Oregon, USA

Although there is some speculation that Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Blake, and other early 20th century watermen may have surfed some of Oregon’s vast wave grounds long ago, the verifiable history of surfing in the state begins much more recently. In fact, the lion’s share of this coast was pioneered by refugees from California, fleeing the Gidget-fueled surf boom of the early 1960s. The best known and most revered of them is a well-traveled San Diegan by the name of Dana Williams. A surfer throughout his youth, Williams joined the Navy in 1958, went to Guam, where he enjoyed excellent warm water reef barrels, then wound up in godforsaken Astoria, assigned to a crew decommissioning old ships on the Columbia River. It was 1962, and he couldn’t find another soul surfing in Oregon, and then he discovered Seaside. A member of the Windansea Surf Club and best friends with Butch Van Artsdalen, it was Williams who got the local kids into the waves. “The water was so cold…and no rubber suit,” recalls Williams. “Guys learned in the first couple of days, to get away from the water!”

Williams was the first surfer to move into Seaside, where he promptly became the subject of considerable local suspicion. “Because of me, Seaside banned surfing and skateboarding,” he laughs. “So I put on a tie and got the Cove and Point opened up.” But that was it – the sandy beach remained off-limits. As a lifeguard he surfed those same sandy beaches despite the ban and wound up in the clink. The mayor once referred to him as “Communist California riff-raff.” To this day, Seaside holds the dubious honor of having the only no-surfing stretch of beach in Oregon (from Avenue U north to the city limits).

Dick Wald, a Portland diver and waterman, started surfing with a bunch of friends in the summer of ‘63 and met Williams at Indian Beach in August, where he was teaching a pack of kids the fundamentals. Williams invited Wald up to Seaside, where they surfed Avenue U that October. It wasn’t till the two were caught in a rip and carried south that they discovered the peaks and channel of the Cove, and it was from the line-up on a big day at the Cove that the two surfers really got a good look at the waves at the Point. The two started working on going left, and one day soon paddled out to ride this mysto lefthander, which Williams had described as “just like the Pipeline” – except it broke directly onto Volkswagen-sized boulders. But Wald, totally at home in the ocean, loved it and was soon famed for riding HUGE Seaside Point on a Jim Sagawa pintail.

Early Oregon locals included Dan and Dave Matthews of Portland, the Scribers (Marty, Steve, and Jackie), who started in the early ‘60s down in at Newport, and Jack Brown in Cannon Beach. Bobby Jensen was shaping boards in Astoria as early as 1964-5; Jim Sagawa made boards in Portland during the same period. Peter de Turk started coming down from Whidbey in ‘66 and used to seek out Bill Fackerell as good big-wave company when the Point was macking. “Pre-leash Seaside was a serious commitment,” says de Turk, who spent all of October there in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

SoCal competitive machine Corky Carroll surfed Seaside alone in 1964, then returned yearly thereafter, winning the Oregon State Championship at Agate Beach in 1967. “I used to stay in the Lanai Motel right there on the point in Seaside,” he recalls. “I remember when a bunch of longhairs from Santa Cruz showed up and started making boards in an old garage at the turnoff to Cannon Beach. Art Spence was one of the dudes.”

Art Spence was the Santa Cruz kid, who got everyone on ultralight shortboards in the late ‘60s; he lived at Seaside Point and taught Bill Barnfield how to shape. Along with Dan Matthews and Jerry Herrington, Spence started Tillamook Head Surfboards; their scene attracted a group of core guys (including Kent Weinker), who surfed the Head spots for Spence’s movie camera. His Free Ride (predating Bill Delaney’s famous flick of the same name by almost eight years) is a classic visual saga of the late ‘60s surfing and skating lifestyle in the Tillamook Head subculture. By 1972, Spence had started up Evergreen Surfboards, and the core group included the Holbrooks from Newport, Dave Copra, Tim Spence, Perry Shoemake, Bruce Prader, Josh Gazdavich (founder of Cleanline Surf Shop), de Turk, and 20 more guys who shared the log fires in the cold and wet after feasting on lonely outpost lefts that could make you or break you. De Turk: “Jack Mullins went from kook to big tube-rider in a matter of two years.”

Meanwhile, John Kelsey was making boards in the Newport/Agate Beach area, where Sagawa’s Sag Surfboards were also popular. Scott Blackman was there, along with intrepid explorers, like Neahahkanie/Insanities pioneer Mad John Fink. Down in Coos Bay, near Cape Arago, another community jelled. The pioneers there were Dave Sheldon, Dan Matthews, Ron Coleman (The Reverend: “Thou shalt not drop in”), Dave Bond (Bastendorff regular), Al Kreiger (president of the Kahuna Surf Club in the mid-’60s), Pete Cochran (made boards, now in Seaside), Arden Keylock, Ellis and Willie Lark, Don ‘Ducko’ Garrett (a Coquille native and the best guy in the area) and Bert Moffitt.

It was Moffitt who let the genie out of the bottle with his article in the Aug/Sep issue of Surfer (“Oregon: As We Like It”). Sniffing something interesting, California waterman Mike Doyle moved up to Port Orford in 1973; he was soon joined by Walt Phillips, who lived up the road a piece, and the two surfed the Creek and entertained curious visitors, like Joey Cabell, who “came up to see what the hell we were up to,” says Doyle. “There were no surfers in the south except a few around Coos Bay; the fisherman on the Port Orford pier used you ask me if I was going out on my shingle today.” Doyle remains impressed with several life-and-death midwinter sessions on the north side of Cape Blanco, one of the gnarliest venues for marine disaster ever concocted by the Author of all our joys and sorrows – “Thirty feet easy,” he marvels.

Today, the Oregon coast remains a harsh place to live, and the decreasing coastal population proves it. But the surf scene thrives in an Oregon sort of way. There are spots of intense localism and areas of extreme mellowness and Aloha of the kind promulgated by Paul George, owner of Rocky Point Surf & Sport in Coos Bay. George spent most of his youth in Hawaii and ran with the likes of Larry Bertlemann, then bailed and came to Oregon, he says, to save his life. Involved in prison ministry and fully involved with his family and the local youth, he is profoundly upset by the hostile localism perpetrated by a few (generally older) surfers. “A strong etiquette is necessary here,” he says. “Surfers have to keep the spirit of aloha alive.”

Reflecting the Northwest’s ‘seek and ye shall find’ ethic, Salem-based Paul Klarin hints that sometimes you find surf in all the wrong places: “There are a series of mystery waves that form on the inside of most every major bay spit and river jetty during really big swells of 20ft-plus (6m). They usually grind away in the friendly confines of the mixing zone of the estuary at up to shoulder size after the wave propagates up the channel and sometimes around the bend. Don't be surprised if on a really big day you look down as you are driving over the Yaquina bridge in Newport and see some longboarder gliding over the sandy bar at the elbow of the channel.”

Meanwhile, Dana Williams continues to articulate the other Pacific Northwest surf ethic: “We shall suffer!”