Top Surfing Destinations

Oahu, Hawaii-North Shore

Hawaii is the original home of surfing. The Polynesians began the sacred ritualistic sport here more than 500 years ago. Today, Hawaii is home to most of the Big Wave surfing and some of the most coveted breaks exist in this island paradise.

The North Shore on the island of Oahu has gigantic winter waves and is commonly referred to as ‘wild water’. The North Shore covers almost 20 miles of beautiful, open sandy beaches that produce mammoth 20-30 foot waves from October to February. The most famous of these breaks is at `Ehukai Beach, known worldwide as the Banzai Pipeline. This ferocious tube breaks over a coral reef that bottoms out at under 24 inches and the waves are normally 10 feet high. This is the place were surfing legends are made and broken.

Another North Shore Big Wave surf spot is Waimea Beach. The Quicksilver Eddie Aikau Invitational competition is held here annually, with wave requirements being 20 feet or higher. This winter wonderland of monster waves is also one of the most dangerous surfing locations in the world. In the summertime, the water is flat and is a charming spot for snorkeling, fishing and swimming.

Cape Town, South Africa- Jeffries Bay

With its mountain backdrop, incredible wildlife, beautiful seashore and gnarly waves, Cape Town and its surrounding breaks are paradise incarnate for the seasoned surfer.

There are all sorts of secret breaks and deserted beaches along South Africa’s Wild Coast. 375 miles to the west of Cape Town is Eastern Cape, home to Jeffries Bay, or J-Bay as it is known, is a pristine spot for consistent surf with famous curls. “Supertubes” beach brings perfect waves that are considered to be unparalleled anywhere else in the world. In July, professional surfers gather here for the Billabong Pro tournament. Other notable surfing breaks are Bruce’s Beauties and Cape St. Francis from Endless Summer fame. Tourism has destroyed some of J-Bay’s charm, however as cheap apartment buildings have sprung up in the area, detracting from its natural beauty.

Watch out for sharks! This area has the reputation of attracting sharks in droves due to the Indian Ocean’s warm water. The breaks in the area that will get you totally stoked are Boneyards, Dungeons, Kitchen Windows, Phantoms and Magnatubes. Some of these beaches can surprise you with a wave you can ride for up to three minutes.

Half Moon Bay, Northern California- Mavericks

Named after a sea-worthy German shepherd in 1961, this beach and its break has become synonymous with Big Wave surfing. It is the only place where surfers can find waves from 25-50 feet in the winter outside of Hawaii. The extraordinary rock formation underwater is the reason for this break’s Big Wave phenomenon, luring many of the world’s best big wave surfers to Pillar Point Harbor, north of Half Moon Bay. Although Mavericks was named in 1961 and surfed by only a few brave surfers for many years, today it has become a popular destination for surfers who want to catch a big wave in California. In 1999, the first annual Invitation-Only Mavericks Surf Contest was formed. This contest gives the top names in big wave surfing 24 hour notice to show up and rip, possibly leaving with cash prizes. Crowds of over 40,000 spectators gather to watch these surfers take on the cold water, unpredictable and strong current conditions of this paddle-in contest.

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The Best Beaches in California

This article presents its list for what we believe are the best beaches in California. Of all the beaches California has to offer, we think these are tops! If you can find better beaches in California, then we’ll eat out hat (metaphorically speaking)!

• Malibu Lagoon Beach: A beautiful lagoon beach with 22 acres of wetlands, gardens and sandy beach. It’s considered one of the worlds premiere surfing beaches. On the east side of the Malibu Creek Bridge is the Malibu Pier, which is excellent for saltwater fishing. On the west side is a nature area.

• Venice Beach: No trip to Los Angeles would be complete without a trip to this iconic beach. Street performers, artists and "the beautiful people" mingle and stroll all the way to Santa Monica along the famous boardwalk that runs through this inimitable California beach town.

• El Capitan Beach: This shady, sandy, Santa Barbara beach features rocky tide pools along El Capitan Creek. It’s perfect for swimming, fishing, surfing, picnicking and camping. A long stairway gives access from the bluffs to beach and a bike trail connects the park with Refugio State Beach.

• Ocean Beach: O.B. as the locals call it is a laid-back beach-community know for its surfers and liberal politics. It is an eclectic beach community with a leash free “dog beach”, a fishing pier, swimming, surfing and volleyball. It has separate swimming and surfing zones, which is definitely a good idea.

• Rio Del Mar Beach: This long, sandy beach is found in the town of Aptos, California, in Santa Cruz County. It features fire rings and a barbecue and picnic area and is a popular summer beach. It is also the home to the “cement boat” a long stranded freighter ship.

• Muir Beach: This beach is less than a half hour drive from San Francisco down scenic Hwy I. It’s one of the most glorious regions of Northern California in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Fishing, surfing and campfires are allowed, and there are many coastal trails above the beach for hikers to explore.

• Black Sands Beach at Shelter Cove: This splendid black sand beach is a great place for Whale watching. Located north of the small hamlet of Shelter Cove in a remote region of the "Lost Coast", it’s the trailhead for the famous King Range hike. This is a day only beach, so campers will have to head for the mountains.

• La Jolla's Beaches: La Jolla means "the jewel," a fitting name for the precious beaches of La Jolla's coast. Surfers prefer Windansea beach, harbor seals love the Children's Pool, La Jolla Shores is popular for swimming and sunbathing, while the Cove is a favorite snorkeling spot.

• Drake's Beach: This vast stretch of white sand can be found at the Point Reyes National Seashore. The areas strong winds and choppy seas make it at little too violent for most swimmers, but sun worshippers will be delighted by the opportunity to work on their tans in a beautiful California outdoor hotspot.

Looking for more information on California Beaches check out visitusa.com your outdoor adventure travel guide.

Follow Your Path to Extreme Sports

If you enjoy taking risks and having a good time appreciating the thrills of nature’s beauty, you probably like to Surf. If this is the case, there are some great surf videos that have awesome waves and surf tricks, displaying the killer California surf, man. You might also be interested in Surf Wear like Sunglasses and Surf Truncks that will make your ride perfect. If you are a regular surf champ, there are some awesome surf facts that you should know. Back on the early days of California surf, a group of friends would pile into a car and head off to search for waves together.

As airplane travel became affordable in the sixties, surfers would toss their long boards on a flight to Hawaii and share a beater and flophouse North Shore housing for their first taste of a 'surf safari.'

Then, in the seventies, groups of traveling surfers used freighters, sailboats and exotic Third World modes of transportation to locate and surf new spots. During the 1980's and 1990's surf camps appeared in remote locations where surfers could take their friends and wives and enjoy a feeling of genteel exploration while surfing un crowded waves.

Additionally, as technology and the internet have opened the world to easier access of information, surfers have used more and more high-tech methods to achieve essentially the same thing as the early travelers, to surf with your buddies in an uncrowded environment.

You probably are aware that surfing spots are crowded and will get worse and worse in the future. To find previously waves that have not been ridden waves in California today, you need a good boat, and we've found one. The " Condor Express” is a 75' aluminum jet-drive rocket ship that will easily do thirty five knots.

Even if we are using a high-tech catamaran and PWCs to access these remote waves, it's essentially all about the adventure-the 'aloha spirit' of our film crew and tow-surfers getting together, sharing the whole experience with anyone interested.

When big swells hit California, we'll be on the Condor with some tow-surfing teams and a film crew. When we return we'll post our images, videoclips and stories on this site so you can share the adventure. Anything that pushes you to the beach is just fine.

It doesn't matter if you're bodysurfing, bodyboarding, windsurfing, kiteboarding, foilboarding, surfing or towsurfing, it's all the same thing.

It pushes you to the beach, and that's what it's all about. Now we have satellite based surfing forecasts, live surf cams and guys flying personal helicopters to inaccessible spots in order to achieve the same objective. Surfers now scour the world looking for not only the perfect wave but the biggest wave.

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Water Proof iPod Now Available

Everyone loves an iPod yet prior to now they have had some serious limitations. For instance you could not take them into the water or surfing? So for an avid surfer who spends hours in the water why would you bother to own one? Well all that has changed now; introducing the H2O Audio Corporations new waterproof cases. Previously these cases were only water resistant; splash proof or snow proof, but now you can submerge them and take them diving, snorkeling, surfing or in the pool.

At the World Famous CES Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas H20 Audio had one of their units dunked in water and playing away. The cases are not really out of line either, for instance you can get a waterproof iPod Shuffle case for only forty bucks. The iPod Nano, which should be cheaper because it is smaller costs eighty dollars and if you get a new video iPod the case is ninety smackeroos.

The new and improved tight seals are able to hold up under water pressure of ten feet or more and you can also get a dive case which can go down some three-hundred feet below sea level, which only costs one-hundred dollars. You need this in 2006.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is a guest writer for Our Spokane Magazine in Spokane, Washington

How I Broke a Girl's Arm While Surfing and Made a Friend

At school we had surfing for sport finally in my senior years. The school worked out when the surf was good that most surfers were dodging sport so they got a couple of teachers to supervise surfing, put us through a course and then introduced us to the beach. We all had a buddy system where half the surfers would stay on the beach and half would be surfing and the one on the beach would watch that the one in the water was always okay.

It was during a day like this that I was paddling out after a wave and a young 14 year old pretty girl came down a wave right at me. I tried to get out of the way and we ended up crashing. I came to the surface and she was screaming in pain. I picked her up on my board and paddled her into the beach where she was taken to hospital with a broken arm.

For a couple of months she continued to come to surfing for sport and we really hit it off. She became a buddy of two surfers each week and this made her more popular as more surfers could surf and some could surf twice.

This girl, surfed at a beach where I used to go by myself to surf each week. She had the most olive skin and such a great figure. She was one of the most prettiest girls I had ever seen and she was a pretty good surfer to!

I always wondered how I could get her to watch me surf with keen interest and one day I figured it out. I would borrow her surfboard. I asked her and she said yes on the condition I would fix any damage I might do and I readily agreed and paddled out. Every time I looked around to the beach her yes were keenly on me.

After about twenty minutes she swam out and held onto her board. She was almost black she was so brown and with a bright yellow bikini she was a sight to see as she hung on the end of her board as she chatted. I was smitten with this young girl. My first platonic relationship with a girl.

I asked her if she could duck dive her board and she said she couldn’t. She hadn’t been surfing for long but when you could make your board go under a wave like this in a duck dive as we called it , it made paddling out in a big sea a lot easier.

So on that day I put my arm around her and taught her how to duck dive her board. I am a guy that loves olive skin and I have to tell you that 24 years have passed since I did that and I can still see her with her butt in the air and those lovely tanned legs pushing down on the board.

With all this love, I forget her name. How bad of me.

I was pretty innocent back then. Perhaps we could have been boyfriend and girlfriend, She didn’t have a boyfriend. One thing I know, I never asked her to be my girlfriend, I was just happy she was my friend.

Matthew is one of two people that operate a site at http://www.escapeministries.net Escape ministries is a place where people can be ministered to over the internet, by reading articles, watching videos and receiving personal prophetic words. James and Matthew invite you to visit today to look at some of the articles they have collected and watch some of the video teachings they are setting about to produce for you. You are encouraged to sign up for our monthly newsletter or simply email James or Matthew with any of your comments. We hope that you might bookmark it and come back to visit often as we pursue our mission statement that is found on our home page. You can visit and view their video's live at youtube by going direct to http://www.youtube.com/EscapeMinistries

How To Make Money Online Surfing From Home

How You Get Paid
Once you sign up for a make money online surfing site you get paid to shop and do surveys. Simply click on any of the offers on the offers page after logging in and follow the instructions. Once you have completed an offer you will be asked to click a button to indicate its completion. After it has been verified that you have completed the offer, your account will be credited accordingly.

Get paid to refer people. You are paid a percentage of your referral’s earnings. For example, if you get 20% for first level referrals and you have referred 5 people who earn $20 a month, that is an extra $20 in your pocket. If you get 100 referrals earning $20 a month, that is an extra $400 you'll earn every month. Several of these sites also pay you for second level referrals (the people that your referrals refer). And some pay you for third level referrals, etc.

If you want to take advantage of the referral programs, creating a blog or a website is a good idea. But you also need to promote your blog/website so people know it is there. A good way to promote your make money online surfing referral page is to post your site on traffic exchanges for free. You also want to add your sites to search engines, post to message boards, forums, and groups.

How Much Money Can You Make?
How much you can make is dependent on a few things such as what country you're from and how much time you're willing to devote to making money. As it is, most members have the opportunity to make more than a thousand dollars a month. Especially if you join more than one make money online surfing website.

Some make money online surfing sites have a minimum payout that you need to meet before they will bother sending out a check. The minimum payout amount will vary depending on which make money online surfing company you join because each company sets their own payout amount.

A Few Tips
Before you start doing offers, create a brand new e-mail address just for the offers, surveys, etc. that you will be doing. In fact, having multiple e-mail addresses and alternating between them helps increase approvals.

Use a free online telephone service that gives you a brand new phone number that you can give out when completing surveys, offers, etc. And you can check your messages on line. This way, your home phone will never ring with additional calls.

Conclusion
This is a great free way to make a little or alot of extra money at your leisure and from your own home. Anytime you're online you could be making money surfing without having to pay anything upfront. This can also be a supplemental source of income to pay off extra bills, or to get a fledgling business off the ground.

Did you find those tips on how to make money online surfing useful? You can learn a lot more about how make money online surfing here: http://www.squidoo.com/make_money_online_surfing

Early History Of Surfing

If images of the kahuna (experts) ritualistically chanting to the Gods to bring the waves, protect men and women who rode them, bless the carved wood boards, kings and queens battling for wave rights and integration between man and the magic of the sea brings images of the history of Surfing to your mind’s eye, then you must be filled with Aloha, as the Polynesians intended. The history of surfing dates back centuries before the first written account of observing ‘the sport of kings’ in 1779 by Lt. James King in the ship’s log of Captian James Cook’s Discovery.

He scrutinizes the sport as existing purely for sport and amusement; “The Men sometimes 20 or 30 go without the Swell of the Surf, & lay themselves flat upon an oval piece of plan about their Size and breadth, they keep their legs close on top of it, & their Arms are us'd to guide the plank, thye wait the time of the greatest Swell that sets on Shore, & altogether push forward with their Arms to keep on its top, it sends them in with a most astonishing Velocity, & the great art is to guide the plan so as always to keep it in a proper direction on the top of the Swell…”Surfing was created as a royal pastime, embedded in the codes of the kapu (taboos) as governed by the Hawaiians.

It was a very well-respected and almost mystical experience which kings and queens welcomed into their lives. When the Europeans began to arrive from England in droves in the early 1800’s, bringing with it their puritanical Calvinistic Christian philosophies, the kapu of the Hawaiians was destroyed and they were forced to live a more European way of life. With this change came the degradation of surfing as offensive to God and Jesus Christ. The Hawaiians were manipulated into believing in a resulting eternal damnation for surfing, and consequently, the sport fell out of favor.

The thrill and immortality of surfing was not completely demolished and there were dedicated lone surfers continuing to take on the waves, despite the Calvinists’ demands. Tourists from other countries began to hear about the fascinating sport and wanted to try it for themselves. In 1851, the writer Reverend Henry T. Cheever inscribed his observation of the mysticism, skill and beauty of surfing. Mark Twain has recorded his account of having wiped out on a wave during his initiation to the sport in 1866.

Surfing stayed on an underground level and continued to decline until 1907 when author Jack London, native surfer George Freeth and eccentric wanderer Alexander Hume Ford founded the Waikiki Swimming Club. London was famous and influential, bringing surfing to the world’s attention with his book “A Royal Sport: Surfing in Waikiki”. George Freeth won the title of “First Man to Surf in California”, which wasn’t exactly true but drew public attention nonetheless. Hume Ford petitioned for Waikiki to be a permanent home for surfing and won. On May 1, 1908 the Hawaiian Outrigger Canoe Club was founded and the sport began to flourish again.

Eric Hartwell oversees "The World's Best Homepage" intended to be a user-generated resource where YOUR opinion counts. Anybody can contribute and all are welcomed. Visit us to read, comment upon or share opinions on sport and visit our associated site articles for free.