Searching for Captain Kew
The Rambling and Wonderful Surfing Life of Writer Michael Kew
It was sometime before the whiskey but after the pulled-pork sandwich and homemade pumpkin pie when Michael Kew dropped the bomb. With 15 neatly packed surfboards lined up in the corner of the kitchen and the television an alternating blur of a recorded San Diego Chargers game and Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer, the light was getting late and perfect on the mountains behind us, a nostalgic golden hue that is the quintessential calling card of winter around these parts. As the crow flies, we were little more than a mile from Rincon, our Queen of the Coast. Rustling through an impressively stuffed cabinet of his published work, Kew looked over his shoulder, gave that short rapid-fire laugh he often uses, and asked innocently enough, “Seriously, though, what’s your angle on this? I mean, why would anyone want to read about me?”
The thing is, if you fancy yourself a surfer and have read surf magazines with an even sporadic interest during the past decade, chances are high that you’ve already read Kew and gazed daydreamingly upon his photography. From the surf rags of Japan and Italy to the polished publications of Brazil and California, the 36-year-old regular-foot is as prolific as they come in the not-so-wide world of surf journalism. (Just punch in “Michael Kew surf” to the Google machine, for instance, and 5.6 million results pop up in less than half a second.) Even better, with an ear wired for dialogue and a perpetual curiosity particularly piqued by cultures of the far flung, Kew’s trademark brand of wordsmithing is typically wielded after adventures — often solo ones — to islands and atolls in forgotten corners of the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean, places that your travel agent isn’t even sure how to get you to.
As Scott Hulet, editor of the Surfers Journal, North America’s preeminent surf publication and a regular landing spot for Kew’s work, put it recently, “Bottom line, I don’t know anyone who has racked up more surf time in remote island groups over the last decade than Kew.”
