The view from Pacific Street above the Oceanside Pier is an iconic California scene; surfers in the water, waiting for the perfect wave.
But head a few blocks inland on Pier View Way, and you’ll find a celebration of all things surfing: The California Surf Museum, which is also celebrating its 40th year.
Executive Director Jim Kempton detailed the museum’s beginnings. “It started with a group of people in the North County of San Diego who were realizing that they were losing their heritage,” he said.
That heritage is definitely safe here. When you walk in, the first thing you see is the gift shop. But right next to all the merch, you find a bit of science. That includes a yellow buoy, the kind used by scientists to monitor the waves off our coast.
“Waves are generated by gigantic storms in the middle of the ocean, and those slowly — as the wind blows them in, they begin to form these sets of waves, and they travel until they hit the coast,” Kempton said.
Humans have been riding the waves in one way or another for millennia. But Kempton, who’s been a surfer most of his life, explained that what we think of as surfing came into being relatively recently; that is, something that’s done for fun, the amazing experience he said surfers get when riding the waves.
A large exhibit in the museum’s main display space tells how it all started in Hawaii.
“This exhibit is called ‘Surfriding, Hawaiian Royalty’s Gift To The World.’ And the gist of it is how a princess, three princes, a duke and a Hawaiian royal minister’s grandson introduced surfing around the globe, and they did it in this very short period of time between 1885 and 1915,” Kempton said.
The exhibit tells how, while at military school in San Mateo in the early 1880s, the princes introduced surfing to Santa Clara.
Then in 1892, while studying in the south of England, Princess Ka’iulani drew huge crowds to the Brighton coast. People were amazed to see the heir to the Hawaiian throne riding the waves, something almost no one had ever seen before.
Next was the great-grandson of a Hawaiian royal minister. He brought surfing to the Southern California coast in 1907.
Finally, in 1914, Olympic Gold Medalist swimmer and expert surfer Duke Kahanamoku’s first stop on a world tour was Sydney, Australia; three continents were introduced to this new sport, unknown before outside of Hawaii and Tahiti.
That brought us to something you might imagine a surfing museum would have.
“It’s a brief history of surfboards, and basically what it is is a history of surfing through the equipment,” Kempton said.
There are the early boards — long, huge, wooden 60-pound-plus monsters.
But over the years, innovations happened. There was the hollow board with ribbing inside, much lighter than the solid wood variety. Then came boards made of balsa wood. Then, the invention of fiberglass in World War II, which Kempton said ushered in the era of the modern surfboard. Short boards and more innovations followed.
“Putting swallow tails in, then you’ve got the first twin-finned surfboard, two fins, changed everything about riding waves at that stage,” Kempton said.
More fins came, three and four. New materials have been introduced, the latest being Kevlar.
And then there’s the surfboard that might make you never want to get into the water at all.
“This is what we call our Mona Lisa,” Kempton said, showing a fiberglass foam board that’s missing a chunk of fiberglass.
In October of 2003, 13-year-old Bethany Hamilton was riding the board, surfing the waves off Kauai, when a nearly 14-foot tiger shark took a huge bite out of it and severed Hamilton’s left arm in the process.
A fellow surfer said he knew which shark it was. He caught it and proved he got the right one by taking the animal’s jaw out and putting it in the chomped-out part of Hamilton’s surfboard. It fit perfectly. Hamilton recovered and continued surfing.
As the museum celebrates its 40th year, Jim Kempton is thinking about the future.
“We just always want to keep upgrading, I mean, I guess that’s the thing, you just have to keep up your game because today, the world is moving a lot faster than it used to,” Kempton said.
There are plans to add two more stories, which will allow the museum to expand the ways it tells the story about a sport that rides on waves crashing into the shore from time immemorial.
