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Photo sequence by Tim Maddux. 
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Tandem surfing, practiced by many surfers in the 1950's and 1960's,
including world-class greats Mike Doyle and Greg Noll. With the
shortboard revolution of the early 70's, tandem surfing all but
disappeared from the surfing world.
The sport appears to be undergoing a renaissance, with recent high-profile pairs taking on big waves in Hawaii and getting a lot of press in the mainstream magazines. Tandem surfing also recently got a thorough treatment in the Surfer's Journal. It's also alive and well in Santa Barbara, thanks to the efforts of surfers like Samantha Bouwer and her boyfriend Scott. I was delighted on one late evening in January of 1997 while watching the sun set over Devereux to see them charging the I.V. reefs, and snapped the following sequence of shots. Wonderful! I was stoked, and so were a lot of the people in the lineup and watching from the beach. Samantha and Scott have been tandem surfing together since around November of 1996... you may happen to see Scott at Campus Point or Devereux next winter doing solo headstands when not with Samantha. Keep it up, both of you! Fellow tandem surfing enthusiasts, The Waikiki Sports Acrobatics Troupe, have put together a couple of tandem surfing picture pages. WAT member Aned Muniz wrote in to say: "It was great to see that there's other people out there who tandem surf! Altough I've never surfed in California, it seems that tandem surfing is alive and well over there. Altough there's great surf in Puerto Rico (where I come from) I never knew the sport of tandem surfing until I came to the University of Hawaii." |