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Salt, Sand & South Swells: California Baja Surfing History
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 11 2026
Pages: 162
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Before the harbor came, a wave called Killer Dana broke long and heavy along the point
at Dana Point, California - the kind of wave that defined a generation of surfers, shaped
their bodies and their character, and asked more of them than anything on land. Then
the dredges arrived. By 1971, the breakwater was complete, and Killer Dana was gone
forever. No swell will ever hit that sandbar again.
Salt, Sand & South Swells: The California-Baja Surfing Story begins and ends with that
kind of truth - that surfing is inseparable from the places it inhabits, and that those
places can vanish. But it is not a story of loss. It is a story of what was found.
Starting with the ancient Hawaiian practice of he'e nalu - wave-sliding - and the legacy
of Duke Kahanamoku, who carried that gift across the ocean to California shores, this
book traces the full arc of surf culture along one of the world's most storied coastlines.
From the early dawn-patrol mornings at Malibu and San Onofre, where a loose tribe of
nomads invented a way of life, to the wild Baja explorations of San Miguel, K-38, Scorpion
Bay, and the thundering big waves of Todos Santos Island - this is a history told through
the people who lived it.
You'll meet Miki Dora, mercurial and maddening, who turned Malibu into a stage. Mickey
Munoz, who could make any board dance. Al Merrick shaping boards in a Santa Barbara
warehouse that would end up under Tom Curren's feet as he rewrote what surfing could
look like. Nacho Felix and the deep Baja lineage that most California surfers never knew
existed.
There's the shortboard revolution that cracked the longboard era in two. The
hard-fought Save Trestles campaign, one of the most important environmental battles in
surf history. The campfire at the end of a long Baja run, salt-crusted and sunburned, with
nowhere to be in the morning.
Salt, Sand & South Swells is written for the ten-year-old who just caught their first wave,
and for the seventy-year-old who still thinks about the ones they rode decades ago. It is a
book for anyone who has ever stood at the water's edge and felt the pull of something
older than themselves.
Open the first page. The water is already moving.
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