'Surfing's Greatest Misadventures' compiles waves of anecdotes
By: GARY WARTH - Staff Writer | ∞
Surfer Jamie Tierney didn't believe in such superstitions, so when Todd Daniel Kayminski of San Diego told him the small-wave board was priced low because of "bad juju," Tierney scoffed and bought it.
The board rode like magic, and Tierney bought two more from Kayminski. The day he picked them up, he also had agreed to give his young cousins a ride to Disneyland. With three boards strapped to his roof and the kids in the car, he headed north to Anaheim.
Around the I-5 and 805 merge in Sorrento Valley, Tierney's 11-year-old cousin pulled on the strap running over his head, loosening it enough to set all three boards free. Tierney looked in the rearview mirror to see them fluttering in the breeze behind him. The brand-new longboards were destroyed immediately, but the shorter "bad juju" board landed in one piece, safely blown against the center divider.
Tierney pulled over and kept his eyes riveted to the board for 90 minutes. He was relieved when a Caltrans worker finally arrived to help him retrieve it. Just as the worker pulled up, though, a blue car stopped next to the center divider. The driver grabbed the board and then sped off.
"I guess that one's funny because it happened to somebody else," said Paul Diamond, editor of "Surfing's Greatest Misadventure" ($15.95, Casagrande Press).
Tierney's story and 29 others are compiled in the book, released March 1 by Diamond's Seattle-based publishing house.
"I had thought of doing it for some time," said Diamond, 35, who has surfed 16 years. Anyone who has surfed that long has heard about surfing misadventures or lived through a few themselves, so Diamond set out to find stories.
One of his favorites is "Crossing the Line" by Jeff Phillips, who rode in a small motorboat seven miles out to sea with his dog and a friend to catch some waves. With his friend already in the water, he was thrown from the boat, which then putt-putted away with his dog. The harrowing trip ended happily, with all three safely back on land.
Another favorite is "Lesson Six" by Ran Elfassy, who was vacationing in Sri Lanka with his wife in December 2004. They were on their sixth and final surfing lesson, bobbing on their boards and waiting for waves, when they noticed that the tide had come in and covered the beach. And then the roads. And then the houses and trees.
The tsunami had struck. After it washed over the shore, the tide switched directions and muddy debris flowed past the surfers. Stepping off their boards, they discovered the ocean had receded and they were standing in just a foot of water. In the ocean behind them, they could see a swell rising and heading toward them.
Diamond chose the stories from about 300 submissions, but few had the drama of Elfassy's. An early attempt at soliciting stories through surfing publications and Web sites netted poor results, so Diamond instead contacted surf journalists, who had great stories and knew how to tell them.
Among the contributors are Steve Barilotti of Cardiff, editor at large of Surfer magazine, Chris Cote of Oceanside, editor of Transworld Surf magazine; Michael Migdol of Encinitas, editor of Automatic magazine; and Nathan Myers of Encinitas, managing editor of Surfing magazine.
Among the shortest and strangest of the misadventures is Migdol's "Homeless Surf Challenge" from July 1999.
After being heckled by "a homeless dude" while suiting up for a surf, Migdol observed that the man seemed to have some expertise.
"It occurred to me that we might have a few homeless rippers on our local beach," he wrote. "At our next editorial meeting at Automatic magazine, we decided that we should, once and for all, find out which of these vagrants rips the hardest and who has the right to heckle. And so the first 'Homeless Surf Challenge' was organized."
Things didn't go well. The one promising contestant couldn't compete because he had been arrested for assaulting a police officer. Among those left were Unmedicated Jeffrey, Transmitter Joe, Stinks of Urine and Will the Messiah, who stood in the water and tried to baptize the other contestants as they paddled out.
Two contestants got into a scuffle over a cigarette butt, half of them were drunk and one of them got sick in the surf. Unmedicated Jeffrey won the grand prize: a shopping cart full of malt liquor.
Cote's entry, "Birds of Timor," recalled his trip to Indonesia with a group of pro surfers. With the hung-over group aboard an aging DC-10, Cote described the plane reaching its top ground speed and starting to take off. Suddenly an explosion rocked the fuselage and filled the plane with smoke. The DC-10 skidded to the end of the runway, almost rolling over. An airport employee walked out, inspected the plane and found a charred bird in the engine. The plane returned to the runway and took off.
Myers' story, "Aftershock," is one of the most somber. Last year, he and others from Surfing magazine traveled to Indonesia to explore reefs that had been exposed by the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami. Besides chronicling new surfing spots, the magazine crew brought tsunami relief packages to an isolated village in northern Sumatra.
On the morning of March 28, the crew thought they were in the path of another tsunami when a predawn earthquake struck while they were anchored off the coast of Asu Island. The crew heard cries for help from the island, and through the pale moonlight they could see that the tide had drastically receded.
"And so now, without a doubt, we knew a tsunami was coming," he wrote.
The crew loaded panicked villagers aboard the ship. As tense minutes passed, they took on 100 passengers while watching the tide recede even more. Finally they sailed away, but the tsunami never came. Returning at dawn, they found that the water had not receded after all, but coral reefs had risen 10 feet from the water.
Barilotti's "Laughing to Disaster" is one of the longest stories and recalls a memorable but ill-fated 1996 surfing trip to Peru. By the end of the trip, half of his friends had bailed out and Barilotti was calling it the worst surfing trip of his life, yet it was one he was sad to see end. His story culminates with a hike up Huaynu Picchu Mountain. Looking at the village below, he wrote that he wanted to see the sight for his late sister.
Diamond did not contribute a story, but said he was inspired to begin compiling misadventures when he experienced just how many things can go wrong in a single day of surfing.
While he was teaching in a surf camp in Baja, Mexico, one of Diamond's teenage students split his head open after diving from a rock.
"To get him out of there, we had to drive through this brush fire that was pretty extensive," he said. "The road was on fire on both sides. He was in the back of an ambulance, and we were following in a van. Then the ambulance came upon an 18-wheeler that had crashed on the highway. The accident had just happened, and there's this guy sprawled out on the street."
The ambulance driver picked up the injured man and continued to the hospital.
"Three hours later, he's getting worked on and I think, hmm, maybe I should start working on this book," he said.
Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410.
Contributors to "Surfing's Greatest Adventure" will appear at three area book-signings in May.
May 1: Steve Barilotti, Nathan Myers, Terry "Tubesteak" Tracy and Steve Pezman are scheduled for 7 p.m. at the San Clemente Library, 242 Avenida del Mar. Call (949) 492-3851.
May 2: Steve Barilotti, Nathan Myers, Chris Cote and Michael Migdol are scheduled for 7 p.m. at Borders Bookstore in Carlsbad, 1905 Calle Barcelona. Call (760) 479-0242.
May 3: Chris Cote and Michael Migdol are scheduled for 7 p.m. at Borders Bookstore in downtown San Diego, 668 Sixth Ave. Call (619) 702-4200.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
Talk & Book-signing
7 p.m.
Barnes & Noble - Encinitas
1040 N. El Camino Real, #104
Friday, May 12, 2006
Book-Signing Only
1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Warwick's La Jolla
7812 Girard Avenue
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