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"They thought I was CIA...."


Sean Collins with his sons


Sean Collins
Job: President of Surfline, the pioneer in surf forecasting.
Age: 52
Residence: Seal Beach
Family: Married to Daren, sons Tyler, 21, and A.J., 14.
Number of surfboards owned: "More than 20, less than 30."
Number of personal watercraft: Three
Last book read: "The Last Season," by Phil Jackson
Favorite movie: "Braveheart"



This profile of Sean Collins appeared in the Register on Jan. 13, 2005. Collins died Monday, Dec. 26, 2011, at the age of 59.


By Martin Wisckol | OC Register
Tuesday December 27th, 2011

Federales rooted through Sean Collins' four-wheel-drive Nissan and weren't quite sure what they'd found. Beside the wetsuits and camp gear sat a shortwave radio and this strange machine with a roll of aluminum-coated paper in it.

"They thought I was CIA," Collins said of the stop, one of several he experienced deep in dusty, barren Baja California during the 1980s. "I'm saying, 'No, no, we're just surfers, we're just surfers.' "

Not that many other surfers would have recognized the shortwave-run weather fax, which etched data from New Zealand into the silver paper. Collins swiped the unit from his dad's sailboat after getting skunked on one too many Mexican surf trips and began translating the distant weather information into local wave forecasts.

In the decades since, Collins has refined wave forecasting to such accuracy that he has changed the sport. He was named one of the 25 most influential surfers of the 20th century by Surfer magazine and, in 2002, the eighth most powerful person in the surf industry.

Collins, now 52, was born to be a waterman. He helped crew his dad's boat on races to Hawaii and Mexico, open-ocean races in which onboard weather forecasting was critical. When he was 8, he started surfing in his hometown of Seal Beach.

As a teen, he was put in charge of selecting anchorages on the return from Mexican races – which prompted Collins to look for the best Baja surf spots. Once a road through Baja was completed in the early 1970s, he began regular overland trips.

"I would go down there and sometimes wait for waves for weeks," said the soft-spoken Collins, whose weathered face includes surf scars on his lip and chin. "I thought there had to be a better way."

The weather fax helped, but it wasn't enough. So, for a year, he spent an hour each morning sitting on the roof of his family's house, logging the size, direction and interval of each wave as it hit one of the Seal Beach jetties. He compared the data to logs made from the weather fax, and started identifying distant storms that sent waves to beaches here a few days later.

He continued refining his pioneering surf forecasts by adding buoy and satellite readings. All of this eventually led him to develop the heavily trafficked Surfline Web site – surfline.com – which the college dropout started as a paid phone service 20 years ago.

Inland surfers can log on to his live surfcams to decide whether to make the drive to the beach. Traveling surfers can make sure there will be waves before flying halfway around the world. Those with families and mortgages – who include Collins, a husband and father of two – are surfing later into their life because they know where and when to catch good waves and when their time is better spent earning their keep.

No more fruitless driving from spot to spot, which used to be the only way to find the day's special spot – if there was one. No more idle speculation about the almost mystical arrival of good waves. No more surf sacrifices.

Pro contest organizers consult with Collins to determine start dates. The vanguard riding the most extreme, 40-foot-plus waves rely on Collins to know where and when their special monsters can be found.

And it goes beyond surfing. He supplies reports to every ocean lifeguard agency in the state, to the Coast Guard, to the National Weather Service, and to dozens of other outlets, including the Register.

"It's never been about the money," Collins said from the Surfline offices overlooking the Huntington Beach pier. "It just turned out that way. It's always been about getting good, uncrowded waves."

CROWDS IN PARADISE

In 1984, Collins took a squad of about a dozen top surfers and surf photographers to a superb but little-known break in Central Mexico. It was a desolate desert stretch of coastline in the middle of nowhere, but the crew traveled eagerly to score the outstanding waves Collins promised.

But the ocean was flat.

On a solar-powered video player at their encampment, Collins showed videos of how good it could be. The cold dusty wind blew. The cases of Mexican beer flowed.

"I got a little out of control," said pro Brad Gerlach, then a rising teenage star. "From then on, we've always had that to laugh about."

Collins, not a big drinker, was more embarrassed than hung over after the trip. Everyone bailed after one night.

"That was such a big expedition, and that was totally my responsibility," he said. "That was a key event (in refining predictions). I'd made some (wrong) assumptions about wind speed, and that really made me go back and figure it out."

Back then, nobody was right all the time. Now he has indeed figured it out. He's expected to always be right. And he virtually always is.

These days, Collins flies to Baja about 10 times a year for the best swells. Sometimes Gerlach and a few other pros join him. Sometimes it's Collins' two surfing sons. But often he travels alone, disappearing from the office at the drop of a hat to surf great waves. He has two trucks stored in separate locations and complains that other surfers know his vehicles and try to track him. He tells stories of crisscrossing the desert, of sweeping over tire tracks on dirt roads to foil followers.

He's been called the Alan Greenspan of the sport, controlling interest rates.

Consider veteran surfer Steve Pezman, editor of The Surfers Journal, who takes an annual trip with a group of buddies to mainland Mexico.

"Four days before we go, we call Sean, and if he says there aren't going to be waves, we reschedule and pay the $50 (airline) penalty," said Pezman, 63.

Of course, it's not just Collins' trail and his advice to friends that send surfers scurrying to the ocean. Anyone can call up his Web site.

"His effect on surfing has been profound," Pezman said. "Before Sean's service, those who could read the surf or checked it a lot or were lucky – they got uncrowded waves. Now, everyone is on it. ... I'd rather give up (Collins' forecasts) and have the surf be a little less crowded.

"For the person that surfs, the last thing you want is more surfers. The only people who want more surfers are people with something to sell. In that regard, I have to dance the same dance as Sean."

Pezman, like many others, says that somebody was bound to come up with a good forecasting service – and that Collins is admirably discreet, mentioning only well-known breaks on his Web site while giving enough swell information for the cognoscenti to figure out the rest. Collins is highly sensitive to perennial criticism that he is ruining spots by contributing to crowds. In the course of four hours of interviews, he offered several unsolicited justifications, including this one: "People talk about how (Surfline) increases the crowd, but we also give people the information to go elsewhere. We disperse the crowd."

But those who know him well suspect an inner conflict.

"I'm sure he's been torn asunder many times by the fact that his prowess as a forecaster jeopardizes his surfing solace," said Larry "Flame" Moore, longtime photo editor of Surfing magazine.

THE MONSTERS OF CORTES

Cortes Bank is an underwater mountain 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. Because it comes within three feet of the water's surface, a wave breaks there – a bathymetric oddity that creates some of the largest waves in the world.

Moore had been studying the spot for 10 years, dreaming of seeing the giants ridden. Early on, he shared his vision with Collins, who worked with him to figure out precisely what kind of swell it needed. Finally, on Jan. 19, 2001, four surfers rode a boat through the cold winter night.

"I had no idea what we were getting into," recalls Gerlach, who was part of the trip. "I just knew it was giant and it was going to be scary."

By the still, cloudless dawn, they were motoring within view of the mountainous, inky waves rising out of the flat ocean to the size of six-story buildings and then hurtling forward with a force that could level a city block – just as the tsunamis did recently in the Indian Ocean.

Soon enough, the two teams were in the water, two guys on personal watercraft towing two wetsuit-clad board riders into position. The ocean was glassy and lake-like between sets, making it hard to tell where the wave would break. Not a spot of land in sight.

Then bumps would appear on the horizon, rolling silently, steadily toward the surfers. As the bottom of a wave began to feel the subsurface island, the water would lift toward the sky. Then it hit the abrupt shallows called Bishop's Rock and, in a fraction of a second, hideously doubled in size, blocking the sun and casting a huge shadow over the ocean.

Into one of the first of these rising monsters, Mike "Snips" Parsons was slung by the Gerlach- driven watercraft. Parsons let go of the tow rope and began racing down toward the deepening trough of the wave. The lip pitched from high above, like some vicious mythological creature. The silence of the open ocean was broken by the eruption of the wave crashing, a noise likehalf a dozen screaming freight trains. Parsons raced as the breaking lip nipped at his heels. From the boat, he appeared as little more than a fleck against the vast roaring canvas of the wave.

On a video of the event, you can hear those on the boat screaming, almost with dread – and then with celebration – as Parsons pulls over the wave's shoulder. The beast was calculated to have been 66 feet tall, at the time the largest documented wave ever ridden.

Everyone involved in the historic endeavor was on hand. Everyone but Collins.

"There were places here I wanted to surf," said Collins, who wasn't prepared to tackle Cortes at that size. He climbed onto a personal watercraft and rode with two friends to a spot at an oil island off Seal Beach. He'd been keeping his eye on the break but never surfed it, waiting for the perfect conditions. It was a tower ing 20 feet – bigger than most surfers would dare, but within Collins' skill set. The three had the break to themselves.

THE SURFING LIFE

By the time of Cortes Bank's debut, business was looking good for Collins. After years of bartending and freelance photography, he had launched Surfline as a phone service in 1985, in part to better provide for the family he was starting. In 1992, he added a subscription fax service and in 1995 went online – despite the fact that he had a hard time figuring out how to make money off the Web site.

"Those were tough years," he recalled. "Sometimes I was using savings to meet payroll."

In February 2000, Collins sold the company and got $3.25 million up front. Then came the dot-com crash, and Collins got back a 38 percent stake in exchange for additional money owed him from the sale. He is now the president of the company, which is well in the black with more than a million individual users monthly.

That means Collins can surf whenever he wants. He can afford to fly off at a moment's notice. It's also allowed him to build an oceanview home in Seal Beach.

As they were 30 years ago – when the federales would root through his truck – surfing, forecasting and exploring remain major passions. But also firmly on the radar are his two sons.

"They both surf better than me," he says, half bragging and half complaining. The younger, 14-year-old A.J., is sponsored by Quiksilver surfwear.

"It used to be that in big waves, I'd worry about saving them," he said. "Now I think, 'Well, I've got somebody to save me.' "

The three had long planned a Christmas break to Tahiti, regardless of wave forecasts.

"My No. 1 priority now is surfing with my kids."

When a couple of big swells began to develop the week before their scheduled departure last month, Collins moved the flight up three days – and they caught the best waves of the trip during those days, with just a handful of others in the water. Otherwise, the surf forecaster watched the waves the old-fashioned way.

"You can tell a lot just by looking at the ocean, like I used to do on my roof in Seal Beach," he said. "It was nice to do it without all the technology.

"We got some incredibly good sessions. It's great taking off on a big wave and having my kids see me and hoot at me. It's reassuring that I can still surf. And it's also gratifying to see them learning so quickly, just getting better and better."

To see video clips of Sean Collins surfing and of Mike Parsons' historic Cortes Bank wave, go to ocregister.com


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