Fifty years ago, Dr Dorian Paskowitz dropped out of society and embarked on a 14-year global surfing safari, raising nine children in a 24ft camper van, and catching every wave he could. He dreamt that they could all live untainted by money, school and fatty foods, and never imagined the wipeout that followed.
Picking his way carefully across the hot sand of San Diego’s Pacific Beach, Dorian ‘Doc’ Paskowitz pauses for a moment and looks out to sea, where dozens of surfers bob in the gentle waves breaking between the point and the pier. “I have surfed here when I was the only person for a hundred miles,” he says. “Now, there’s a hundred people for one mile.”
When he first came to Pacific Beach as a boy, there …Â Details