The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Surfing Photos

  • 60s & 70s Surfing Slide Show

    We never tired of going down to the beach, in the mornings to surf, in the afternoons to boogie, in the evenings to walk, to catch the sunset. I bought a used Exakta 500 for surfing photos. The 50mm lens was too small, so I bought a used 120mm portrait lens. After the sun went down we sat out in the backyard and watched a slide show on the side of the garage wall.

    Surf films, streaming videos, and photos often depict surf spots as gardens of paradise, perfect waves, friendly sun, and green down to tan-white sand and then the waterline, clean blues and greens. Nothing industrial going on. Very good days are rare though, and we went down to the water anyway, regardless of conditions. And once in the water, it didn’t matter. Every wave was a Top 40 hit song, every photo a classic. The beach break at El Porto was our home spot, over the dunes from the El Segundo Standard Oil Refinery. The photos we took in the 60s and 70s might today look as bad as the waves we rode. AI Assistant wants to touch them up for me, but I prefer seeing the originals, even if those are now becoming as faded as the memory, dye fading and color shifting.

  • Boogie El Porto

    The first boogie boards were kits – a foam blank and a “skin.” You shaped the blank, bringing the nose up a bit, and skinned it with glue, trimming the edges. We boogied El Porto mostly in the afternoons after the wind turned from offshore to onshore blowing out the waves. Better formed morning waves went to surfboards. The boogie boards worked best with a fin. The short duck foot was the best fin, one or two. The fin helped paddle into the wave and angle down the face. The photos here are from early to mid 70’s.

    As the boogie boards gained popularity, they were used all day long. Because they were soft, they were not as dangerous as surfboards. The photo bottom left above was taken during a storm surf episode late 70s, and shows the iconic El Segundo towers in the upper right corner. The lifeguard tower ramp is at 45th, the north end of El Porto. The sand cliff carved out by the storm surf is unusual. The beach usually gradually sloped down to the water.

    We started wearing wetsuits around 1969, but in the afternoons we usually did not. The water wasn’t that cold. We got spoiled by the wetsuits.

    We took photos with my Exakta 500, which I had bought used from a local photo shop. We used slide film which we got developed usually at a local Fotomat drive through. The 50mm lens that came with the camera proved inadequate, so I later bought a 120mm portrait lens which worked pretty well as a telephoto. But we also used Instamatic cameras, also using slide film. The slides here are worn and showing their age. A few I’ve posted before, but continue to scan and update as conversion technology has improved, and the audience here and for old stuff from the old days at El Porto continues to change.

    These are not professional photos, not even good photos, which is why some of them, like the last one above, might approach art. The photographers were surfers who picked up a camera anonymously to save a moment.

  • What Shall We Do With a Drunken Surfer

    What Shall We Do With a Drunken Surfer

    She bops down to the beach to dance
    in the sand by the water the seaweed
    brittle and he trips aback and nearly falls
    like the drunken sailor in the shanty
    “Ho! No! Thar she blows!”

    She desires to dance politely
    he wants to throw the bottle
    into the waves they bouncing
    round two junks in the vessel
    carried away in a rash riptide

    With a message for the great white
    whale they glide over the stonefish
    ease through a fluther of box jellies
    the moon full but the night not fair
    the music stops the beach empties

    He awakes in the bottle rolling in the ripples
    with her sound asleep soft nipples
    in the warm sand above the water line
    calm and sober like the walrus
    angel watching over you

    What shall we do with a drunken surfer
    who dreams full of fishes seaweed wrack
    brack Saltwort Ale and other foolishness
    who never caught a fish nor wave enough
    to feed his wife out combing the beach

  • Two Ocean Surfing Poems at Berfrois – and a gallery of old ocean photos

    “Ray, 1956” and “Watermarks from a Night Spring,” two poems with themes of the ocean, surfing, and working, were posted at Berfrois a couple of days ago, along with a few old surf photos.

    Paddle on over to Berfrois and check out the surf poems.

    And below find a gallery with more photos from the late 60’s thru mid 70’s. Most of these photos were taken with an Exakta 500 single-lens reflex camera (East German), with a 120 portrait lens, both purchased used and cheap to take surfing photos at local spots on Santa Monica Bay. Most are scanned from slides, Kodachrome or Ektachrome, and one is from a black and white print. The portrait lens was an affordable workaround at the time used as a kind of telephoto, and it worked ok. The camera was abused though, tossed in the sand, and over time the shutter began to stick. The photos starting coming out black. Some viewers may feel these the best photos. See etched drawing on one of the black slides. These are not “big” waves, and the surfers are locals, but the ocean is huge and alive and old and every morning new. Click any photo to see the gallery. And don’t forget to check out the poems.

    Related: Watermarks from a Night Spring & Ray, 1956

  • Ocean Surfing Photos From the Late 1960’s

    I went outside to grab this morning’s paper and the air smelled and felt like the ocean, warm but a bit wet, a “marine layer,” the weather folks call it, and I was reminded of early June mornings in the South Bay, getting up to “go surfing,” and thought I’d pull some old photos, for an ocean surfing post.

    We’d sometimes go down to the Redondo Beach pier, a horseshoe shaped pier. The waves were never very good there, but the view from the back of the waves gives a different perspective on the surfers, here one paddling out, the other dropping down.

    Also at the Redondo, horseshoe shaped pier, this photo was taken looking south from the north end of the horseshoe.

    The last two photos above were both taken looking south from the Manhattan Beach pier.

    We peeled the fiberglass off of our longboards, reshaped them into short boards, and re-glassed them in my Dad’s garage on Mariposa.

    This is me at El Porto in September of 1969, (riding the board seen on the floor of the garage in above photo, an old Jacobs), the month before reporting for Basic Combat Training at Fort Bliss, in El Paso. Surfing is bliss.

    Here I am kicking out at Leo Carrillo, but my board has a different idea. Now I’m going to kick out of the house and go for a walk in this marine air.

    For More on Surfing, See Related Posts, Below:

    The Sea Far Away

    Jerry Lewis at the Paradise

    Hemingway surfing and writing

    Small Wave Riders 2009 annual surf trip video

    John Cage, Cowboy Surf Shop, and Garage Jazz

    Albert Camus on the Economic Collapse

    Where weather and writing merge