Throughout the years, The Santa Barbara Independent’s Surf Issue — our paper’s annual ode to the waves that break along our shore (albeit only sometimes) and the men and women who ride them — has enjoyed the good fortune of having some fairly spectacular wave wranglers grace its pages. As it turns out, despite our generally surf-starved situation around these parts, many of the folks who make up the fabric of the 805’s well-steeped surf culture are also big-time players in surfing’s global tribe. What follows is a quick catch-up with four such individuals who have been making some major waves of their own since their Independent debuts.
Liz Clark
When she first turned up on our pages back in November of 2006, Clark, a UCSB graduate and former bartender extraordinaire at the Endless Summer, was already one year into a mostly solo sailing and surfing global adventure. Since then, Captain Liz and her trusty vessel, Swell, are still pillaging the high seas, having just arrived this week, after a 500-mile crossing, in French Polynesia’s Marquesas Islands. For guaranteed bouts of jealousy and downright beautiful and often inspirational writing, follow her ongoing travels at swellvoyage.com.