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29.1

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Inside TSJ 29.1, we run up the coast looking for surf in the Travel Advisory Level 4 zone of Sinaloa, offer a retrospective on Jimmy Metyko’s captures of Santa Barbara’s 1980s “progression era”, and trek across volcanic rock to find empty pointbreaks in the Eastern Atlantic. A retelling of Rob Machado’s disaster-plagued biopic benefits from longform treatment, while a look at the legacy of the world’s most famous wave print hits on wider cultural interest points.

Features

We stand out. Outside the obvious tourism zones, a gringo traveling though Sinaloa is an inscrutable and unwelcome presence. Those in the Funny Business will make you as a narc, a spook, a rat, or all of the above.

Page 22
TRANQUILA LA PLAZA

For a hundred or so local surfers, day-tripping Sinaloa is—tentatively—back on the table.

By Scott Hulet

Photograph by Mark Kronemeyer/Bego Felix

Page 30
HELMSMAN

Offshore rescues and high-minded business models with Tom Kay— seaman, surfer, manufacturer.

By Daniel Crockett

Photograph by Jeff Masamori

Surfer runs a sort of retrospective of Metyko’s work in 1984—just a few years after he’d begun shooting professionally. By the time it hits the newsstands Metyko’s already packed it up and moved back to Texas, and his photos of the Santa Barbara area disappear.

Page 40
OUTLANDER

In the 1980s, Texan Jimmy Metyko was exactly the shooter Santa Barbara County needed.

Introduction by Jamie Brisick

Photograph by Jimmy Metyko

Machado slashes the mattress. Grabs the pillow and disembowels it with one downward slash. Feathers splatter to the floor. He slams the knife into the wall and stares at the wreckage fluttering around him. Not a drop of sweat.

Page 54
THE END OF THE CIRCLE

Typhoid, dengue fever, heartbreak, madness. A 2009 biopic about Rob Machado wasn’t the first film to unravel in a Southeast Asian jungle—even if it felt like it to the crew. Ten years later, its screenwriter takes stock.

By Nathan Myers

Photograph by Dustin Humphrey

We discuss in hushed detail the screenshots that have brought us here. The handful of pictures we’ve found online, unwittingly taken by a group of intrepid hikers, appear to show a pumping righthand point defined by a marauding foamball.

Page 68
OCCIDENTAL DRIFT

Point surf and volcanic hardscrabble in the Eastern Atlantic

By Pete Geall & Al Mackinnon

Photograph by Al Mackinnon

 

Page 84
ACHROMATIC PETRIFICATION

Portraits of the wave-rider tribe

By Stephan Vanfleteren

The influence of The Great Wave has become so pervasive in the centuries since Hokusai’s death that most artists, illustrators, designers, and other visual practitioners have little idea that it is the origin of big-wave imagery.

Page 94
UNDER THE GREAT WAVE

A 200-year-old woodblock print is the most widely dispersed image of a single wave ever produced. Today, its impact still reverberates across the visual landscape, from the hyper-stylized cartooning of Japanese manga to the scale and focus of modern surf photography.

By Bolton Colburn

Artwork courtesy of the Library of Congress

Page 102
THE WALLFLOWER’S PROGRESS

The high-impact imagery and unassuming presence of Trevor Moran.

Introduction by Zander Morton

Photograph by Trevor Moran