Celebrating California

A few years back I was on a flight from Chicago to Portland, Maine. Thirty minutes into the flight, comfortably numb from the valium and two beers I down religiously before I fly, I was sunken into my assigned pleather seat not really watching a rerun of an episode of Friends, when I overheard a conversation between a young man and older woman in the row behind me that caught my attention. They spoke politely though uncomfortably with one another, as airline passengers usually do, but, aside from the novelty of eavesdropping, what struck my interest was the woman’s reaction after the young man told her where he lived.
“So where are you from?” she asked.
“Bakersfield,” the teenager said.
“Where?”
“California.”
“Oh, wow,” she said in her thick Chicago accent. “You must be a surfer.”
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The surfer is to California what the mobster is to New York or what the red neck is to the south – a staple of the regional culture. Surfing is one of the most identifiable parts of California’s cultural identity. It’s in that spirit that SurfShot wants to give California surfers something they can hang their hat on. Beginning in July, SurfShot Magazine will be the first publication since the now defunct Breakout Magazine in the 80s to exclusively cover surfing in the Golden State.
Our little magazine has had quite a busy year and a half, expanding the region we cover from San Diego to Southern California to, now, California as a whole. So you can expect to see a steady influx of content covering Central and Northern California in addition to the Southern California content we currently run. From Northern Baja to north of San Francisco, everything running cover to cover is only a day’s drive away.
Since its conception, SurfShot’s primary focus has always been relevance on a local scale. That hasn’t changed. This magazine’s goal, independent of its scope, is to cover what the California surfing public is talking about each month -- if we’re not touching on that, we haven’t done our job.
In our eyes, this step is long overdue. The east coast has its surf magazine. Hawaii has its surf magazine. Yet, California, the epicenter of the surf industry, is without. The California surfer should have a publication he can call his own – something that celebrates the landscape of his culture and sport. And so we unveil the new SurfShot Magazine, California’s surf magazine, celebrating surfing on the west coast.