One of surfing's greatest legends passed away last week. He wasn't known for the typical achieve-ments like so many others our sport has champion-ed. He didn't make his mark discovering some new, unexplored surf break. He didn't ride the biggest waves or perfect some new maneuver. He didn't win a world title. Yet, his influence was felt around the world.
Sean Collins, husband, father and surfer, was the founder and creator of Surfline, a wave forecasting company that was the granddaddy of all future forecasting sites. Collins' passion for surfing led him to pursue the study of waves and swells to better predict when and where the best waves would be.
In its infancy, Surfline was a service designed for the telephone. I vividly remember the old phone charge service that was once considered state-of-the-art wave forecasting. Living outside of Baltimore at the time, I would call in for a recorded wave report and plan my day accordingly. While primitive by today's standards, it was still enough of a heads up for me to manage to make it over to the beach in time for a late morning session.
Over the years, I watched with avid interest as Surfline grew into an Internet based forecasting tool. As Collins shared his knowledge with the world I quickly became a fervent disciple. Even later, when I lived within five miles of the beach, it still was an inestimable advantage to know in advance what the waves were forecast to be like a day or two in the future.
It was especially true for those of us who lived on the East Coast. With swells of much shorter duration than are typically enjoyed in other areas of the world, it is extremely hard to accurately predict exactly when and where our quick moving storms will produce the desired results. As Surfline's expertise increased, many surfers on the East Coast particularly benefited by scoring more surfable swells.
Collins' mostly self-taught skills, while somewhat proprietary, paved the way for many more sources to follow in his footsteps and use much of the technology that he developed. Today, none of us would start a surf trip or plan a major excursion without consulting the long range forecasts. Every major surf contest relies heavily on the swell forecasts, predominately from Surfline.
Last fall's Quiksilver Pro is a stellar example, and perhaps the pinnacle of Collins' forecasting skill. Seemingly against all odds, Collins accurately predicted well over a year in advance a ten-day window, in what was really up to that point an obscure surf break outside New York City, when there would be very good to epic waves for a duration long enough to hold a world class surf contest featuring the top surfers in the world. Most of us thought he was crazy. Quiksilver bet over a million dollars on his knowledge. And his brilliance became evident during the contest with some of the best surf of the whole tour showcased on live feed all over the world.
For us east coasters, it was validation of who and what was being finally proven to the whole surfing world. For the 2011 World Tour, it was the capstone of an exciting year. And for Sean Collins, unbeknownst to us, it was his swan song; his departing gift to the surfing world.
But for many of us, Collins will continue to give for years to come through his technology which he left behind. He has an enduring legacy that will be remembered by many of us every time we plan our next session.
R.I.P. Sean Collins, 1952-2011.
Roy Harrell is available for private or group surf lessons. Call 302 537 6287 or email roywow@aol.com.
Source: http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20120103/DW03/201030325/Surf-legend-s-legacy-will-live-on?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CDelaware%20Wave%7Cs
Sean Collins, Who Used Science to Help Surfers, Dies at 59
By CHRIS DIXON
Published: December 31, 2011
photo by Jason Murray
Sean Collins in 2002 in Huntington Beach, Calif. His business, Surfline, provided up-to-date information on surf conditions
Sean Collins, who created Surfline.com, whose forecasts and real-time views of beaches reach 1.5 million surfers a week, died on Monday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 59.
While playing tennis, he had a heart attack, his business partner, David Gilovich, said.
Before Surfline, dedicated surfers would hang out on the beach for weeks at a time, dropping everything, including work and relationships, when the surf came up. Mr. Collins’s forecasts meant surfers could use their time more efficiently. It allowed them to continue to chase swells through what he termed “the responsible years,” and gave rise to a breed of plugged-in surfers who make their living through high-dollar contests or by chasing monster swells.
“Sean was a renaissance man,” said Bill Sharp, director of the annual Billabong XXL Big Wave Awards and a longtime colleague. “He could see something that was needed long before anyone else. From looking at an isobar line on a weather chart to having a sense of how people would want their information delivered decades down the line. He was surfing’s Leonardo da Vinci.”
Mr. Collins’s forecasting prowess was self-taught. He scrupulously logged daily surf conditions, studied obscure National Weather Service archives and used a short-wave fax machine — stringing antenna wire across Baja cactus plants — to receive weather reports from New Zealand and understand how Antarctic storms could send waves across the Pacific. His predictions astonished friends.
He joined a telephone forecast venture called Surfline in 1984, and two years later began a rival service called Wavetrak. He bought out Surfline in 1990 and five years later started Surfline.com.
Forecasts were refined with the help of Jon Chrostowski, a NASA scientist who hacked into data streams broadcast by weather buoys, and William C. O’Reilly, an oceanographer with the Scripps Institute who modeled the interaction of waves with the sea floor.
Mr. Collins was born on April 8, 1952, in Pasadena, Calif. He sailed the coasts of California and Baja, Mexico, with his father, a Navy lieutenant, and developed into a talented competitive surfer, following waves to Hawaii and financing his surf addiction through magazine photography.
He explored the Mexican outback extensively. “We’d spend months camping out and waiting for swells,” he said in an interview in 2002. “You can’t do that and live a normal kind of mainstream life.”
He is survived by his wife, Daren; two sons, Tyler and A. J.; his mother, Gloria; and his siblings, Whitney Jr., Gloria Burdette and Robert.
The way Mr. Collins’s friends and colleagues relied on his forecasts could be stressful — particularly when he became a go-to forecaster for California lifeguards, Navy Seals, the Coast Guard and major surf competitions.
In 2008, Mr. Collins phoned his friend Mike Parsons to demand that he and five friends abort an attempt on Cortes Bank during one of the worst Pacific storms on record. But Mr. Parsons had already left on an expedition that found waves a hundred feet high.
“Sean worried about us,” Mr. Parsons said. “If you were a loyal friend, there was just an incredibly strong bond. I learned so much about the ocean from him, but he was the authority. Now when we launch a mission, we’ll just sort of never know for sure.”
