Imagine collecting thousands of empty plastic bottles, lashing them together to make a boat and sailing the thing from California to Australia, a journey of 11,000 miles through treacherous seas.
You’d have to be crazy, or trying to make a point. David de Rothschild is trying to make a point.
De Rothschild hopes his one-of-a-kind vessel, now being built on a San Francisco pier, will boost recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste. Except for the masts, which are metal, everything on the 60-foot catamaran is made from recycled plastic.
“It’s all sail power,” he said. “The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere…Â
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For better or worse, over the last decade, surfers have gone retro.
In San Diego County perhaps more than in any other location, surfers have returned to longboards, twin-fins, single fins and five fins, quad fins and finless boards from nearly every era in surfing’s history. At times, it feels as though some surfers are merely skipping along the short timeline of surfing history and seemingly at random picking a place at which to stop, exhuming the surfboard relics from the era and applying them to the modern surfing culture.
Proponents call this freeing; naysayers say …Â Details
California, that fount of American cultural invention, has birthed many of our postwar cultural talismans, maybe none more idiosyncratic as popular surf culture. Looking back on it there’s a quaintness to its frantic assertion of the bohemian; we can see it now, with the distance of two generations, as a first innocent acting out on impulses of personal freedom and self-identity that would show up, by turns joyfully and tragically, across the nation before long. …Â
…Pop Surf Culture a splashy, capacious and readable history of the scene, brings together the strands of surfing’s multi-sourced past…   Details
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Mt. Baldy: Average Joe snowboarders and free-skiers will get the opportunity to compete against everyone from the best riders in the country to their next door neighbors at an upcoming event at Mt. Baldy.
The “Money N Tha Bank” throwdown rail jam on Saturday is a grassroots competition for all ages and rider levels at the ski area known for its challenging terrain and wide open bowls.
“We call it a throw down because anything goes,” said event organizer Nick Ciotti.
The event originated as an end-of-the-year rail jam…Â Details