Did Surfline Revolutionize the Sport or Kill a Part of Its Renegade Soul?

Greg Long had it on good authority that a wave bigger than any he’d ridden at Mexico’s Islas Todos Santos could arrive between 10:20 and 10:40 A.M. on January 6, 2023. The 40-year-old had been chasing swells down to the islands in northern Baja since he was a teenager in the 1990s, planning his trips using the crude surf forecasting available at the time—a fax with a three-day outlook from a nascent company called Surfline, which Long picked up at the lifeguard station where his father worked in San Clemente, California.

With three days’ notice, he would skip school, drive two and a half hours south with his father, and hop a 30-minute boat ride to the islands to see if the swell was arriving as predicted. Often it wasn’t. “We would show up with the expectation that a swell was gonna be hitting, and sure enough it would be 12 hours late and we’d miss it by a day,” said Long, now one of the best big-wave surfers in the world. “It was an early, fun adventure to have that forecast information but still not 100 percent be able to rely on it.”

Surfline has since grown into a behemoth. The 100-person company, based in Huntington Beach, California, now comprises a website and mobile app with 5.5 million users who visit an average of 18 times a month to take advantage of its hourly forecasting service and network of more than 950 cameras that live stream waves around the world. (The user and visitation numbers were shared on May 31, 2023 by then-CEO Kyle Laughlin. The current CEO says they are now inaccurate, but would not offer updated figures.)

Thanks to modern technology and 16 full-time forecasters, Surfline’s accuracy at predicting surf conditions has improved significantly since Long’s early trips to Todos. Led by chief forecaster Kevin Wallis, the team now relies on closely held knowledge refined from 38 years of meticulously archived storm-tracking data. Long and Wallis have also developed a close working relationship, consulting frequently on where to chase swells and exactly when to be in the water to meet them at their peak.

Long understood that, compared with past storms, the early January swell at Todos Santos that day would be one of the biggest he’d ever witnessed there, the kind that happened once in a decade if you were lucky. “I had probably seen it as big in years past, but that was well before we were physically and mentally prepared, or had the equipment to paddle waves like that,” Long said. “But I always remember seeing it at that size and feeling that, given the right conditions, you could paddle into a wave with a 50-to-60-foot face if you were in the right position. I knew this would be quite possibly the largest I’d ever attempted.”

Wallis noticed a critical pattern that helped Long hone in his timing. A day before the session at Todos Santos, offshore buoys to the north spiked pronouncedly as waves filtered past. “Seeing a spike like that on multiple buoys in a row gives you confidence that there should be a peak in the swell at a certain time,” Wallis said. “If I’d seen it on just one buoy, I might not have trusted it.”

When the swell passed the final buoy nearest to Todos Santos, Wallis texted Long’s team, which comprised a photographer and two other surfers. “Spike on the Tanner Bank Buoy at 5:40 A.M. That’s 5hrs to Todos so big set around 10:20-10:40.”

Long was in the water when the largest set of the day came in, exactly when Wallis predicted. He hadn’t yet caught a wave, and scratched over the first two. He hoped they would groom the choppy surface of the water for the next wave in the set. From his view, the third incoming wave was “an enormous wall of water stretching as far as you could see.” He was in the perfect spot. “I knew right away—that was the biggest wave of my life out there.” He hardly had to paddle to catch it and barely stayed in front of the avalanche of whitewater behind him.

As big-wave surfers like Long have learned to ride waves at the upper limit of what the ocean can produce, expert surf forecasters have become essential to moving the sport forward. Long points out that big-wave surfers can now ride massive swells 50 days a year or more, when in the past they’d be lucky to get in a couple such days each season. “Advancements in forecasting are the number one reason that big-wave surfing has progressed so much. There are acute details that only someone like Kevin can read into,” Long said. “Now you can predict almost to the minute when and where it’s gonna be.”

The same weekend Long rode the wave of a lifetime at Todos Santos, surfers up and down the Pacific coast who would never ride a wave half that size—and who did not have direct access to Surfline’s chief forecaster—were already experiencing what can only be described as the XXL effect. Surfline sounded the alarm on January 5 with a headline on its website: “INCOMING! Bombing WNW Swell for California.” Its team had been hyping the forecast earlier in the week, with the promise of massive surf along a coast home to an estimated 1.1 million surfers, and now hour-by-hour coverage had commenced. Surfline advised those surfers in Northern California to “head south (or WAY south),” where the waves would be more favorable, and it posted photos from Santa Barbara, Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Diego to “instill a bit of FOMO,” describing the conditions in turns as “XL,” “XXL,” “powerful and historic,” “nuclear,” and “world-class.” This hype machine doubled as convenient self-promotion for Surfline’s $100-per-year premium subscription, which offers long-range forecasts and uninterrupted ad-free streaming from its nearly 1,000 surf cams. (For free, users can access short-range forecasts and limited camera streams with ads).

I was in San Diego that week, visiting from my home in San Francisco, which now has a total of eight Surfline cameras pointed along the strand at Ocean Beach. Even my friends from outside California had gotten word of the swell and were asking me about the waves. “Where you hunting today?” read one text message. “Swami’s looks good,” read another from a friend stuck in Portland, Oregon, who was watching Surfline footage of a well-known wave in northern San Diego county, with no hope of making it there in time to surf it.

I’d come to surf these over-hyped days with trepidation, knowing how packed they’d be. Few surfers had any business at spots that could handle the full force of the swell. Crowds doubled and tripled on pockets of the coast known to cut the surf down to a manageable size. The shame of missing the biggest or best swell of the year outweighed the hassle of contending with the masses. The FOMO-induced rush operated by the same logic as a Black Friday sale, with Surfline users hooked on a service advertising spots where demand often exceeded supply.

In 2020, Surfline received $30 million in funding from private equity firm The Chernin Group and appointed a new CEO: Kyle Laughlin, a former executive from Amazon and Disney who grew up in Chicago. He was replaced in September 2023 by Ross Garrett, who had been Surfline’s president until late 2020 and served as a board adviser in the interim. Garrett is an avid surfer from San Diego who briefly competed in the World Surf League’s Qualifying Series in the nineties. This background gives him a heightened sensitivity to the effects of Surfline on the communities it serves.

“When we put in cameras, we want to make sure that we do that in a way that isn’t stealing discovery. It’s at places you know have been discovered,” Garrett said. “That’s a fine line we have to walk, and it’s not black and white. It’s a slippery slope.” In some particularly territorial surf communities in Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts, Surfline has opted to provide only surf reports and forecasting rather than a live stream. But those locations are the exception; Surfline’s camera network has ballooned from under 300 in 2017 to nearly 1,000 across the globe, with an expected increase of about 50 new cameras per year going forward. Meanwhile, Surfline has also gone on an acquisition spree, purchasing some of its largest competitors—Coastalwatch, Magic Seaweed, and Surf2Surf—to aid its business growth and camera coverage across Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

As a privately held company, Surfline doesn’t disclose its revenue, but according to SensorTower, an analytics tool that tracks online subscription revenue, Surfline brings in more than $5.5 million per year in indirect subscription sales alone (excluding subscription revenue from their website) via third-party app stores such as Android and Apple. According to Surfline, that figure understates its app-store sales, but it wouldn’t provide a corrected figure. Surfline also confirmed that the majority of subscription sales come in directly through Surfline’s website rather than app stores, which would mean the company has at the very least surpassed $11 million in annual recurring revenue. And this doesn’t include other revenue such as site advertising and merchandise sales, which Surfline said comprises 10 percent of its business. Additionally, representatives I interviewed said Surfline has grown more than 20 percent annually since 2019.

Despite such incredible user growth, Garrett believes that Surfline’s “cameras don’t increase crowds”; instead, he attributes packed lineups to the sport’s inherent appeal as an outdoor pursuit and its pandemic-driven boom in popularity. Some 800,000 new participants took up the sport in the U.S. in 2020, contributing to a total of nearly 3.8 million surfers that year, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. These factors certainly can’t be discounted—to say nothing of the ways social media has driven awareness of surf-spot-specific information through geotagging and loose-lipped comments sections. But if online platforms have created a megaphone, Surfline is the loudest voice shouting into it at moments when good surf arrives, and its forecasting and cameras are instrumental in shaping how crowds are distributed and when and where they go.

In late 2019, Surfline installed a camera pointed at Rincon, an iconic cobblestone point break on the southern tip of Santa Barbara nicknamed “The Queen of the Coast.” The community was outraged. Erin Feinblatt, a 46-year-old surfer who has lived in the area since 2008, launched a petition that summarized the sentiment: “Our complaint isn’t that Rincon is for ‘locals only’—we are well aware that this jewel of California is widely known and loved and that surfers come from all over to enjoy the wintertime waves. But the imposition of a live-stream camera puts added pressure on an already overcrowded break.”

More surfers took to Instagram to voice their concerns, including prominent surfboard shaper Ryan Lovelace, who wrote that “the newly mounted surveillance camera at Rincon … was not with the agreement of the local community.” He encouraged “other communities to stand up for their sacred spaces as well.”

Resistance to the installation of cameras is a familiar problem for Surfline. New devices have incited vandalism and threats of violence at surf spots around the world. When evaluating a location, Surfline says that it consults community members as part of a “qualitative analysis.” Yet an overwhelming number of surfers in Santa Barbara saw no evidence of widespread outreach, and they felt that Surfline came to its decision unilaterally.

Determining which communities would be receptive to live footage is “by far the most complicated, nuanced, and potentially important part of what we do,” said Johnny Marcon, the vice president at Surfline who oversees camera operations. Marcon is a lifelong surfer from Dana Point, California, who moved to Santa Barbara to attend UCSB before moving back to Orange County to work at Surfline in 2014. Even when surfers react negatively to the installation of a new camera, Marcon says he welcomes the feedback to better understand what people find objectionable. “The public discussion about a location like Rincon doesn’t bother me or Surfline at all,” he said. “As a matter of fact I think it’s really constructive.”

Christian Beamish, an accomplished big-wave surfer, a shaper, and a writer who lives in Ventura, just south of Santa Barbara, started hearing talk of vandalism as a solution to the camera problem. In his column for local outlet Coastal View News, Beamish urged surfers to instead exhaust all diplomatic and nonviolent means of having the camera removed, and called on Patagonia and Channel Islands Surfboards, two area companies with international reputations, to help apply pressure. Five days after the column was published, a marketing director at Channel Islands contacted Ross Garrett, then serving as Surfline’s president, and offered to sponsor the Rincon surf-report page in exchange for having the camera removed.

Garrett called Beamish and explained that Surfline had consulted surfers in the community before the Rincon camera went live. He said that he had personally spoken with a surfer named Ryan Moore who runs a local coffee shop and comes from a longtime surfing family based in the area. So Beamish asked Moore about the conversation. Moore could only recall a quick exchange made in passing at his coffee shop, during a busy time when he was trying to serve other customers. “That’s different, to a large degree, than earnestly sitting down with whoever you might call the stakeholders from the community and saying, ‘This is what we’d like to do. Would that be something that would benefit the Rincon surfing community?’” Beamish said. “They didn’t do that.” According to Garrett, he contacted Beamish as part of his ongoing effort to understand local sentiment, and he told Beamish that he had spoken to “many and long standing surfers and surf families” in the community before the camera went up, not just Moore.

The Surfline camera in question was perched on the home of an elderly property owner, who Surfline had approached when scouting for locations with a view of Rincon. As tensions heightened, the property owner received two separate threats of physical violence. At that point, Surfline said they came to a mutual decision with the property owner to remove the camera.

Surfline and most community members opposed to the Rincon camera agreed on one issue: physical violence and vandalism have no place in a conflict over something this frivolous. Beamish referred to the surfers who threatened to take such measures as “the more unhinged among us.” Yet it’s hard to know whether a petition or another kind of diplomatic protest would have yielded the same outcome. Some surfers in Santa Barbara still feel they’re being taken advantage of by a profit-seeking company that has little regard for its effect on relevant communities.

Following the removal of the Rincon camera, Beamish knew that he and other surfers who frequent the spot hadn’t escaped Surfline’s influence. “When Surfline does its big hyped ‘Inbound XXL’ announcement, or whatever they do, I’m not immune to it,” Beamish said. “I see a purple blob on the swell models and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, it’s coming. Fuck, what am I gonna do? The kids have soccer. I guess I could squeeze a session in at Rincon.’ And you go down there and sometimes it’s not all that. The swell ends up turning a little north and it’s four feet. But 490 guys show up that day, and they’re still gonna paddle out, even if it’s four feet and a little soft.”

Despite the vocal opposition at Rincon, Surfline soon installed a camera just up the road at Sandspit, another iconic surf spot, which breaks off the Santa Barbara Harbor jetty. At the time, Feinblatt was busy with work and didn’t have time to rally support for another petition. “When the Sandspit camera went up at the harbor, we were all devastated. That camera didn’t come down, and to this day it’s such a bummer,” he said.

“There used to be days when it was waist high and there would be nobody out there. Now there can be 30 people and you’re thinking, Wait, what? Guys, it’s waist high. What’s going on?”

The ease with which modern surfers can track swells can be traced back to Surfline’s original chief forecaster, Sean Collins, a self-taught junior-college dropout with no formal meteorological training who lived to find waves. Before Collins helped launch the pay-per-call surf report and 72-hour forecast for Southern California in 1985—alongside the phone-sex lines and horoscope readings that pervaded pay-per-call 900 numbers of the time—surfers in California had to rely on the local news to predict swells, or listen for word that big surf had arrived in Hawaii or Mexico and would soon make its way to them.

At that time, many surfers believed that south swells reaching the West Coast were all derived from hurricanes, when in fact the majority of storms originate in the South Pacific. This was among the false beliefs Collins dispelled as his forecasting skills grew. He had a passion for surfing Mexico’s Baja peninsula and was known for tossing a 100-foot antenna atop a cactus to get a radio signal and access the latest weather data—which he’d then print out from a car-battery-powered fax machine. He’d pull information from satellite images, NOAA millibar charts used to track storm and weather activity, and at-sea ship data. Today Surfline’s proprietary swell model, Lotus, is still driven by NOAA’s wind model, which the forecast team fine-tunes based on observational data from satellite passes over storms and offshore buoy data. While other surfers may have gone to similar lengths to develop forecasts for themselves, Collins was first to make the information available to a wide audience. By the late nineties, Surfline received a million calls annually.

The company’s success hinged on two elements: making weather data widely available, and expertly translating that data for an audience that knew little about meteorology. Collins had a keen understanding of how various attributes of the forecast would affect the surf conditions. The company also amassed a ton of data. Through the early 2000s, Surfline’s forecast relied on a brigade of more than 25 on-the-ground reporters who would check the surf at their local beaches twice a day and report back via the nearest payphone—until those reporters were replaced by the growing network of cameras.

But those who knew Collins before he died of a heart attack in 2011, at age 59, saw his misgivings about what he’d created: he struck upon a great business opportunity, but it exposed his hard-won knowledge to the masses. “Sean wouldn’t do the forecast for areas in Baja that he wanted to go. He was very old-school in that fashion,” said Mike Parsons, a former pro and close friend of Collins. “He found all these spots and surfed by himself. He wanted that experience for his kids, but it’s kind of a double-edged sword because you’re developing programs that are going to help everyone score.”

Parsons, along with big-wave icons like Laird Hamilton and Kelly Slater, benefited directly from Collins’s exclusive firsthand knowledge—just as elite surfers today rely on Collins’s closely mentored protégé, Kevin Wallis. During a trip to Maui’s Jaws one January, Collins told Parsons the swell would peak at one o’clock. “I got probably the best wave of my life based on him telling me when to be in the water,” Parsons said. But he also mourns what’s been lost. “I used to go to the beach every day to see if there was a swell. While we all miss that time, the flip side of that is I wouldn’t have been out at Jaws at one o’clock.”

In many ways, Collins represented surfers with values of an earlier era than the one he brought into being. “There’s a conundrum at the heart of what we do,” said Surfline’s vice president of product and innovation Ben Freeston during an appearance on the Surf Splendor podcast. “It’s that we all want this information, and we all wish that no one else had it. That’s the blunt truth.”

The cameras Surfline uses were originally designed as industrial-scale security cameras. In the past, there have been two major technical limitations that prevented the company from deploying these at certain beaches: access to the power grid and high-speed internet. But those barriers are diminishing with the emergence of reliable solar power and satellite internet providers such as Elon Musk’s Starlink. “Surfline is a very short distance away from having a standard package of solar and Starlink, or Starlink-like internet service, that basically allows us to put a camera anywhere,” Surfline’s Marcon said.

Surfline’s cameras are now also capable of interpreting surf conditions, thanks to breakthroughs in computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence that allows them to provide users easy-to-digest information on wave shape, ocean currents, and crowds. When and how these features will be made publicly available, however, has yet to be determined by the Surfline team. “These aren’t passive, dumb cameras,” Freeston said on the Surf Splendor podcast. “Surfline has a thousand sensors 24/7 pointed at a thousand key beaches. These things are gonna feed even more data than Sean [Collins] was able to collect, and that just makes things better and better.”

The company has also begun expanding into new business opportunities, installing cameras at wave pools to sell visiting surfers their footage, partnering with local government agencies to help monitor erosion, and aiding the work of lifeguards with a program called Surf Zone AI.

As Surfline bakes increased automation into its products, it will continue to alter the experience of average surfers. Before Surfline, a forecast was something surfers had to create themselves. Now that data is something surfers consume passively. With live cameras, color-coded reports—and, soon, real-time updates to the surf conditions—it’s become easier than ever to find good waves without any knowledge of the underlying data studied by forecasters like Wallis.

The downside is that one’s horizons become limited to spots under the gaze of Surfline’s cameras. But this is also the silver lining. To most users, Surfline will remain an invitation to join the crowd. Yet it’s also a way to stay ahead of it for those who maintain the knowledge and motivation to find waves along coastal stretches that the company has yet to bring into full focus. “Should average surfers be hopeful that they can find surf with no one around? Sure, absolutely,” famed boat captain and surf explorer Martin Daly told me. “There’s so much surf out there if you want to get off your ass, get off your phone, and go look for it yourself.”

While a survey of Surfline’s cameras may lead you to think that empty waves can only be found in far-flung corners of the world, Daly argues for a vanishing frame of mind, not a destination. There are still surfers out there getting it, much closer to home, just beyond the scope of Surfline’s watchful eye.