March 24, 2023 Breaking News, Latest News, and Videos

Santa Monica Pier Paddleboard Race and Ocean Festival: Upcoming Surfing Event Harkens to Watermen Legacy

“Waterman” was the descriptive name given to the early greats of surfing like Tom Blake and Pete Peterson, Santa Monica’s most famous Watermen, who shaped the culture of Santa Monica and of beach communities around the world.

The Santa Monica Pier Paddleboard Race and Ocean Festival, June 11, continues the Waterman tradition with an all day celebration of life at the beach featuring: paddleboard, outrigger and dory races; live music; and a ‘museum for a day’ showcasing the Waterman history and the history of lifeguarding, surfing, paddleboarding and skateboarding. The event benefits Heal the Bay.

Paddleboard races were a regular event at the Santa Monica Pier in the 1940s. Two paddleboard clubs, the Santa Monica Paddleboard Club and the all women’s Manoa Paddleboard Club, both housed at the pier, were Santa Monica favorites. The clubs had large memberships. Champion paddleboarders including Dorothy and Maryann Hawkins and Esther Lopez Maier, drew many fans.

Paddleboards were first used in Santa Monica in the 1920s when Blake, one of the earliest of the Santa Monica Lifeguards, introduced the paddleboard as a way to rescue distressed swimmers.

Blake began surfing in California in the1920s. He worked as a lifeguard, a swimming instructor, and a movie stunt double. He was also an important surfboard innovator. He shaped boards from the ancient, Hawaiian olo design to see if he could build a faster board to use in the annual and popular surfboard paddling races held in southern California each summer. To lighten the weight of the surfboard, Blake took his 16-foot olo replica board and drilled it full of holes to lighten and dry it out, resulting in the first hollow surfboard.

In 1928, armed with his olo replica, Blake won the first Pacific Coast Surfing Championship. Reports of the day said 10,000 people gathered to celebrate the holiday and watch the races. Blake used his hollow surfboard in the race from the California mainland to Catalina Island over a 26-mile course across open water. Blake made the trek in 5 hours and 53 minutes.

One of his most enduring contributions, the surfboard skeg – or fin – which he introduced in 1935, went on to be an integral part of surfboard design.

Pete Peterson, who grew up in Santa Monica Canyon, soon joined Blake in the surfing world. Peterson became recognized in the 1930s as the Mainland’s best surfer, winning the Pacific Coast Surfing Championship four times out of 10 (1932, 1936, 1938, and 1941).

More than a contest surfer, however, Peterson was a Waterman in the truest sense of the word. In 1939 Peterson took his paddleboard over the massive open ocean bumps from Anacapa Island to Santa Monica Pier, a distance of more than 30 miles.

He was also an innovator of ocean vehicles and lifeguard rescue equipment. Some of his lifesaving creations include soft rescue tubes, all-fiberglass hollow boards, and foam/plywood/balsa sandwich surfboards.

Blake and Peterson exemplify the Waterman tradition now being honored by Santa Monicans working together to bring paddleboard racing back to Santa Monica and the Pier. The race and festival are organized by a long and well-known list of Santa Monica community activists, business owners, lifeguards, and members of the Harbor Patrol.

Race and festival committee members are event director Joel Brand, race director Todd Roberts, Russ Barnard, Jay Butki, Andi Curl, Jon Van Duinwyk, Eric Faber, Scott Ferguson, Ross Furukawa, Jared Kingsbury, Lori Nafshun, Tom Seth, Tim Sanford, and Mike Vaughan. Waterman’s History Committee members are co-chair Jim Harris, co-chair Nick Steers, Harold Dunnigan, Jeff Ho, Craig Lockwood, Stephanie McLean, and Cary Weiss.

These Santa Monica locals see the Pier as a wonderful venue for events, and want to have more community events on the Pier that tie in with the experience of the ocean.

The 2011 Pier Paddleboard Race and Ocean Festival celebrates the Waterman tradition, the magic of the ocean, and people coming together to have a grand time. Register to be one of the racers in either the 2- or the 5-mile race. Cheer the racers, meet Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman, the woman who inspired the “Gidget” movies and Esther Lopez Maier, winner of the 1947 Championship Race. Listen to the FuDogs, be an environmental steward and bring your own, reusable water bottle, and get it filled at the Pier, and continue the spirit of the Watermen.

What Say You?

in Opinion
Related Posts

Column: SB 9 Ended R-1 Zoning, but It’s Not Meeting Goals

March 11, 2023

March 11, 2023

By Tom Elias More than a year after it took effect, the landmark housing density law known as SB 9...

SMa.r.t. Column: The Urgency to Retrofit Earthquake-Deficient Buildings

March 6, 2023

March 6, 2023

Recent early-morning tremors off the Malibu coast, and the huge and terrible earthquake in Turkey and Syria have made us...

SMa.r.t. Column: ​​Reinforcing the Future – A Revisit

February 27, 2023

February 27, 2023

Six years go we discussed, in these pages, the city’s then-renewed earthquake-retrofit rules. At the time we argued that the...

Column: The Inevitable Conversions Begin Multiplying

February 25, 2023

February 25, 2023

By Tom Elias It’s a phenomenon from New York to Dallas to Fresno and Los Angeles, one that seemed inevitable...

Column: The Fantasy World of California Housing Policy

February 20, 2023

February 20, 2023

By Tom Elias If you’re looking for sure things among bills under consideration in the state Legislature, think of one...

SMa.r.t. Column: Santa Monica City Council – Planners, Politicians, or Developers?

February 19, 2023

February 19, 2023

Santa Monica – a progressive city 20 years ago, a chaotic city today! A city that is struggling for its...

SMa.r.t. Column: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

February 16, 2023

February 16, 2023

The picture shown above is the future of Santa Monica. Large tall buildings along the Boulevards and Avenues plus Downtown...

SMa.r.t. Column: To a Better Housing Element

February 3, 2023

February 3, 2023

Your City is busy rewriting much of its zoning code to implement our new Housing Element as demanded by the...

Santa Monica Police Chief’s Message to the Community

January 30, 2023

January 30, 2023

January 27, 2023  Dear Santa Monica Community,  The Santa Monica Police Department (SMPD) would like to extend our heartfelt condolences...

Column: State Usurping Key Powers From Cities

January 28, 2023

January 28, 2023

By Tom Elias All over California last fall, hundreds of the civic minded spent thousands of hours and millions of...

Column – A California Positive: Kids Swarm Extra Classes

January 24, 2023

January 24, 2023

By Tom Elias It’s become a cliché, the shibboleth that California has lousy public schools and most of the kids...

SMa.r.t. Column: Let’s Get Real and Apply Practical Common Sense

January 20, 2023

January 20, 2023

This week’s column is a letter to the City Council, written by Arthur Jeon and sent in this past week....

SMa.r.t. Column: Water Water Everywhere

January 13, 2023

January 13, 2023

The new year has started with water, lots of WATER. The west coast and particularly central and northern California have...

S.M.a.r.t. Looks Ahead

December 31, 2022

December 31, 2022

It’s that time of the year again, when people and organizations look ahead and make resolutions to try to do...

SMa.r.t. Column: Refugees in our Midst

December 22, 2022

December 22, 2022

We published this article exactly five years ago. We leave it to the reader to consider whether this article is...