Waves and Beaches

Waves and Beaches
Author: Kim McCoy
Publisher: Patagonia
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9781938340956

The Bestselling Classic Updated for Surfers, Sailors, Oceanographers, Climate Activists, and Those Who Love the Sea First published in 1963 and updated in 1979, this classic was an essential handbook for anyone who studies, surfs, protects, or is fascinated by the ocean. The original author, Willard Bascom, was a master of the subject and included a wealth of information, based on theory and statistics, but also anecdotal observation and personal experience. It brought to the general public understanding of the awesome and complex power of the waves. This revision from Kim McCoy adds recent facts and anecdotes to update the book's relevance in the time of climate change. One of the most significant effects of global warming will be sea-level rise. What will this mean to waves and beaches, and what effects are we already seeing? New text and photos cover events such as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina flooding of 2005, and the 2011 earthquake and resulting devastation in Fukishima. As well as students, surfers, and the general public, this updated edition of a beloved classic is an essential handbook for climate scientists and ocean activists, providing clear explanations and detailed resources for the constant battle to preserve the shore.

Sandy Beach Morphodynamics

Sandy Beach Morphodynamics
Author: Derek Jackson
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 814
Release: 2020-05-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0081029276

Sandy beaches represent some of the most dynamic environments on Earth and examining their morphodynamic behaviour over different temporal and spatial scales is challenging, relying on multidisciplinary approaches and techniques. Sandy Beach Morphodynamics brings together the latest research on beach systems and their morphodynamics and the ways in which they are studied in 29 chapters that review the full spectrum of beach morphodynamics. The chapters are written by leading experts in the field and provide introductory level understanding of physical processes and resulting landforms, along with more advanced discussions.

Empire in Waves

Empire in Waves
Author: Scott Laderman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2014-01-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520958047

Surfing today evokes many things: thundering waves, warm beaches, bikinis and lifeguards, and carefree pleasure. But is the story of surfing really as simple as popular culture suggests? In this first international political history of the sport, Scott Laderman shows that while wave riding is indeed capable of stimulating tremendous pleasure, its globalization went hand in hand with the blood and repression of the long twentieth century. Emerging as an imperial instrument in post-annexation Hawaii, spawning a form of tourism that conquered the littoral Third World, tracing the struggle against South African apartheid, and employed as a diplomatic weapon in America's Cold War arsenal, the saga of modern surfing is only partially captured by Gidget, the Beach Boys, and the film Blue Crush. From nineteenth-century American empire-building in the Pacific to the low-wage labor of the surf industry today, Laderman argues that surfing in fact closely mirrored American foreign relations. Yet despite its less-than-golden past, the sport continues to captivate people worldwide. Whether in El Salvador or Indonesia or points between, the modern history of this cherished pastime is hardly an uncomplicated story of beachside bliss. Sometimes messy, occasionally contentious, but never dull, surfing offers us a whole new way of viewing our globalized world.

Barbarian Days

Barbarian Days
Author: William Finnegan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0143109391

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography** Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times Magazine Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

Swell

Swell
Author: Evan Slater
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2012-05-09
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1452105936

Wave watchers around the world know that no two waves are the same. Yet each and every wave that rises, peaks, and crashes onto the beach is generated by a much larger force originating thousands of miles away. Surf journalist team Evan Slater and Peter Taras capture the essence of waves and the swells that produce them in this breathtaking collection of wave photography. Slater characterizes four distinct swells from different corners of the globe and traces their journeys throughout the year from storm to seashore. His reflective, informative essays amplify these powerful images of hundreds of waves frozen in time, beautiful, simple, universal, yet wholly unique—and the best thing to watch on the planet.

Waves of Resistance

Waves of Resistance
Author: Isaiah Helekunihi Walker
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2011-03-02
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0824860918

Surfing has been a significant sport and cultural practice in Hawai‘i for more than 1,500 years. In the last century, facing increased marginalization on land, many Native Hawaiians have found refuge, autonomy, and identity in the waves. In Waves of Resistance Isaiah Walker argues that throughout the twentieth century Hawaiian surfers have successfully resisted colonial encroachment in the po‘ina nalu (surf zone). The struggle against foreign domination of the waves goes back to the early 1900s, shortly after the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, when proponents of this political seizure helped establish the Outrigger Canoe Club—a haoles (whites)-only surfing organization in Waikiki. A group of Hawaiian surfers, led by Duke Kahanamoku, united under Hui Nalu to compete openly against their Outrigger rivals and established their authority in the surf. Drawing from Hawaiian language newspapers and oral history interviews, Walker’s history of the struggle for the po‘ina nalu revises previous surf history accounts and unveils the relationship between surfing and colonialism in Hawai‘i. This work begins with a brief look at surfing in ancient Hawai‘i before moving on to chapters detailing Hui Nalu and other Waikiki surfers of the early twentieth century (including Prince Jonah Kuhio), the 1960s radical antidevelopment group Save Our Surf, professional Hawaiian surfers like Eddie Aikau, whose success helped inspire a newfound pride in Hawaiian cultural identity, and finally the North Shore’s Hui O He‘e Nalu, formed in 1976 in response to the burgeoning professional surfing industry that threatened to exclude local surfers from their own beaches. Walker also examines how Hawaiian surfers have been empowered by their defiance of haole ideas of how Hawaiian males should behave. For example, Hui Nalu surfers successfully combated annexationists, married white women, ran lucrative businesses, and dictated what non-Hawaiians could and could not do in their surf—even as the popular, tourist-driven media portrayed Hawaiian men as harmless and effeminate. Decades later, the media were labeling Hawaiian surfers as violent extremists who terrorized haole surfers on the North Shore. Yet Hawaiians contested, rewrote, or creatively negotiated with these stereotypes in the waves. The po‘ina nalu became a place where resistance proved historically meaningful and where colonial hierarchies and categories could be transposed. 25 illus.

Surf Science

Surf Science
Author: Tony Butt
Publisher: Alison Hodge Publishers
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2014-03-25
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780906720899

Have you ever wondered where surf­ing waves come from, what makes every wave dif­fer­ent, why some peel per­fectly and oth­ers just close out; why, some days, the waves come in sets and other days they don’t, and how the tides, the wind and the shape of the sea floor affect the waves for surf­ing? If you have, this book is for you. Now in its third edi­tion, Surf Sci­ence is the first book to talk in depth about the sci­ence of waves from a surfer’s point of view. It fills the gap between surf­ing books and waves text­books, and will help you learn how to pre­dict surf. Surf Sci­ence is also a use­ful intro­duc­tion to ocean­o­graphy and the sci­ence of waves. You don’t need a sci­entific back­ground to read it – just curi­os­ity and a fas­cin­a­tion for waves.