nice healthy tan is a cool thing to have.  Skin cancer is NOT.  I know because I have it.  When I was a kid nobody told us to use sunblock.  Probably because there wasn’t really much sunblock available.  There was the white zinc oxide stuff that seemed to never work very good, but the lifeguards would use it.  I tried it but it just seemed to get all over my board and didn’t help anyway.  So for the most part I dealt with a fully fried nose all the time.  It hurt and looked awful but I dealt with it. Now I am paying the price.  A needle in the nose in prep for having it cut on hurts way worse.  And six needles in the nose are six times worse.  I recently found that out.  In the past six months I have had to deal with surgeries and chemotherapy and neither one was any kind of fun at all.  Today we are lucky to have tons of excellent sun blocks on the market.  I recommend using the strongest you can find and use it generously and often.  Put it on at least twenty minutes before going out in the sun and repeat applications often, especially after coming out of the water.  It takes a little while to start working.  Also don’t think that you will not get a tan if you use sunblock, that is not true.

 

There is going to be a surfing event on May 30th in San Clemente promoting education and awareness of skin cancer.  It’s called the World Skin Cancer Foundation Sean & Skippy Slater Invitational.  This will be the first time this event has been held on the west coast and it will bring prominent surfers together to educate people about skin cancer and how to protect their skin.  The event is sponsored by Ocean Potion; a prominent company in the manufacture and sales of sun care products.  There will be free skin cancer screenings.  It would be a good idea to get down there for a check up.  To raise money for the foundation a dinner party at the Surfing Heritage Museum will be held with many cool items up for auction. Tickets are still available for $45.

   

Trust me when I say that you do not wanna get skin cancer.  For more info on the event: www.worldskincarefoundation.com

 

May 17, 2009

ROUGHING IT, OR NOT

Filed under: Wave Column — @ 11:12 pm

ROUGHING IT, OR NOT

By Corky Carroll

 

Today is the grand opening of our newest jewel in the crown of Surf City, the Queen of the Surfing Coast.  It’s the beautiful and ultra cool “Shorebreak Hotel,” at 500 Pacific Coast Highway right here in Huntington Beach.  Ya gotta love a hotel that is on the beach and is named Shorebreak.  Gives ya the feeling that you can surf right up to your room, hop off and pop directly into the shower.  After which you can bask in your luxury bathroom. 

 

I can honestly, and proudly at that, say that my days of roughing it are over.  When I was younger (I like to use the term younger as it implies that I am still young….. hence young-ger) I used to go on surf safaris and camp out on the beach in a sleeping bag or just sleep in the car.  I had my old ’57 Chevy Bel Air station wagon all set up with a mattress in the back and curtains on the windows.  I had many a happy adventure in that surf mobile.  The main problem with that was usually it was really cold or it was noisy or the police would come and tell me that it was not legal for me to park in that spot to spend the night.  And there was no bathroom etc.  I used to take along a jug of water to brush me teeth and wash my face in the morning with.  When I was 16 this was not a bad way to be able to be the first one to paddle out on a good day at Rincon or Someplace far away from my home in Surfside. 

 

As I got a little older I grew less and less fond of sleeping in my car or on the beach.  I sort of gravitated to the cheaper beach motels that were pretty much all over along Pacific Coast Highway back in those days (the 60’s).  That was a bit better as far as being warm and having a bathroom went.  If I was lucky I might wind up in a room that had one of those “vibra-beds” that would shake for 15 minutes if you put in a quarter.  A poor surfers version of a spa massage.  

 

Now that I am a more refined and mature gentleman I like to be more comfortable.  The Shorebreak Hotel is my kinda beach accomadations.  We are taking 4 star level digs here.  Plush beds and sheets, robes, gourmet coffee, flat screen HDTV, morning paper (obviously the Register) and a killer restaurant named “Zimzala.”  That, loosely translated from surfaneeze lingo, means “free spirited person who finds peace with sand between the toes.”  Hey, that’s actually kinda me although I really like to only have sand between my toes when I am actually in the sand.  But seeing as how the Shorebreak Hotel is right there I guess it’s close enough.  

 

For more information check out www.shorebreakhotel.com

PRESSED HAM AND FRUIT BOWL

Filed under: Local Column — @ 11:10 pm

MORE ON THE PRESSED HAM

By Corky Carroll

 

A few weeks ago I did a column on the art of the “Moon.”

I half expected my editor to kick it back to me, as this is sort of a grey subject matter in a family paper.  But it ran and the response was incredible.  I also thought if it did run I would get a lot of librarians and mothers scolding me for talking about bare butts.  But I only got one of those, all the rest were happy readers and many with their own Moon stories.  I have enough for ten columns but have selected my favorites that would fit into one.  Here they are:

 

From Steve Pezman (Publisher of SURFERS JOURNAL).

“1962: On the way home from Trestles in my ’50 Ford Woody, with me driving, Bill Wetzel riding shotgun, and Bob “radical man” Beadle in the back seat, we found ourselves stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, all lanes barely creeping, north bound between Laguna and Corona Del Mar. We’re riding along when the young man driving the car next to us looks the Woody over and remarks so we can hear, “daddy’s car!” He had east coast plates and obviously he wasn’t used to seeing young guys driving what to him was a ”parents” vehicle. The problem was he was obviously a dork himself, while we were the kings of cool, and the fool didn’t know what he was saying and to who. Plus, his wife is sitting next to him and what looks to be his mother in law is in the back and they’re all snickering. That did it! Beadle immediately dropped his Miss’s Reed’s customs around his knees and pushed his bare butt against the back window on their side, a move which was known in the vernacular of the times as a “pressed hams and fruit bowl.”  We were all laughing so hard we almost threw up, but not one of us even glanced at them the whole time.  We could only imagine what they were thinking.  We’d figured that was the last time that smart-ass would open his flap.”

 

This one from David Miller.

“Reading your column on mooning brought back a memory of truly astronomical proportions.  In 1976 after graduating HS my dad helped me buy a new car. Not just any car, but a brand spanking new Ford pinto with a 4 speed no less, even though I had never driven a stick b4.  One Saturday afternoon me and my buddies were coming home after surfing Salt Creek all morning. We took our time home cruising up PCH. As we approached Main St in HB we saw Mike Purpus and his crew walking across the street from the beach. (did I mention I had a CB radio with a PA system?)  I, in my infinite wisdom picked up my mic, as my friend Paul hung his butt out the window in a two handed cheek spread moon, I yell into the mic, “Mike Purpus is a kook.”  The light turned green, I dumped the clutch and promptly stalled the car. By now these guys are right next to my car. B4 Paul could get his butt back in the car one of Mike’s crew members snapped a wet towel at Paul, scoring a direct and perfect hit, we are talking dead center. As I restarted my car I heard a horrible piercing scream from Paul. The towel snapper must have been studying Astronomy, because over Paul’s whimpering I heard the guy yell,  “You really can see the rings around Uranus.”  All of us except Paul were laughing so hard we were in tears.”

 

                                                                                    

From Pete Rabbit.

“Your latest on “Mooning” especially interested me as I too still love to moon people, and we’re contemporaries!  Whilst attending the University of Colorado, two “legendary mooners” stand out…Oliver Fields, and Bob Trout…They were known to go to the local taco joint, and perform a “Double Inverted Pressed Ham” against the window!…This was done by Ollie getting on Bob’s shoulders.  Many years later, still perhaps the greatest classic moon ever!”

 

One more from Dave Hobbs.

“We used to look for out of state license plates on cars and drive past them yelling, “Welcome to California.” When it was cold in the winter and we didn’t want to roll down all the windows we would press our butt against a window.  Called it a “pressed ham.”

 

And that’s the END of this subject for now.

 

May 10, 2009

LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

Filed under: Local Column — @ 7:30 pm

LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

By Corky Carroll

 

Ya know folks; there are people who can see dark side of everything.  The frowny faces who never can be happy no matter how wonderful things are.  The surf can be ten feet and perfect with 80-degree water and nobody out and they will say, “yeah, but where are the naked babes on the beach?” 

 

And there can even be naked babes on the beach and they will say, “yeah, but the one with blonde hair is kinda fat.”  I know dudes like that.  I do my best to avoid them as much as possible.  I hate it when you see someone you and when you give ‘em the normal, “Howsit?,” they give you a thirty minute run down on all the horrors and chaos in the world.  Kinds turns down the heat on my stoke.

 

But then, thankfully, there are those other ones who can see the bright side in almost any situation.  No matter how bad things can be they are the ones who will come up with a joke or funny one liner to make everything seem not so bad.  These are the people that I gravitate too.  Hey, we all have challenges in life and we all have some sort of problems that we are trying to solve almost all the time.  For me the stress level seems to hit about 3 A.M when I should be sleeping and dreaming about ten foot waves, 80 degree water and naked babes, fat or not, on the beach.  For some reason I wake up and all my troubles are like megamount in my mind.  I hate that.  Thankfully when I wake up at 7 and look out the window and see that the surf looks good it all seems to pale in importance.  I guess this is why I get stressed in the first place; I put lifestyle very far ahead of income and material things.  Then some bill comes in and reality smacks me in the chops and 3 A.M. comes and I worry about it, followed by 7 when I paddle out and don’t worry about it.   Anyway, all that has nothing to do with my story for today other than to set the tone.

 

Have you ever gone on a trip where just about everything goes wrong?  You have a horrible time and the truth is that you wish you would never have gone in the first place.  Yet  you tell everybody about what an amazing trip it was and how you had the best time ever and how the surf was ten feet with 80 degree water and naked babes on the beach.  This is one of those adventures.

 

My pal the “Iguana” and his pal Jim VanDerhyden once took a surf trip to a place called Scorpion Bay in Baja.  I guess they had one of those car breaking down, running out of gas, getting lost in the desert, no surf, no chicas and bad conditions kinda adventures.  Jim’s board got huge dings on the rocks and the fleas and mosquitoes ate them both for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day and night.  They decided to go into a town called San Felipe for dinner and drinks one night.  They were in the mood to relax and try to forget all the problems of the trip.  One thing led to another, which led to a few “nightclubs” that maybe they should not have gone to if they had known better but they didn’t know better so they did.  Sometime during the night they got back in their car and tried to get back to where they were staying.  Unfortunately they were lost, and not seeing correctly anyway, and they drove around for hours and had no idea where they were or how they got there when they eventually stopped and fell asleep in the car. 

 

Have you ever woke up after a night like that and not known where you are, even when you do know where you are?  It’s way worse when you really and truly don’t know where you are.  Trust me on that.  So this was the case when the Iguana woke up and got out of the car to look around.  They were in the middle of the dump.  There were piles of trash and the car had wound up next to a big mound of decaying old mattresses.  Jim opened his eyes and asked if the Iguana knew where they were. 

 

“Yeah, we are OK. We’re at San Felipe Springs.”    

May 7, 2009

THE HOUSING HAS IT

Filed under: Wave Column — @ 8:12 pm

THE HOUSING HAS IT

By Corky Carroll

 

When I was first learning how to surf as a small, yet lovely, boy in front my house in Surfside Colony there were only a few surfers on our beach.  It was the mid 1950’s and there were only a few surfers on all the beaches for that matter.  I looked up to the older dudes who knew how to surf and always did their best to run me over, splash water in my face and tell me to take off on waves that were sure to crunch me.  A great bunch of guys.  Two of the best local surfers were Larry Conroy and Ray Toggweiler.  Larry lived next door to me and Ray was from Seal Beach.  For the longest time I always thought that the surf spot, “Ray Bay,” was in fact named after Ray Toggweiler.  It was only later after having surfed there a few times that I found out that it was actually named after the 30 billion sting-rays that live there.  That place is the undisputed stingray capital of the world.  Stingrays go there for conventions and vacations.  In the late 60’s they had the big Stingray “Love In” there. 

 

Aside from not having Ray Bay named after him Ray was nonetheless a great local surfer during that time period.  What is little known is the fact that Rays father, Mart, was probably the worlds leading builder of underwater camera housings for the surfing photography industry.  I recently connected with Ray and asked him to write me something about his father and how he developed the underwater housings used by all the leading surf photogs for many decades.  The following is what Ray sent me about his dad.

 

“Surf photography, most likely, started in the 1930’s.  The pictures were taken from the beach, piers and jettys.  Because of the distance between the photographer and the surfer, the image was quite small. By the late 1940’s telephoto lens were being used.  These lenses, with time, became larger and larger. In the early 1950’s a photo of a surfer, taken from a quarter mile away, was very recognizable.  Because the surfers could now recognize themselves surf photography, both stills and movies, became popular.  Mart Toggweiler, during the 1950’s, was running a charter boat from Long Beach to Catalina Island for skin divers and spear fishermen.  A few of these divers were experimenting with crude housings for their cameras to be taken underwater.  I can remember Mart’s wife giving up her pressure cooker to be used as the first housing that he built.  This struck his interest in underwater photography.  He started working with Plexiglas and soon found that he could custom fit most cameras, still and movies, within a Plexiglas housing.  By attaching Plexiglas O-rings glands to the housing he could control the shutter, focus and film advance from the exterior of the housings.  The interest in building waterproof housings for cameras soon evolved into a business called Hyodrotech.  Mart Toggweiler started building custom housings, developed and printed a manual on how to build your own underwater housing and sold parts through mail order to people who wanted to build their own housings.  Through word of mouth the underwater housings soon caught the attention of the surf photographers.  By the early 1960’s most of the Hydrotech business shifted from divers to surfers.  This was an easy transition for Mart Toggweiler.  The only difference was that the surf photographers wanted their housings to float, and because the housings never went any deeper than ten feet, they could be built a lot

lighter.  Some of the surf photographers who used his custom housings were; John Severson, Bruce Brown, Bud Brown, Dan Merkel, Aaron Chang, Tom Holden, Russ Hoover, Larry Moore, Greg MacGillivary and Jim Freeman (Five Summer Stories).  As time went on, the motion picture business started ordering housings for their productions. The cameras used were very large and required large housing. The largest was for MacGillivary Freeman Films. This housing was used in the production of a film for the I-Max theaters.  Between 1956 and 2002, Mart estimates that he built over 1500 custom camera housings. Mart Toggweiler is now retired and lives in Seal Beach, Ca.  He has very fond memories of developing a product that helped introduce the world to surfing.”

 

Larry Conroy went on to a major career in Electronics and never forgave me for dinging his beautiful Dick Barrymore balsawood surfboard and later dinging his ugly green pickup truck.  Thanks Ray for the cool info on your pops.

May 2, 2009

AVOIDING SURF PROBLEMS

Filed under: Wave Column — @ 4:54 pm

AVOIDING SURF PROBLEMS

By Corky Carroll

 

This morning I was out surfing at one of my favorite local spots and having mellow time of it.  There were only a few guys in the area and there seemed to be enough waves to go around.  Everybody out there seemed happy and having a good time.  Then a good set came in just to the south of were I was sitting.  I was tempted to paddle my brains out to try and get over to where it was and grab one.  But there were a couple of guys already over there and they would have better position than me so I opted to just stay put and watch.  What happened kind of amazed me.  There were three good waves in this approaching set.  Both of the guys let the first one go.  The second wave looked good and the guy that was farther over started moving into position for it.  But the other guy, instead of moving out for the next one, started paddling as hard as he could to get inside of the other guy who was already in the spot.  The first guy had clear position.  The second guy was doing his best to snake the dude out of the wave.  

 

 I am sitting there thinking how stupid this situation is.  There is another wave outside and it looks even better.  But guy number two is so bent on beating guy number one out of this wave that he didn’t even bother to check outside to see if there was a better wave.

 

As I watch guy number two paddles inside of guy number one.  Guy number one had been paying attention to the wave and getting in a good take off spot and had not seen the other guy franticly paddling inside of him.  Guy number one catches the wave and started dropping down the face.  Guy number two, who had paddled on the inside of him, then turns around and makes a last second late takeoff and starts yelling, “hey hey hey.”  

 

I am now totally disgusted, yet amused, at what was going on.  This is so typical of our crowded local conditions these days.  But on this day when there were not many people out and plenty of waves to go around, this was just totally uncool. 

 

As guy number two is screaming at the top of his he fails to notice that he has actually positioned himself too deep to make the wave anyway.  The lip came crashing down right on his head and he ate it like a rat.  Guy number one continued on and got a great ride.

 

 “That is a classic case of surf justice,” I was thinking.  Guy number two created the problem and his own bad karma got him in the end.  Hahahahahaha.  Served the dude right.

 

But that was not the end of it.  When guy number one got back out to the lineup guy number two started shouting at him and running off at the mouth with all the usual verbiage used on “kuks from nowhere who come down here and drop in on everybody and don’t know their butts from watermelons from space.”  It was entertaining yet at the same time about as uncalled for as it gets.  Guy number two was so in the wrong it was crazy that he could be saying a word.  But he went on and on ranting to this other guy who had only been in the right place in the first place.  Finally guy number one had heard enough and turned and paddled away.  He didn’t say a word.  

 

I was impressed by this.  It could have turned into something worse but guy number one choose to avoid the problem other than to add fuel to it.  I wouldn’t have done that.  I would have reacted to the injustice of this guy and his nerve to yell about it like he was in the right.  Then it would have gotten even more heated and the guy would have probably smacked me or something.  The young guys have no respect for us old dinos anymore.  They would just as soon beat us than look at us.   But this other guy had much better self-control than me and probably most other dudes out there these days.   It was a nice thing to see and a good lesson.  It’s better to have a shut mouth than a bloody one.  And besides guy number one got the good wave and the good ride.  All the other geek got was a beating by the wave and a whole lot of anger within himself to deal with.  

THE SWEET SOUND

Filed under: Local Column — @ 4:52 pm

THE SWEET SOUND

By Corky Carroll

 

In surfing there is a thing that we all strive for.  It is to get “inside” of the wave.  We call it getting into the “barrel,” or into the “tube, curl, green room or pipe.”  I have also heard it called the “Green Cathedral,” and the “Tunnel of Wet Love.”  That last one might have more than one usage but it works pretty good in describing the surfing thing of getting into the hollow part of the wave as it breaks.  To do it right you need to also emerge out the end of the tunnel as the wave peels along.  When you are perfectly into that wonderful watery pocket there is a certain sound that is unmistakable.  It’s a sound that once you have heard it you wanna hear it again and again.  Like the angels singing.  Combined with the feeling of the cover up it is more or less the ultimate surfing experience.  

 

Over the years I have been asked to describe this many times and it always comes out pretty much the same way.  It is a feeling that only can be felt and not described.  But the sound is something like that of being in a drainpipe with you riding through it.  It’s very magical.  For most of my surfing life I have described my first “in the curl” experience from a ride I got on my first surfboard out in front of my house in Surfside when I had been surfing about a year.  One day I was on this wave that was over my head and it started to close out in front of me.  I thought about trying to straighten out but I was too locked into the direction I was going and was not good enough yet to make a sudden cutback.  And it was too late to kick out.  So my only choice was to jump off or just stand there and eat it like a rat.  I froze.  Then a miracle happened.  The wave broke right over my head and just kept peeling off with me inside of it.  I came out the other side just pulsating with adrenalin.  Talk about being totally stoked?  I was in surf hog heaven.  I heard “the sound.”  Forget college mom and dad.  

 

I had always remembered that as my first time in the barrel.  But then the other day I realized that I had actually experienced this before that and had forgotten about it.  What triggered the memory was I was driving through Malibu Canyon on the way to a job I got doing a small part in a new movie.  We passed a little road that turned off the highway and I was telling my wife, the extremely kool Kika, that when I was a little boy my parents had sent me off to a summer camp right there.  It was called Kilgore’s Kiddie Camp.  I was really little and my only memory of the camp itself was that I cried the first night and wanted my mommy.  And there was a girl that got attacked by bees and I was scared of bees for a long time after that.  But also one day they took us all by bus to a little beach just south of Malibu.  It is where there is a little walk bridge going across Pacific Coast Highway.  I was wading around in the shorebreak when a wave broke right over me.  I heard the sound.  The wave creamed me but I liked the feeling of being inside of it and the sound.  For the next hour I kept trying to get another wave to break over me but all I succeeded in doing was getting thrashed.  Some girl told me that I would get brain damage if I kept doing that.  Humph.  Maybe she was right.  

 

That memory came flooding back into my mind as I was telling Kika about being at the summer camp and I realized that it was actually then that I got my first barrel and not on that wave at Surfside.  But seeing as how I was just standing there and had no way to come out the end I guess it would not count as a real barrel ride.  Nonetheless it was cool.   And I did keep my Kilgore’s Kiddie Camp T-shirt in my collection for years and years. 

 

This does not mean you should go stand in the path of breaking waves.  Just a little recollection of memorable moments of spending an entire life trying to stay in the “curl.”

 

 

Powered by WordPress