Last week in this space I wrote about the incredible Blakey Johnston who is prepared to surf himself almost to death to keep the stoke alive and help others discover their inner awesome, and I hope you all raced out and bought tickets for Blakey’s Noosa launch of his book Swell-Being, happening in October.
This week a salute to another bloke whose tenacity got him into the Guinness Book of World Records many moons ago and whose record, like Kelly Slater’s, will never be broken.
Not that Dale Webster had the surfing skills of a Blakey, or even a JJ Moon to be honest, but after a relatively late start, the surfer from Sonoma County, California surfed every day, from 2 September 1975 to 5 October 2015, when hospitalisation for kidney stones forced the end of the “streak”, as he called it. That’s 40 years, one month and three days, or 14,642 days, if you will.
Webster’s obsession with devoting his life to riding at least three waves a day (his rules, and the last one had to be all the way to the beach) came with plenty of hardships and sacrifice.
In the first year of the streak he surfed 121 consecutive days in sub-55 degrees Farenheit (that’s 12.8 Centigrade). And if you’ve ever surfed north of San Francisco you’ll know you often have a wind-chill factor so severe that it feels much lower than that.
He surfed every day (very briefly, it must be said) while his wife lay at home dying of cancer, he couldn’t leave the coast for any reason for longer than half a day, he couldn’t hold down a real job. But he got a lot of column inches!
As Sports Illustrated noted in 2008: “It is his burden and salvation.”
Webster developed a phobia about injuries that might keep him out of the surf for a day and ruin everything.
Mowing the lawn was out of the question in case a rock flew up and hit him. We don’t know how he felt about the dangers of washing up. He surfed on through all kinds of shocking weather and the flu, cuts, sprains, headache and earache. And even when the kidney stone started to give him grief, he got his wife to carry his board to the water’s edge, paddled out for his three waves, then crawled back up the beach and went to hospital. (This was before the cancer, of course.)
During a spate of publicity when he reached the 25 year milestone, 9132 days, in 2000,
Webster told the New York Times that he often thought about “all the things I’ll have missed in life because of this. The only thing I’ll have is the memory of riding all those waves.” Sad, crazy, and in a way, strangely wonderful.
Webster died earlier this month, aged 77. As Encyclopedia of Surfing’s Matt Warshaw noted: “Of those 28,019 days on earth, over half were stitched together in a streak that isn’t just the longest of its kind, but possibly the greatest, and without question the strangest, athletic streak of any kind.”
Will it pump for WSL Finals?
Possibly not, according to the week-out swell tracking as I write, but the good news is that the forecast is better now (Sunday night) than it was on Friday, when some of the bloggerati were predicting an all-airs one final series at Cloudbreak.
I can’t even begin to imagine the carnage that might ensue with everyone trying to punt over the jagged ledges of Shishkebabs, which is where you would be on the reef if it’s under double-overhead. Only a little bit overhead being my seniors limit at Cloudy, probably my favourite wave in the world when I was merely late middle-aged, I’m reasonably familiar with that stretch of reef, and I wouldn’t want to be taking to the air, even if I knew how to.
Fortunately, it’s now looking like an early week swell might provide a perfect canvas. Who’s it going to work for? Well, they’ll all have a dig, but in the men’s the two Brazilian goofies should go to town, and Yago Dora only has to surf once if he can close it out on first appearance, whereas Italo Ferreira, down at #5 seed, has to surf five times to win the title.
Sentimental favorite? Well, Jack Robbo at #4 seed, of course, but if our Jack can’t get there I’d love to see the big bru, South Africa’s Jordy Smith take a title at last.
In the women’s, I reckon our Molly Picklum has a world title to lose, and she’s not going to. She’s #1 seed for a reason, and she’s two surfs from getting home. Go Pickles! I think her only real threat is Gabby Bryan, but Molly’s poise and steely nerve should win the day.
