My story post 41

After that first surf contest I completely forgot that there actually could be surf during a surf meet.

It seemed to me that there was rarely any surf during the days a surf event was scheduled. Even though sometimes there was surf, most of the time there was little. Case in point was the second surf contest I entered.

It was early summer of 1967. The contest was held in Hermosa Beach. Beautiful weather, sunny warm… but the surf? Totally none existent. Unless you call not even knee high wind chop surf, maybe one rogue knee bump every 15 or 20 minutes if that. So with 15 minute 5 man heats what kind of surfing were the judges scoring?

Remember your best three waves count, but getting three waves was close to impossible in the allotted 15 minutes. Looking for something to ride you’d paddle for anything hoping the chop would have enough push to glide you long enough to get to your feet, but then what. You couldn’t generate enough speed to execute a turn without digging a rail. My friend Mike Smith was in the same heat as I was so we just joked around in the water until the horn blew to end the heat.

So once again I walked to the check in stand, tuned in my jersey and continued walking to my van and went home.. hoping when I got back to Ventura there may be some surf because, by then I really wanted to surf!

What I didn’t know was that every time you entered an event you got points. If you advanced to the next level in the event you got more points. Over time you would accumulate all these points that would put you somewhere in the standing of the USSA, or what ever the organization was that did the contests. So if you entered all the contests and advanced through enough heats you could have a pretty high standing at the end of the event year. Never really placing very high in an event.

Oh well, it really didn’t matter to me at that point because it just seemed stupid to hold a surf contest when there weren’t any waves. And it seemed that most of the time there was little to no surf when a contest was held. So I gave up on the whole contest thing.

Contests can be fun and maybe most guys don’t mind them as long as they’re not held at their home break.

D.R.

An old Surfer Mag. photo of a contest winners circle. Steve Bigler wins a TV. Donald Takayama wins… what is that a transistor radio? And John Peck wins the motor cycle. Bigler... 'pretty cool ... a TV set'. John is all smiles on his new machine... with the look on TD’s face…. ‘what the heck’?