Woody Woodworth has been doing aerial recon missions along the California coastline since January of 1976, a total of ten or twelve missions over a period of twenty years so far. The result has been a fascinating set of aerial photographs of the California coastline.Woody has graciously agreed to let me display a few of them here, taken on December 21st, 1995. These pictures and others were previously published in the pages of The Surfer's Journal, V. 5, No. 2. Woody's own words provide an accompanying text.
I've been involved in the California surf scene for thirty years, and I've shot from land and water at all of the places pictured. Most surf photographers start as surfers but find as they get older that the drive to photograph the ride overwhelms the need to surf the waves yourself.Plus, for me, the thrill of being able to figuratively ride a three hundred mile stretch of coast in a single day is compelling. I'm up there... feeling the entire swell on an epic day, rather than just a single break. I have a way to quickly assess great ranges of coastline during a swell event, thereby gaining insight into why and where specific swell parameters produce the best surfable waves. It is also a thrill to see a predicted swell come in and work its unique magic as it wraps and bends its way onto the beaches.
With the explosion of the internet, today's surfers can access a wealth of information about the surf. You can track a swell from its moment of creation by viewing NOAA satellite pictures and interpreting the Pacific Surface Analysis maps of storm isobars across the entire Pacific Ocean. NOAA also carries 24- and 48-hour computerized prognosis models, so you know when ocean swells are on the build. Interactive buoy markers that cover most of the northern hemisphere wave zones store 12-hour histories of swell activity, enabling the user to see if the trend is up or down. The newest additions to the information superhighway are digitized photographs of surf spots that are in most cases less than five minutes old.
So, armed with Internet access and wavefaxes, I knew that epic surf was on its way for the winter of 1995 and that the weather was going to cooperate. I called my pilot, Chris Prell, and he scheduled the plane. On the morning of December 21, Chris and I took to the air.
There was already a 6 ft. 14 s. west swell running, with a larger 20 s. swell due to fill into the Central Coast around noon. As we flew north we could clearly see the existing swell doing its mechanical thing at Rincon... peeling around the point.
The swell was really a shade too north, but the overall setup of the point for those wagon-spoke days with a little more west angle to them is readily apparent.
The cutback in the shot above is a pretty amazing image capture, considering that we're on a fly-by. I'm always trying for action, but that's secondary to capturing the mechanics of the swells interacting with the coastal geography. The swells are the things on which I'm focused.
