"A challenge? I love a challenge!" So spits Gordo the Great in Jack McCoy's 1997 film Psychedelic Desert Groove. Gordo, who's given name is John Gordon, is a gun for hire, a master of the long lens who lives on private's wages. His story is indicative of the hand-to-mouth existence of so many involved in surf filmmaking. Besides the memorable one-liner delivered to Occy, Gordo's resume of projects worked is too long to list. You may have seen his handiwork featured on an ASP webcast. He's the guy in the tower or the boat shooting for 12 hours a day.

If Whitman was multitudes, Los Angeles, California’s Craig Roberto Stecyk is a Chinese phonebook. Mat surfer, artist, photographer, writer, filmmaker, propagandist, Caddie collector, historian, magaziner, archaeologist, commercial creative, and godfather to a notoriously fucked-up troop of skaters, surfers, and art hounds, CR has dropped so much inventiveness, styling, and verve on the surf world that it’s almost a joke.

Often charged with documenting some of the world’s best surfers for their anchor sponsors, Kenworthy finds himself on a constant hunt for the "A-lister."  Chasing surfers who "move the needle”—Dane Reynolds, Julian Wilson, Dusty Payne, Kolohe Andino, or Bruce Irons—is no easy feat.  Schedules must be determined well in advance, strategies put in place, and flakey personalities contended with. Jason has to be on the boat in Indo, finger on the trigger, and ready to work when a select cast finally decides to get onboard.

By the middle of the 1970s, most of us felt like lucky survivors of the late ’60s. American surfing was in a funk. Australia had kidnapped our slang expressions and Aussie-ized them, taken our “surf trunks” and renamed them “board shorts,” added an “ie” to the end of everyone’s first name and to maneuvers like the cutback (cuttie), changed the term for “longboard” to “mal,” and corrupted just about everything else we held dear. We even allowed Ian Cairns and Peter Townend to take charge of teaching our youth how to snake and block to win heats. Bitchin!

Over its 22 years, The Journal has gained a reputation for wide-ranging, high impact photography. Always presented “from a purist’s point of view,” we’ve endeavored to showcase elements of the surfing life that speak to seasoned, thoughtful surfers—with little quarter given to the likes of the new participant or the dabbler. That stance might seem elitist but, frankly, there are endless repositories out there for the flash-bang, gee whiz school.

At first blush, this book almost seems like a bad idea, the sort of pot-addled nonsense dream that can come to a surfer after watching Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now” too many times and finding more meaning in the phrase “Charlie Don’t Surf!” then is probably really there. Stories about war and killer swells both have that epic, aching-to-be-told-over-the-campfire quality to them that makes this old Marine suspicious at the outset.

Once upon a time, the best surf breaks along California’s coast lay open and unridden. Times have changed. As Phil Edwards sardonically commented, “You guys have to spend thousands to get what I had for a buck’s worth of gas.” While neighborhood crowds get stiffer and more combative, many stellar, unmanned breaks are working on those same swells, unreachable to all but the few who approach by sea. On a larger scale, as much as the woody wagon was the “search for surf” vehicle of the past, a full range of boats and ships have become the go-to for today’s adventure surf travel.

Transcending from a family lineage of Waikiki beach boy and wonderfully Hawaiian family values, Kimo Hollinger grew up a modern man imbedded in the roots of a traditional culture. He was one of the relatively few Hawaiians to pioneer their own big North Shore waves in the early stages of their discovery. He quit them when a near life-ender at Waimea Bay delivered him a powerful message that life might be way too fragile to risk squandering it on such frivolous games.