Todd Balf of Outside heads to the coastal town of York, Maine to attend a weeklong surfboard building workshop offered by Grain Surfboards, and tries to explain his newfound obsession:

“…I’m still trying to figure out why I felt the need to come here. Partly it’s because I want to build something nice, to prove I can—despite a barnful of half-assed projects back home that say I can’t. And I want to find a path into a sport that, up until now, I’ve resisted. More and more, guys I used to ride bikes with are absent, gone surfing. My kids surf. So do my basketball buddies. I live only minutes from a nice little Massachusetts break.”

photo credit: rowland_rick

From Hawaii and Baja to Tasmania and Western Australia to Easter Island and South Africa, Californian surfers Rusty and Greg Long have made a life out chasing the world’s biggest waves. Kitt Doucette of Men’s Journal spends a few days traveling, surfing, and trying to understand what makes these “big-wave hell men” tick.

“Their styles on the water reflect their personalities, with Greg surfing aggressively and competitively, riding deep in the tube and cutting waves to pieces with powerful carves, and Rusty surfing patiently, smoothly flowing between elegant, relaxed turns. Neither brother, though, is about to let the pursuit of a trophy or title get in the way of their good time. ‘Contests are an important part of big-wave surfing,’ Greg says, ‘but the greatest joy for me comes from leaving the first set of footprints on an isolated beach, paddling out into unknown waters, and being the first to ride a wave somewhere.’”

photo credit: Bengt Nyman

Club Of The Waves interviews Southern Californian surf painter and sculptor Phil Roberts about sidewalk art, his unique scientific illustrations, and what he hopes to communicate through his work:

“Figurative in any medium. I’ve always been drawn (pardon the pun) to the human figure and the challenge of capturing personalities since I started doing caricatures in high school. I’ve been very fortunate that my destiny as an artist has always been evident to me.”

20 year-old Clay Marzo of Maui is one of the planet’s most gifted surfers; he also was diagnosed in 2007 with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of “high-functioning” autism. Jonah Lehrer of Outside Magazine investigates Clay’s struggles to articulate, his rare physical grace, and an “encompassing preoccupation” with the ocean.

“Clay Marzo doesn’t love surfing. Love is a complicated thing—sometimes people fall out of love—but there is nothing complicated about Clay’s relationship to the ocean. For Clay, surfing is an elemental need, a form of sustenance, a way of being that he couldn’t be without. He just turned 20, but he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t obsessed with barrels, shortboards, and the daily swell report.”

Documentary: Clay Marzo: Just Add Water

Produced by Koastal Media

In June 2006 former LAPD Officer Kristina Ripatti was shot three times by a suspect, severing her spinal cord and paralyzing her from the chest down. Tim Pearce, her husband, “sensed that she would recover more quickly and fully if she could resume the activities she loved — biking, surfing, fishing — even with limitations.”

“When they surf together, Pearce carries her into the water and, using swim fins, pushes her board beyond the surf line before turning it toward shore. She rides the wave in and he follows close behind,” writes Jean Merl of the Los Angeles Times.

Club Of The Waves speaks with Australian surf photographer Trent Mitchell about subject matter, still shooting film, favorite travel locales, and his evolving fascination with the sport:

“…I rode waves long before I loved riding them. It was maybe after a couple of years until I really did love it. Maybe when I was 14/15. It could have been a few sessions out a local reef break, where you kind of weightlessly draw lines into the tube every wave. It was not big, but hollow for the size and I really remember being addicted to that weightless millisecond and going fast with a lip pitching over your head.”

With roughly 40 members and its headquarters a “dilapidated corrugated iron shack, about the size of an outside toilet,” the Gaza Surf Club is group of young and old Palestinians battling world-wide political perception, in addition to raw sewage on their surf break.

“The sea around Gaza is heavily polluted with at least 60 million litres of raw and partially treated sewage being pumped into it every day,” writes Jon Donnison of BBC News.

“It’s therefore a somewhat surreal sight to see young men, clad in wetsuits, boards tucked under their arms, splashing into the water. These are the surfers of Gaza.”

Board Shaper

Entrepreneurs and surfboard shapers Joey Santley and Steve Cox of San Clemente, Ca. of start-up Green Foam Blanks and Ned McMahon of San Diego’s Malma Composites (soy-based surfboard blanks), are trying to change the toxic manufacturing history of the surfboard industry by creating blanks that are 60 to 65 percent recycled waste.

“A broken board tossed in a landfill will take generations to biodegrade; the plastic fins probably never will. Even the thin strip of wood that runs down the middle to provide strength comes at an environmental cost…” writes Mike Anton of The Los Angeles Times.

photo credit: Jaymis

Danielle Pergament of The New York Times writes about Todos Santos, Mexico–a small coastal town at the foothills of Baja’s Sierra de la Laguna Mountains (about an hour north of Cabo San Lucas) that has been a sleepy surf locale for more than 10 years, but is finally coming into its own. Longtime residents want to avoid the local development mistakes of Cabo to the south.

“‘This is unspoiled Mexico,’ said Lisa Harper, who owns the Rancho Pescadero hotel, which opened last fall 10 minutes outside of Todos Santos. ‘It’s relatively undeveloped and we have an amazing water culture; it’s what Cabo was like 20 years ago. There’s nothing left to discover in Cabo. Here, we’re on the edge of being discovered, but we still have great little nooks that are untouched.’”

Thanks to recent security improvements, Colombia’s destination tourism appeal has flourished in the past few years, and surfing the country’s northwest Caribbean Coast–in largely undiscovered locales like Pradomar, Puerto Colombia–are opportunities to spend the day being coached by local surfing royalty and partake in their growing, but uniquely friendly, wave riding communities.

“Surf tourism in Colombia is in its infancy, and here it’s a grassroots movement. Foreigners are cherished, not resented, and the few who make their way here are given royal treatment – including, in my case, free personal coaching from a pro champion [Sergio Navarro],” writes Esther Hsieh of The Globe and Mail.

“[Colombians] are patriotically proud of their beaches and even prouder to share them. Unlike in so many other places, I was always welcome to join them on their surf outings even though I hadn’t put in years to ‘earn my spot.’ (I also think 40-plus years of civil war may have taught them that life is too short for hoarding.)”