Reporting from The Pacific Northwest — The hunt is on. Garrett McNamara hurtles 60 mph down an icy river in the Great Northwest, throttling a 255-horsepower Sea Doo jet ski loaded with surfboards. His 11-year-old son Titus clings to his back, and a reporter clings to Titus’ back.
McNamara punches it up to 65 to cross the mud flats of a coastal inlet. The engine screams like it’s shredding sheet metal. Eyes tear up in the cold. The water is just inches deep. Tiny shells glint in the slipstream. McNamara does not worry about hitting a rock or submerged log. He is not a man given to thoughts of mortality.
McNamara, 41, has surfed some of the biggest, heaviest, ugliest waves on earth — notably the debris-strewn tsunamis generated by crashing glaciers in Alaska. He has broken his back and three ribs, popped both his knees, scraped most of the skin off his thigh, suffered countless sprains and deep-tissue cuts, and shattered his foot several times.
On this January morning, he is here to surf the local “slab” — not so much a normal ocean wave as a sudden, violent tear in the fabric of the ocean…. More info

When he trademarked the Santa Cruz Surfing Club name, Ryan Rittenhouse didn’t know he was unleashing a battle royale between old friends and generations of surfers.
Robert Rittenhouse Sr., a tall and dignified 84-year-old with a neat part in his white hair, sits in the drafty warehouse offices of the Santa Cruz Surfing Club Inc., reminiscing about the business’s namesake, the original 27-member club he started with his friends as teenagers in the 1930s.
“We were all kids,” he says. “[At one point], the club thought, we should buy Cowell’s Beach up there where the hotel was. We never knew anything about real estate, but we thought, gee, maybe Cowell would sell it.”
He chuckles gravely.
“We went up to San Francisco and actually had enough nerve to …Â More info
Aliso Viejo, Ca — The Surf Industry Manufacturers Association (SIMA), founded in 1989, is proud to celebrate its 20th anniversary. As the trade association of competing surf product suppliers working together for the development of the surf industry, SIMA has united the surf industry for the past 20 years.
“Many years ago, SIMA began out of a need to work more effectively with our tradeshow partners,†said Bob McKnight, CEO of Quiksilver and SIMA’s first president. “We started in this industry because of our passion for surfing and the beach lifestyle. SIMA has done a tremendous job in sharing the real message of surf culture and helping us all ‘grow the pond.’â€
From issues like the closure of Clark Foam to trade show dates, SIMA has proven its effectiveness in unifying and serving the surf business by gathering the leaders of our industry and acting as their collective voice.
“SIMA has been the glue that has kept our industry together for many years… More info
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Our recent Baja Update drew a significant amount speculative feedback regarding the safety, or lack thereof, in Northern Baja. We thought one response, however, deserved to be shared. In an unsolicited, open letter, an anonymous Surfline user wrote of his most recent Baja experience:
Dear Surfline,
I wanted to drop a note and tell you guys of a very bad experience I endured while in Rosarito. It was the weekend of Jan 17-19th. I had traveled down there with my girl and we had surfed BM’s all three days. There were alot of ski’s in the water (8+) and they made it hard for any of the paddle in crew to get any decent waves. I even tried going down the beach farther, but it seemed like they kept following me. That was a disappointment, but not the main point of this letter. After surfing all day my chick and I decided to hang out and wait till late evening to …Â More info
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