Sunny Garcia scares me. Always has. For one reason or another, when I was a young surfer in the early 1990s, I picked Sunny out of the constellation of hard-ass Hawaiians I could have feared to be the surfing boogeyman. Of course, I had nothing to fear from Sunny, or Johnny Boy Gomes, or Marvin Foster, or any of their contemporaries from where I lived, thousands of miles away on the Central Coast of California, with plenty of deranged beardos yelling at unfamiliar faces over wonky reef breaks I should have been afraid of instead. But, nope, it was Sunny who haunted me. I’d flip through the pages of surf mags and see Sunny glaring out at me through an ad. Press play on a video and watch him cleave a poor North Shore wave in half with an honest-to-god man turn. Walk into a surf shop and see a poster of him standing tall and Buffin a horrifying inside Sunset barrel and I’d be intimidated, a little frightened even. Not just because the dude looked like he could flay the skin of a haole’s back with one sideways glance, but because his entire approach to waves—powerful, consequential waves—called my hesitant ass into question. This was a man for whom the concept of “fear” could not possibly exist. His badassery frightened me because it reflected my own shortcomings back in a big, giant mirror. When I first ventured to the North Shore, my main concern was not in any way pissing Sunny off.
This story is from the Volume 60, Issue 4 edition of Surfer.
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This story is from the Volume 60, Issue 4 edition of Surfer.
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60 Years Ahead
We had a whole plan for this year. Funny, right? Surfer's 60 year anniversary volume was going to be filled with stories nodding to SURFER’s past, with cover concepts paying homage to the magazine’s most iconic imagery. Our new Page One depicts something that’s never happened in surfing before, let alone on a prior SURFER cover. And our table of contents was completely scrapped and replaced as we reacted to the fizzing, sparking, roiling world around us. In other words, 2020 happened to SURFER, just like it happened to you.
A Few Things We Got Horribly Wrong
You don’t make 60 years of magazines without dropping some balls. Here are a few
THE LGBTQ+ WAVE
Surf culture has a long history of marginalizing the LGBTQ+ community, but a new generation of queer surfers is working to change that
For Generations to Come
Rockaway’s Lou Harris is spreading the stoke to Black youth and leading surfers in paddling out for racial justice
Christina Koch, 41
Texas surfer, NASA astronaut, record holder for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman
END TIMES FOR PRO SURFING
By the time the pandemic is done reshaping the world, will the World Tour still have a place in it?
CHANGING OF THE GUARD
After decades of exclusive access to Hollister Ranch, the most coveted stretch of California coast is finally going public
What They Don't Tell You
How does becoming a mother affect your surfing life?
Four Things to Make You Feel A Little Less Shitty About Everything
Helpful reminders for the quarantine era
The Art of Being Seen
How a group of black women are finding creative ways to make diversity in surfing more visible