Wired to the waves

Danette Goulet

As winter approaches and morning dawns colder with each passing day,

there is a tool many modern surfers wouldn’t want to live without -- the

Surfline surf report and forecast.

Let the other guy get up and brave the cold and tell you what the

waves are doing. That’s the idea, in part -- but that’s just the

beginning.

“It’s based on an obsession,” said Surfline’s vice president Dave

Gilovich.

Surfers are, quite simply, obsessed with the surf -- what it’s doing,

what it will be doing and most importantly how can they be in the right

place at the right time to catch that elusive perfect wave.

“The thing that drives the whole thing is that unlike golf or

something, where the playing field isn’t going to change, the inherent

nature of surfing is that the playing field is always changing,” Gilovich

said. “We are the facilitators to finding that perfect wave.”

Although the Huntington Beach-based company has changed since it began

in 1985 as the phone line 976-SURF, which surfers called to hear

conditions, the concept hasn’t.

Surfline, now a primarily online commodity, offers its fanatical

audience up-to-date news on what the surf is doing complete with “surf

cams” and highly technical forecasts of what it will do -- around the

globe.

The cameras allow surfers to catch a peek of what they’re missing

while stuck behind a desk at work. In fact, Gilovich said, site traffic

patterns support that this is just what happens.

“Camera traffic spikes at 9 a.m. Eastern time,” he said, laughing.

At 5 p.m. Eastern time it begins to drop off a little and slows way

down at 5 p.m. here on the West Coast, he said.

“I look at Surfline at least an hour a day,” said surfer Mike

Henderson, 51, of Newport Beach. “I’m in sales so I might as well look at

the surf as do something else.”

“He calls me all the time and says ‘You should see the surf’,” fellow

surfer Todd Griswold chimed in with a laugh.

The 58 cameras Surfline has all over the world also allow surfers to

see, in real time, what the waves are doing in Hawaii, Bali or Spain.

It’s another way to check out the surf spots you may want to vacation

at or see the spots someone you know is surfing.

“You can surf the world that way,” Henderson said.

But it is the forecast portion of the site that has become invaluable

to those serious about their surfing.

Surfers can go online and find out what mother nature has planned for

their home break. They can plan evening glass-off sessions, sessions for

the the next day or days -- even plan vacation time if they know how to

read the intricate weather patterns properly.

“I love it because we were taking a trip to Hawaii and we could check

out what the waves were going to be doing,” said Denise Marble, of Seal

Beach, as she waxed her long board.

But the forecast portion wasn’t even feasible in the early stages of

Surfline.

“In 1985 you could call that number and for $1.50 a minute you enter

your area code. There were reporters around the country that would get up

and look at the surf,” Gilovich said. “There was a midmorning update, but

it wasn’t until later that we added the forecast side. The guy that

brought that was Sean Collins.”

Collins, currently the president of Surfline, was brought on board

early on when the original partners heard of his knack for wave tracking.

In the early 1970s Collins discovered that in Baja California the

waves were best in the summer.

“He would drive down there and wait in the desert for a month for the

waves to appear,” Gilovich said with a combination of awe and admiration.

Collins realized that storms off New Zealand brought waves to Baja. So

he figured, if he knew where those storms were he would know when to

expect the waves.

He began taking careful and copious notes on the waves, Gilovich said,

the distance between them, the height, how long they lasted.

At the time there wasn’t all the information that is available now,

from NOAA and the National Weather Service, so Collins was on his own in

his quest to know when the waves were coming.

“He found a few nuggets of information and sat in the desert with

weird little fax device with an antenna and hooked up to a car battery,”

Gilovich said. “It was one of the ones with the silver paper.”

Collins would get faxes from New Zealand, from the Navy about where

the storms were and wait, and calculate.

“He became this mythical guru weather guy. He’d know waves were coming

before everyone else. It really changed surfers lives,” Gilovich said.

And it is Collins’ unending fascination that led him to stay one step

ahead of everyone else and partner with Scripps Oceanographic institute

to create the interactive forecastingtool Surfline launched in October.

LOLA, is an advanced weather tracing system that makes use of

satellites. Information from those satellites show up on LOLA as colors,

which metrologists at Surfline interpret for subscribers. The data is

also all there for viewers to further interpret on their own.

When the new program was launched on Oct. 25 Surfline changed formats

once again, this time adding an annual fee of $29.95 for the forecast

portion of the site.

“We love Surfline but we hate that we have to pay for LOLA,” said

Linda Good, of Huntington Beach, who said she visits the site several

times a day.

Jumping from nothing, it may sound like a lot, but it’s really only

about 10 cents a day, Gilovich said, and for the die-hards, not a

problem.

“We’ve had thousands sign up already,” he said.