This was my third year missing out on booking a room directly at the Golden Sails Hotel. It takes a while for me to get my calendar in order. The previous two years I had gone for whatever cheap motel I could find on Hwy 1. I gotta say though, it's a pretty boring area. Trust me, I walked like 3 miles from my motel to the Golden Sails one year. So this time I thought I'd nestle myself a little more into Long Beach, and stayed at the Beach Inn, which was within walking distance of the Beach and the Queen Mary. It was about 4 miles away from the Golden Sails, still not a huge distance. I could either check out the town or head to the Golden Sails because this year they had breakfast and music from 9:30 to 11am at the pool.

There are a lot of surf festivals. I try to pay attention, but it’s hard to keep track. But the biggest most significant of them in the US is the Surfguitar101 Festival. Even if it weren’t a big ol’ 3-day event with multiple groups from all around the globe, it’s at the epicenter of surf music in Southern California. Put on by Jeff “BigTikiDude” Hanson, Art Bourasseau, and (as Jeff put it) a lot of cool friends, it’s not only a fantastic opportunity to see the best surf bands in the world, but it’s a chance to meet and greet with other surf nerds.

It's hard to beat surf music in Southern California. Surfguitar101 was ostensibly a meetup for online forum members with a nice lineup of 10 bands, Today it stands as the premiere surf event of the US and possibly the world, with a globe-spanning lineup of over twenty bands, and I believe Saturday night was the biggest I'd ever seen it. Organizer Jeff "BigTikiDude" Hanson, modest pool cleaner by day, has been slowly tweaking the event and his support team to grow the event organically into something uncompromisingly accessible and genuine.

SurfGuitar101 is back and, to embrace cliche, bigger than ever. This year organizer Jeff "BigTikiDude" Hanson partnered with a few other organizers, dropped the moniker of Convention, and moved to the 3-day weekender model, held at the Golden Sails hotel, where I failed to get a room before it filled up.

For those that got into surf somewhere after the 80’s and before bandcamp, compilations were key for exposure to more surf groups. That’s slowed down significantly, with only a handful of notable ones in the past few years (off the top of my head Brave New Surf and Monsters of Surf). Reverb Nation serves a dual purpose of commemorating a great lineup at the Surfguitar 101 convention (the tracks are mostly in the same sequence of the performances) and as a surf compilation.

First time it’s a new thing, second time it’s getting official, third time it’s a ritual.

Center of the Surf is a live recording of surf giants The Madeira playing at the 2017 Surfguitar101 Convention in Torrance, CA: essentially the center of US surf music fandom and surf music history. Present in the audience was Mark Linett, a 3-time grammy winning producer and engineer capturing it all.

This will be my second year at the biggest US surf event: the Surfguitar 101 Convention in Torrance, CA.