surfresearch.com.au  mctavish : california, 1968

Compare and contrast with McTavish's The Wild and Wonderful Days of Noosa , Part Two : National.
Surfing World Magazine March 1967 pages 18 to 25.

Black and white illustration.

Page 9

CALIFORNIA is a mind blowing experience.
Southern California is the place it's all come from for surfers.
Seeing where Gidget, Simmons, Dora, Yater, Phil and Hollywood happened, the after flow that's happening.

Flying into the joint - L.A. is the usual - lights disappearing into smog - just a glowing carpet, with the pattern of the snake weaving across and around.
Closer and these snakes become streams of headlights going ...

A bank towards the two lines of blue lights, a big de-throttle, shuddering like hell and bump and grind and a wail.
L.A.
It's cold, but you don't feel it.
California is central heated.
The tentacle tube that suckers to the plane's door is heated, the terminal is heated, the car headed north is heated.
Heat everywhere.

Doing 70 m.p.h. in the middle of the city is freaky.
Billboards start screaming at anyone who sees and who can help but see?
Huge and white with simple brainwash slogans. ...

Not a traffic light till close to ... Malibu!!
Really?
The real thing?
A wire fence and real estate signs are all the night shows, but it's Malibu.
Outasight!!
California.

The coast drag by County Line, Secos and eventually Ventura. ...Solimar and Rincon!
The little corner by the sea is asleep and I join it.

Early, it's cold.
The sun rises in the south.
(The south?)
George's cop-car rips to Rincon - he knows someone who lives on the point, so we're allowed past the signs that say "Keep Out!! Residents and guests only."

Parking, and walking around Rincon point from the north end, we spy waves, people out and Yippee!!!
Rincon's on.

"First time since Christmas," said Moto.
Wow!
Six weeks of nothing ... bloody cold nothing too.
Anyway, today is 4-5' maybe, and getting bigger.

So we hit it, and it's so bloody cold I can't bear it, so I come in.
I haven't got a board anyway.
Just borrowed a giant slug.
What a bastard of a way to start rny Rincon friendship.
Like meeting a guy and saying "Hi, meat-head!"

So I go away browned off.
But I corne back tomorrow, this time on a surfoplane of Greenough's.
The wind's onshore anyway, so I go out and get wiped a few times and develop early arthritis from the 52 degree water.

So I miss out on a whole swell. Who cares, I say, I'm surfed out from Hawaii anyway.
(Crap.)

Two weeks later I have a board and I get to do my Rincon thing.
For the next five weeks Rincon wasn't good. .. for four or five days.
The rest of the time ranged between 3 and 6 and perfect.
Even sorne days better than perfect with sections that meant you disappeared often.
Perfect means machine-like.
Better than perfect means it's hotter in sorne spots and cooler in others, allowing some kind of creativity, while still maintaining glass conditions and no cross burnps.

Size up to twelve.
Biggest Rincon in five years.
Eight guys out.
Unbelievabulbul.

But California is more than Rincon.
It's guys ... and chicks.
Chicks are super friendly, stoked on Aussie accents, but generally hang on to their pants quite tightly.
The hippie chicks know how to love their rnan.
They cook well, make beads with soul- strings, smile easily.

Guys wear beads alla tirne.
Kornbi buses are expensive and wanted.
Grass is everywhere, so are cops, narcs, sheriffs, Highway Patrol, Gestapo.

Music is everywhere.
All cars have radio and stereo ... All pads have same.
Record shops have treasures of good rock that we'll never get to hear in Australia.
Pity.

Board shops are eighty percent huge factories, twenty percent contact custom shops.
Boards are good, but confused.
Little boards are moving but through the sea of confusion.

Surfers are very good, same as Sydney standard, but more jelly gut kooks floating out of wave range.

People in California are suffering from several major diseases.
Smog: which is killing millions slowly but very surely.
It's so bad that somedays people can't leave their beds - can't breathe.

Paranoia: which comes from doing something you think is all right, while the cops think it's not.
And from not knowmg which one of your surfing buddies is a narc.

Draft: a terrible sickness that ensnares all Californian males because it ruins their best years with two years of compulsory killing and hate-your- brother brain washing.
But, wonder of wonders, why does it still exist when 85 per cent don't want it?
Looks like free enterprise conditions a look-after-thine-self attitude.

Money: fortunately this disease appears to be on the decline amongst the clean, more level headed young people.
The inbred addiction has somehow been kicked.

The racial thing is festering like a boil.

This year is election year, and things are going to be ugly.
Oldens want Reagan.
Youngens don't.
Oldens and uglies want draft.
Youngens don't.
Oldens want war, youngens don't.

Black wants blood.
Hippies want freedom to breathe.
And factories still make the bomb.
Police get more power.
Spies are everywhere.

California is screwed.
Californians who are people know it, and apologize to the world.
The world forgives.
Grass!
These people will probably sink with the ship - many anyway.
By choice.
Christians to the crosses.
May their protein and iron and stuff reassemble well.

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