A Single Website Has a Choke Hold on Surfing
Surfline made the sport more convenient for amateurs and professionals alike. Why do so many of them complain about it?
Updated at 7:45 a.m. ET on September 12, 2023.
Matt Warshaw still remembers the jolt of horror he felt when the camera went up. It was September 2000, a decade since he quit his job as the editor of Surfing magazine and fled the crowded breaks of Southern California for the cold, isolated waves of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. When he saw the cam on the flagpole at a beachfront house his friend was renting, he was livid, certain that the website it broadcast to, Surfline, would bring crowds to his favorite spot. He wrote his friend’s landlord a letter. “Tom, how could you do this to us?” he recalls writing. “You don’t really know what you’ve done here.”
Within a month, Warshaw ate his words. He was using the camera to check out the waves himself.
Decades later, Surfline continues to take flak from surfers. “Surfline is full bullshit,” one recent comment on the company’s Instagram reads. Last year, in Venice Beach, California, someone spray-painted Fuck Surfline in bright green within view of one of the company’s cameras.
All this griping can seem rather overblown when you consider that Surfline is, at its heart, a company that forecasts waves. Today, it’s a subscription media business that offers 24/7 surf predictions for breaks around the world, complete with live views from its more than 1,000 cameras, as well as surfing-related news. Millions of people visit Surfline every month to help plan when to go out and where. The company also partners with the World Surf League to ensure that professional contests are held in the best possible conditions.
These services are not always well received. Surfing is a sport of closely guarded secrets, where information about choice locations is earned, not given. In an ideal world, each wave that rolls in would be ridden by just one, maybe two people at most. Each day at the beach brings only a certain number of waves, and even fewer great ones. Every surfer that paddles out is another surfer to compete with. A friend recently sent me a video of pristine waves rolling ashore down in Mexico. When I asked him where he was, he said he couldn’t say.
Surfline may be just a website, but it has almost certainly changed when and where people surf, and usually for the better. Surfline helps surfers optimize their time in the water, so they can manage family and work obligations while still catching great waves—which is either convenient or a pollution of the sport’s laid-back philosophy. It can unleash hordes of people on a break—which is either inclusive and democratizing, or something that ruins the experience for everyone. In some ways, the decades-long jostling over the site is a battle for the true spirit of the sport.
Surfline’s haters cite an ocean’s worth of reasons for disliking it. The grumpier critics call it “Surflies,” accusing its forecasters of overhyping storm swells that don’t pan out. Reddit is full of gripes about its cost (about $100 a year in the U.S.), framing it as a greedy empire exploiting what should be free to all. This summer, Surfline formally merged with Magicseaweed, or MSW, a smaller competitor it acquired back in 2017, annoying some longtime MSW fans. Surfline, though, is unperturbed. “We just really believe that we’re bringing real value to the lives of people who want to maintain their surfing passion over the course of their life,” Johnny Marcon, Surfline’s vice president of operations, told me.
One of the biggest complaints about Surfline is that it crowds certain spots. Although this is probably true in part, the website isn’t entirely to blame. Thanks to pop culture, the commercialization of the sport, and the pandemic, more people are getting in the water: One industry report found that the number of American surfers increased by nearly a million from 2019 to 2022. And Surfline is often the site that tells new and experienced surfers alike when and where to go.
That is a lot of power for any one website. Other, smaller surf-forecasting websites and cameras exist, but only Surfline has a choke hold on the sport. And a good share of that control lies in the hands of Kevin Wallis, a Surfline veteran of 23 years who serves as its director of forecasting. Wallis does not take his job lightly. “There’s a real sense of responsibility,” he told me over Zoom, whether he and his team are providing a forecast for a high-stakes professional contest or for someone who just wants to cruise around in knee-high water. Some surfers allege that Surfline staff don’t put up cameras at their local breaks because they want to keep those to themselves, but Wallis firmly denied it. A lot of the staff live and surf near some of the most popular—and well-surveilled—breaks in Southern California, he said. According to Marcon, the accusations of intentionally shoddy forecasting are false too. “It would be terrible for our business model to do anything but our absolute best in providing people with the most accurate information,” he said.
Wallis said the perception of Surfline as “this big kind of evil corporation” has been around since it was a small company. (He joined in 2000, when it had fewer than 10 employees.) And to be fair, some of surfers’ fears from the early days of the internet seem to have come true. Surfers maintain that Surfline’s cameras and forecasts do seem to put pressure on breaks at ideal times. “We’re all on this perpetual search for uncrowded waves,” William Finnegan, a lifelong surfer who won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, told me. “Cams tend to crowd up places, and therefore we head for places without cams.” And although Surfline might have democratized information, surfing experts I spoke with worry that wealthier surfers are the ones most poised to act on it. After all, they are the ones who can afford plane tickets and hotels when Surfline says a great swell is heading to Indonesia.
Before the internet, you’d need to get crafty to figure out whether the waves were any good. Maybe you’d drive toward the coast, waving your thumbs wildly at any car that was headed back from the beach with surfboards on top, hoping they’d reply with a thumbs-up—meaning the ocean was firing. Or maybe you’d call up a local surf shop, a lifeguard stand, or a friend with a beachfront view, and ask them for a surf report. Or maybe you’d just quit your job and move to the beach full time so you could see for yourself out the window.
Even experienced surfers acknowledge how useful the site is. “I live in Manhattan, and I do not know how we surfed from here without Surfline,” Finnegan said. “There are really good waves within an hour of New York City. But you really, really have to nail it.” Takuji Masuda, a longtime surfer and filmmaker based in Malibu, California, told me he uses the camera to avoid crowds: “ I can see how many people are out there … and that kind of dictates where I want to go.”
All the agita over Surfline is masking a decades-old debate over who surfing is for. The sport has always been competitive, Mindy Pennybacker, the author of Surfing Sisterhood, told me. But old depictions of surfing, including vintage photography and illustrations, show multiple people sharing a single wave—a far cry from the jockeying for position that is often found in lineups today. “As far as I’m concerned, everyone should have the opportunity to go and ride waves if they want to do it,” Wallis, from Surfline, told me. The people complaining about crowds don’t always seem to agree.
Surfing isn’t the only area of modern life that’s faced pressure when, thanks to the internet, everyone with a smartphone descends upon it. Businesses get overwhelmed, ticket prices soar, lines form. But when a bakery goes viral for its croissant-doughnut, it might be able to expand its business. Surfers can’t bake additional waves into their favorite spot. Yes, our oceans are big, and there are surely plenty of breaks around the world that have never been ridden before. Finding them requires a lot more effort—because they’re not on Surfline.
As a beginner surfer, I depend completely on Surfline to tell me when the waves are breaking just right and at just the right size for my skill level. I’ve wondered if I’m missing something fundamental about the sport by using technology as a kind of cheat code to set me up for good waves only. When I asked a bunch of surf legends whether that was true, they all had different answers, but I found Warshaw’s the most comforting: “The whole history of surf is taking advantage of everything you can to surf better to get more waves,” he explained. “If you’re in the ocean, that’s all that counts.”
This article previously misstated Kevin Wallis’s title.