Remember Dale Webster? He’s the completely spun surfer from Northern California who was featured in Dana Brown’s Step into Liquid? Well, he’s still at it according to Sports Illustrated’s Chris Ballard.
Every day for the last 32 years, every single day, he has surfed. He heads out each morning in Bodega Bay, a blustery town on the northern California coast, and paddles into the 50° water, a worn-out 59-year-old in a worn-out wet suit. He’s caught waves during howling storms, while wracked by kidney stones and, once, within snapping distance of a Volvo-sized great white (“never paddled so hard in my life,” he says). He’s gone through 35-plus wet suits and as many surfboards, and he’s scraped off 45 pounds of surf wax, all of it preserved in a gooey, browning mound in his backyard. All that cold water has narrowed his ear canals, and his eyes are bloodshot and glassy, in need of surgery.
Having surfed 96 days straight once before in our lives we can say this: running streaks like that is enough to drive a man deeply, irrevocably crazy. We don’t care what anyone says, Dale Webster is crazy.
[Link: Sports Illustrated]
