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PORTRAIT: PHOTO BY T-ROC ALL OTHER PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY PHOTOGRAPHY Windansea: Life, Death, Resurrection C hris Ahrens was 12 years old in 1959 when he and a friend saw the movie Gidget. eir lives were permanently changed. at night, they went back to Ahrens' house in the L.A. suburb of Montebello and tore apart his model train set for the plywood underneath. Using his father's power saw, Ahrens fashioned what he believed to be two surfboards. ey painted them yellow and went to the beach, but the boards didn't float. "We skim-boarded for a couple of years," Ahrens says with a laugh. By 1962, he had saved enough from his paper route to buy a real board, and his father, who had surfed wooden planks in the 1940s, drove him and his friends to the beach every weekend. If his father wasn't available, Ahrens hitchhiked to Huntington Beach from Montebello, cadging boards from strangers and collecting stories, many of which form the basis of Windansea: Life, Death, Resurrection, his coffee-table book that chronicles the legendary La Jolla surf break and the eccentric tribe who made it sacred ground. "Windansea was the big daddy," Ahrens explains. "at was our Hawaii on this coast. You really graduated when you got there." Historically, the break at Windansea has produced an outsized share of surfing pioneers: Butch Van Artsdalen, the first "Mr. Pipeline," who rode Oahu's most dangerous wave in ways no one thought possible; Pat Curren, the master shaper who built the big- wave boards that made Waimea Bay rideable; and Woody Brown, the New York glider pilot who invented the modern catamaran and was still surfing in his late 80s. For Ahrens, the book marks five decades documenting surf culture — first as a photographer, but then as a writer when his camera was stolen in 1972. His first article appeared in Surfer magazine in 1973. e Windansea book began 15 years ago when e Surfer's Journal asked Ahrens to write on the history of Windansea. Ahrens interviewed Brown, then 88, who told him about crashing a glider on the beach, finding a piece of driftwood, and carving a surfboard shaped like an airplane wing. "Genius," says Ahrens. "When people saw it, they said it was the best surfboard they'd ever seen." Ahrens spoke with original members of the Windansea Surf Club, people who remembered when La Jolla had 5,000 residents and surfers made their own boards from scratch. He collected stories about Tiny Brain omas, who pushed a friend's car into the break to create an artificial reef. e tale of California's most mythologized break BY BILL ABRAMS detour culture Chris Ahrens ranchandcoast.com 96 JULY 2026 RANCH & COAST MAGAZINE