Sean Collins : photo courtesy Surfline

Industry News

CHASING, SHOOTING AND SURFING SEAN COLLINS DOESN’T JUST PREDICT THE WAVES

Surfersvillage Global Surf News, 20 November, 2006 : - -  After a couple of weeks of email exchanges, I finally got Sean Collins, the founder of Surfline.com on the phone. Collins was just getting back from a trip to Australia for the Beachley Classic. There he helped his good friend, Layne Beachley get the best three days out of the week long waiting period for her event.

After the contest, his plan was to head back to California, but while Collins was getting ready to leave, he noticed something that would extend his trip for three more days. “I saw a really big storm off of Antarctica,” Collins said. So he made a couple of calls, and flew into Tahiti and shot some incredible surf. 

RICHARD LIVSEY: Let’s talk about surf photography? I didn’t know you were doing that.
SEAN COLLINS:  When it gets too big for me, I can’t think of anything more I’d rather do than shoot  it.

RL: What size wave is too big for Sean Collins?
SC: My perfect range is getting into overhead to double overhead. Once it starts getting bigger than that. You know, I’m a little bit older and not quite as good of shape that I used to be.

RL: Double overhead, that’s respectable.
SC: I’ll surf bigger. I’ll go up to about 15 foot faces as long as it’s not, dry reef Teahupoo or something.

RL: Speaking of big waves. When you see an epic swell developing, for Hawaii or Tahiti who are the first surfers that you call? 
SC: It depends on the swell, if it’s a big one. I got Laird and Dave Kalama.

RL: The first phone call is to Laird Hamilton?
SC: No. I call all the guys, Laird and Dave Kalama, Shane Dorian, Mike Parsons, Brad Gerlach. 

RL: Out of all the top surfers, which one has impressed you the most recently?
SC: Everybody is on different levels. Like you got big wave surfing. I’d have to go with Dorian.

RL: Me too.
SC: He’s just such a laid back mellow guy. A little guy. And he’s just so fucking gnarly.

RL: That Billabong Monster Tube Award that he got was sick.
SC: Yeah it’s just incredible, but with that being said, on the overall surfing competitive front, Slater.

RL: Definitely. He’s a man on a mission for sure, and speaking of missions. Let’s talk about Surfline?
SC: The core of our business is the same as it always has been, and that’s really reporting and forecasting the surf. That’s what all these millions of people come to the site for primarily. Our goal is for the surfer to understand exactly what it is that we have said, so they can go score good waves. And if they don’t do that, then we have failed.

RL: I know when predicting waves there is a certain level of guesswork, but in all fairness, how accurate is Surfline?
SC: If you set a threshold, that if I miss it by 2 feet of face height or if I miss it by 12 hours and that classifies as a miss. Then if you look at it that way, we’re over 95% accurate.

RL: Give me an example of a situation that could cause a miss?
SC: Say you have a storm off of New Zealand which is about six thousand miles away from Southern California. And you have a storm down there that points right at us for about 48 hours. The difference between 40 knots of wind or 45 knots of wind. Just five knots difference. The end result here in Southern California is about 24 hours in arrival time and four feet in face height.

RL: Besides surfers who uses the information on Surfline?
SC: The Coast Guard here in California and certainly on the east coast. As well as the Weather Service, the Navy, the Navy SEALs use us for their operations. The Army Corps of Engineers uses us. Every lifeguard agency in the country practically uses us. Every surf company planning trips for photo shoots. ASP World tour contests. At some point,  pretty much everybody is touching us from  the surfing public to governmental organizations doing public safety.

RL: Being from New York City, I surf with a tough crowd on Long Island. And I’ve heard my fair share of complaints regarding Surfline, most are off the cuff remarks, but there’s one that I want to ask you about. Does Surfline give more priority to the West Coast and Hawaii when forecasting waves? Some locals believe this to be so, how do you respond to that?
SC: I disagree. One of the things that we don’t do is try to do the forecast for the east coast from our west coast office. We have a total of eight orecasters and we have three of those guys that are on the east coast. One in Florida, one in the North East, and another one in North Carolina, so we have dedicated personnel that we’re paying full-time to make sure that information is as good as we can get it. I am sympathetic to what your Long Island guys are talking about. But on the same token, I think they’ll respect the fact that we also want to be really sensitive and careful to the locals in this situation. We have so much information and data at our fingertips that we could drill down to a spot by spot basis with really detailed surf forecast. For example, we can go Lincoln Blvd. on this swell is going to be all-time Thursday afternoon and Friday. We’ll send a thousand people there. We can do that.

RL: But you won’t do that.
SC: No. Where we draw the line is, we back off a little bit, and say okay this is the swell direction. And these are going to be general high points. At that point, we try to leave enough room for the surfers to make their own choice about where they want to go surf. Because we don’t want to tell
people where to surf .

To learn more about wave forecasting or how to become a premium Surfline member go to surfline.com

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Richard Livsey

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