Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [59]
“Those were fantastic days,” says Collins. “Nobody else knew anything, and I’d just get tons of waves. It was like voodoo.”
“You know, in eighteenth-century Hawaii, there was this whole cult of surf priests, or kahunas,” says George. “They had a temple on Waikiki Beach. By monitoring natural things like water color and temperatures or bird flights indicating a faraway storm, they could predict the surf. The fantastic thing was, when the waves were going to hit, the kahunas would send kites above Diamond Head to tell the villagers, ‘Hey, the surf’s up!’ The villages would empty as the people rushed to Waikiki. Sean became our kahuna.”
The track of the USS Enterprise before her collision with the Cortes Bank on November 2, 1985. The times shown are military times, while the hand-drawn figures indicate rudder/steering angle commands. The outline shows Bishop Rock’s six fathom (maximum thirty-six-foot deep) outline. The Enterprise passed through very shallow water, barely two nautical miles from where the waves break. Image courtesy of Karlene H. Roberts taken from the study: “Bishop Rock Dead Ahead: The Grounding of USS Enterprise.” By Karlene H. Roberts, University of California, Berkeley. 1986. Image courtesy: Karlene H. Roberts.
Flame soon recognized that Collins’s predictions were becoming accurate enough to bank on and offered him a five-hundred-dollar-a-month forecasting retainer. Collins would give the heads up, and Flame would position photographers and surfers along the coast.
The mid- to late eighties were heady days for Surfing. Flame was getting baffling and frustrating drops on his archrivals at Surfer, whose offices were just up the road in San Juan Capistrano, and Flame’s two young editors were talented provocateurs. On the one side was Sam George—an earthy, long-haired, and loudly opinionated soul surfer from the Bay Area. On the other was Bill Sharp—a brash and equally opinionated neon-clad ripper from Newport Beach with his halo of spiky bleach-blond hair. Their night-and-day lifestyles provided a yin-and-yang balance for a magazine targeting young readers. “Bill dyed his hair and wore tiger-striped spats,” laughs George. “He was raging at the clubs and ska dancing to the Specials. I was listening to Loggins and Messina.”
If George tended to be self-serious and even self-important in his pronouncements about the surfing life, he was also generous, gregarious, and always open to other opinions. And in Bill Sharp, he found the perfect philosophical and rhetorical foil.
“When Bill started full-time at the mag, I had a little trepidation because we were so different,” George says. “But we saw right away that he had a really wry sense of humor, and over that, we established a bond. We didn’t butt heads, but Bill had a much more cynical outlook than I did. He wasn’t shy about keeping the reins on my hyperbole and romance—which was good. He taught me that my reverence for surfing could be a liability. And he was also very good at looking at the big picture.”
Surfing’s editorial director, Dave Gilovich, brought Sharp and George’s ideas into clear focus. Art Director Mike Salisbury framed the work of trailblazing photographers Aaron Chang and Jeff Hornbaker in neon and checkerboard, while budding writers Nick Carroll and future X-Files creator Chris Carter further enhanced the brain trust. This was arguably the most forward-thinking, entrepreneurial, and controversial team of media minds surfing ever produced. For better or worse, their focus on young surfers, competition, hot brands, and fashion planted the seeds for what has grown into today’s multibillion-dollar surf industry.
However, this transformation required more than style. There were practical necessities, and Collins couldn’t help but wonder: If Flame was willing to pay five hundred dollars a month for his forecasts, what