Over the years I have been to surf camps and each one was a memorable experience. Unfortunately each trip only lasted for a day. Spending a whole week here would be a brilliant experience as I have been hoping to improve on my surfing skills for a while now. A few months back I watched Waveriders which convinced me even more to surf, after all the North West is known for being one of the best surf spots in the world.
My family are big into athletics, competing at national and international level, but I want to make surfing my own sport. I have missed out on the opportunity to come back here over the last few years. This is the first year in a long time that we will be home for the summer. I saw this competition this morning and it definitely woke me up! – Who wouldn’t chance an entry for this brilliant opportunity?
Surfing culture in Southern California has gone through several revisions — the bronzed, silly countercultural movement of the early ’60s, spearheaded by Miki Dora; the Technicolor times of the Beach Boys and surf kitsch films like Beach Party; the dirty, somewhat scummy years captured best in the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys; the shredded, California punk era, when everything got a bit more “aggressive”; the hard-core bros at Windansea and the “surf weird” longboarders of La Jolla.
Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian waterman most credited with spreading the gospel of surfing, came to California and put on several surfing exhibitions for the inhabitants of Newport Beach and Huntington Beach. Surfing existed in the States prior to the Duke’s arrival, but the Duke spread the gospel of aloha culture throughout California. Huntington Beach has far from the best waves on the West Coast, but it quickly became the kitschy capital of SoCal surf culture, home to both the International Surfing Hall of Fame, the U. S. Open of Surfing, and a life-size statue of the Duke.
In the late ’40s and early ’50s, returning G. I. ’s and advances in board technology made surfing more accessible (prior to 1940, most surfers had to figure out ways to carve their own surfboards out of massive, heavy pieces of lumber or beat-up telephone posts) and the first salable iteration of surf culture was born. In 1957, a screenwriter and novelist named Frederick Kohner published Gidget, a book based on his daughter Kathy’s adventures in Malibu, and by 1959 the Gidget movie franchise had launched and the rest of the country learned that there was, indeed, some appeal in surfing at the beach all day long.