I took off from home about noon yesterday, on my way north on Hwy One to Pt. Arena to hang out with with my pal Louie in Pt. Arena and environs.

I’m in midst of publishing 64-pg. book, “Driftwood Shacks,” and about halfway up the coast, spotted a nicely symmetrical tipi-shaped beach shack from a cliff. Whoa! Totally timely. I climbed down the cliff and discovered a strung-out village of maybe 15 beach shacks over a mile and a half, perfect day after rains, good surf, jogging along beach, gulls, turkey buzzards soaring, beach vibes rich in chi.

I think my book just grew another dozen pages. Will be out before year’s end. Digital printing by Ingram’s Lightning Source. Color, 8 by 8”, probably $20. This is a shot of my computer screen this morning.

Photo by Dave McGuire: Martinis at Jack O’Neill’s cliffside home in Santa Cruz in 2013. L-R, Betty Van Dyke, Richard Novak, Jack, Lloyd

I graduated from high school in San Francisco in 1952. I had to make up some grades in order to get admitted to Stanford, so I took some morning classes at a private high school and worked as an office boy at an insurance company in the afternoons. Each day I had a couple of hours off, so I started going to the beach.

Kelly’s Cove is the beach right next to the Cliff House at Ocean Beach, and I met a bunch of guys who were starting to bodysurf there. Cliff Kamaka, a Hawaiian who was a lifeguard at the nearby Fleishacker Pool* had taught the boys the art of bodysurfing. Charley Grimm, Rod Lundquist, John Stonum, Jim Fisher, Bill Hickey — and Jack O’Neill — were some of the gang.

The water averaged in the low ’50s, so you had to really be motivated to endure the cold. They’d build a big fire on the beach to warm up after getting out of the water, and had constructed driftwood windbreaks that you could get inside to lay in the sun.

Jack was working for a company that sold firefighting equipment. He and his wife Marge and their 6 kids lived in an apartment on Sloat Blvd., across from the zoo, a few blocks from the beach. His first attempt at staying warm was a “dry suit,” as used by divers. It was thin rubber. Jack bought one He showed it to me and he was wearing long woolen underwear underneath it. Where it might have worked for diving in calm water, it didn’t work at all in the turbulent ocean. Water would come in at the sleeves, legs, and neck.

Jack didn’t invent the wetsuit. According to Wikipedia, “Hugh Bradner, a University of California, Berkeley physicist invented the modern wetsuit in 1952…” The US Navy then developed wetsuits for their divers and the first ones were being sold in stores. The wetsuit was neoprene and allowed the water to get next to your body, but kept it warm. Before they started lining them with nylon (maybe Jack’s invention), they were difficult to get on, so we had to coat our skin with corn starch so they would slide on.

I may be the only person in the world who knows this, but one day Jack went to Roos Brothers, the big department store on Market at Powell in San Francisco, and bought a wetsuit in their sporting goods department. He took it home, took the measurements off it, and returned it the next day. Voilá, he had the pattern for his first wetsuit. I know this because I stopped by to see him the day he brought it home. Like Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, but perfected it and made it available to millions, so it was with Jack and wetsuits.

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I had a radio interview to do yesterday, so hit the Cliff House in SF for an Irish Coffee and popovers to start the day, then got rolling on Hwy One, making the coastal SF/SC journey for maybe the 300th time. By the time I got through Half Moon Bay and it was just brussels sprouts, strawberries and arroyos leading down to beaches, I was sailing, getting that exhilaration that comes from moving smoothly through space.

Got into SC, took right on Swift Street, past Haut’s shop, then to Steamer Lane, which was breaking and surprisingly uncrowded. I SO love Santa Cruz, having lived here on and off in the ’50s. The water’s warmer, the waves better, it’s more tranquillo, like it’s 15% LA (Santa Barbara is 70% LA). Like San Francisco, it’s overcrowded and expensive, but its carefree and playful, with soul intact.

When I discoverd surfing at age 18, I rearranged my classes at Stanford so I had no classes on Friday. I took off at noon every Thursday (either on my Harley 45 or hitchhiking) and spent 3-1/2 days of the week in SC. 4 of us rented a cabin on Ocean Ave. for $20 a month.

I can hardly believe it now, but we surfed without wet suits. So stoked were we. SO cold.

There were maybe 20 surfers in town and for some reason they accepted me, didn’t treat me like I was a college jerk. SC then had a population of 25,000 in winter and 75,000 in summer.

Right now am in v. cool new barista shop, Cat and Cloud, on Portola Ave., soon to head back up the coast for a meeting in our office this afternoon, where we’ll be strategizing tour/marketing/blah blah for the new book.

Ike and Tina Turner, Shake a Tail Feather Baby playing right now. What an incredible band! Their CD “Proud Mary”is a great chronological record of this phenomenal band.

Boy am I havin fun! It’s been a perfect week down here. In the water at 7:30 this morning, a shower and now latte and raisin roll and good wi-fi. I wish I had more time to do stuff like this. Idea! I’ll make a little short-run book of the trip. Where’s my clone, anyway?

It’s so easy down here now, and it was so hard 20-30 years ago. My great little Baja bug was under water twice, I had a sketchy relationship with the cunning landlord of the palapa I rented (for $1,000 a year), the place was destroyed in a hurricane of Nov 4 cuatro de Noviembre in the ’90s, and on…

Now there’s a smoothly paved road 12 mi. out to Shipwrecks. Funny, there don’t seem to be many people around at all. Part of that being wealthy people buying (or building) trophy houses that they rarely visit. Summer’s the south-swell surfing season down here and Nov-Dec-Jan are prime times for people fleeing cold climes, but March seems perfect, it’s really comfortable, cool at night and April winds haven’t started. Surprisingly, I found nno mention of the surf online. There’s nothing like checking out the surf in person.

 I still love San José del Cabo. Wandering around the quiet streets. Last night at dusk, Chilón and I walked down to the palm grove by the San José river; it was—the perfect Spanish word—tranquillo. Tortillas de nopales in a little roadside shack, with la cocinera patting out fresh tortillas…

My Instagram on the web this morning came out like a poster for the past few days:

https://www.instagram.com/lloyd.kahn/?hl=es