The Prince of Tides

One night near the end of the disco era, Sean Collins excused himself from three surfer friends drinking Coronas at a Cabo San Lucas hotel and strolled through the night air to his pickup truck. He flipped on a shortwave radio mounted behind the seat and listened intently as it sputtered weather data. He plotted the coordinates of a hurricane spinning 500 miles off the coast, noted its wind speeds and direction, scrutinized a map and returned to the table.

“We’ve gotta get out of here,” he told his buddies, who knew better than to question their friend. “The swell is coming right on schedule.”

The next morning, Collins and his friends turned onto a dirt road leading to the patch of Baja coastline where he had divined the swell and its near-perfect surf would come ashore. As they neared the beach, Collins looked in his rearview mirror and saw dust rising from the desert floor. Then he spotted a surfboard-stacked truck. Collins shook his head. Sure enough, word had gotten out. Master wave forecaster Sean Collins was in town, and he had predicted surf.

Twenty years later, Collins, 45, is regarded by many as the world’s best wave forecaster. He has almost single-handedly led surfing out of the Dark Ages of little more than a decade ago, when great waves washed up with no warning, forcing surfers to cancel meetings, call in sick, ditch school or, worst of all, miss out entirely. In the surfing firmament, where riding the waves is less a sport than a way of life and the quest for the perfect wave a religious Grail, Collins and the Huntington Beach forecasting firm he is a partner in, Surfline/Wavetrak, are held in something close to awe. “Sean,” says Surfer magazine editor Steve Hawk, “has changed the whole mind-set.”

Surfline fields nearly a million calls a year, at $1.50 each, from surfers seeking forecasts for waves from Malibu to Waikiki, Cape Hatteras to Costa Rica. “He’s the authority,” says Bob Rich, 29, an El Segundo surfer who checks Collins’ forecasts before he loads his truck for the beach. “If you know the surf will be good on Thursday you get your errands done Tuesday.” Professional surfers use Collins’ forecasts to accomplish feats once only dreamed of. Two years ago, hopping on and off planes, champion bodyboarder Mike Stewart chased a swell across the Pacific and surfed waves generated by the same storm in Tahiti, Hawaii, California and Alaska. The weeklong odyssey, now legendary among surfers, would havebeen impossible without Collins’ dead-on predictions.

Other wave-forecasting businesses have sprung up since Collins’ debut, but most have disappeared. (One that survived is Surfax, run by Carpinteria surfer Steve Decile, who monitors wind and wave reports and says of Collins: “He’s the big fish.”)

Collins hangs satellite photographs of storms in his office as if they’re old friends and talks about powerful hurricanes as though they’re his children (“You’ve got to follow a storm and nurture it,” he’ll murmur) and is at the moment busier than ever. Lifeguards use his forecasts when deciding how many beach towers to staff. Movie makers hire him as a consultant when shooting surf scenes. Frenzied reporters demand quotes whenever a storm brews off the coast. And then there’s El Nino. Collins sighs at its mere mention, weary of the incessant hype. Yes, he says dutifully, the potential for big waves is high. Yes, the coast could get battered. And, yes, “We’ll definitely have a few scares this winter.”

On a gloomy weekday afternoon offering Southern California surfers only small, mushy waves--a fact that came as no surprise to Collins or callers to Surfline--Collins sits in his oceanfront offices overlooking the Huntington Beach Pier and, the Weather Channel flickering on a nearby television, explains how a surf-fanatic college dropout with no formal meteorological training became the world’s preeminent wave forecaster.

“I was obsessed,” Collins says in the same soft, measured voice that has delivered countless forecasts over telephone lines since the mid-’80s. “Number one with getting good waves, and number two because it was a personal challenge. I was just thinking of myself.”

Growing up in Long Beach, Collins fell in love with the sea while sailing a 40-foot ketch with his father, Whitney, a former Navy navigator who clipped the weather page from the daily paper. Sean liked the big boat, but he preferred his 25-pound Harbour surfboard and the rush he got racing down waves at Seal Beach. Surfing proved an enduring distraction for Collins through high school and two years at Long Beach City College. Then he quit school. “I was more interested in surfing,” he admits.

He began spending some of his abundant free time on the dusty, remote reaches of Baja California and its unspoiled beaches, long a magnet for serious surfers. Time and again he would hit his favorite spots north of Cabo San Lucas only to to find a belligerently calm sea. Where were the waves? When he searched for answers, he found there were no reliable surf forecasts. Standard government marine predictions were far too vague for surfers, especially for California surfers interested in summertime swells rolling in from the Southern Hemisphere.

Collins decided to do his own forecasting. He scoured university libraries for oceanography texts, trooped to government offices to plumb marine studies, and spent untold hours on the roof of his Surfside home studying the sea, noting wave heights, timing intervals between breakers, identifying subtle patterns. Collins’ wife, Daren, recalls her husband’s roof days: “Everybody who drove by would look up and wave at him, knowing that he was doing his thing.”

Collins yanked a weather fax machine out of his father’s sailboat and hauled it along on trips to Baja. Lacking a suitable antenna, he parked his truck next to the tallest cactus he could find, tossed a 100-foot wire over it and waited for satellite images to come rolling out. There, in the middle of the Baja desert, Collins studied the fuzzy numbers and squiggly lines and pieced together his earliest wave predictions.

Like many hard-core surfers, Collins successfully eluded adult commitments, waiting tables and taking freelance photographs to maximize surf time. Daren Collins understood. “Way down deep he has a connection to the ocean that I don’t think many others have,” she says. But in 1983, she gave birth to the couple’s first son, Tyler. “That was the wake-up call,” Collins says firmly. “With a kid, you can’t just keep traveling off to Baja for weeks on end. I had to get a real job.

In 1985, he went to work for Surfline, a toll-call business started by entrepreneur Jerry Arnold and two partners who, like Collins, saw the demand for accurate surf reports and forecasts. It would be Collins’ job to supply the forecasts. While the company set up shop in Huntington Beach and launched an advertising campaign, Collins studied weather charts. A month later, Surfline debuted with Collins’ first recorded forecast: a big swell would roll into Southern California from a storm off New Zealand, bringing excellent 6- to 8-foot waves to south-facing beaches such as Newport and Huntington. It was a bold prophecy. Pacific swells from the Southern Hemisphere are notoriously difficult to predict because weather reporting stations are so widely dispersed and because of the huge distances the swells must cover before reaching California--miscalculate the speed of a swell rolling northeast from New Zealand by 12 mph and your prediction will be off by days. Some surfers scoffed at the forecast. Nervous, even Arnold asked Collins if he was sure. Collins stood by his prediction.

“I’m really confident,” he told his new boss.

A week later, an impressive swell appeared on the horizon. Then head-high waves began rolling into Southern California. In Huntington Beach, wave after wave broke crisply in peaks, then peeled with precision toward the beach. Stoked surfers, their numbers swelled by Collins’ dead-on prediction, paddled into the churning, near-perfect surf. “It was just unbelievable,” Collins recalls, flashing a big grin. “That was the first time anybody had publicly offered advance notice of a Southern Hemisphere swell. People just couldn’t believe it.”

These days, thanks to Collins, surfers not only believe it, they expect it. “It took very little time for people to get used to accurate forecasting,” says Surfer magazine’s Hawk.

Collins says he hears complaints from disappointed surfers each time he misses a swell, which he claims happens about 5% of the time. The key to wave forecasting, he says, is gathering accurate wind and wave data far out at sea--Collins collects his from ship reports, satellites and special weather buoys. Often, the data conflict. “You end up in a dilemma,” he says. “Who to believe?” In the end, he makes his forecasts with a combination of calculation and gut instinct. “When the math stops working,” he says, “it becomes artful.”

It’s an art some surfers would prefer Collins kept to himself. Yes, wave forecasts help surfers plan, but that has resulted in overcrowding at popular spots and more intense competition for waves. What’s more, says veteran San Francisco surfer Mark Renneker, forecasts are rendering obsolete the unique thrill of the wave hunt. Without forecasts and detailed reports, surfers are more likely to wander up the coast searching for waves, he says. In seeking out better surf, important discoveries are made. “You’ll learn something about the place,” Renneker says. “Maybe you’ll get to know the people up there because you didn’t surf but just talked. The whole subculture of surfing depends on that.”

Collins understands the criticism. “Some of the magic is gone,” he says. But given the amount of weather information now available, Collins insists that if he quit offering forecasts today, others would quickly take his place. Also, he says, he makes concessions whenever he can. To help preserve the joy of surf discovery in Baja, for example, Collins never names specific spots in his forecasts but only speaks generally about the peninsula’s northern, central and southern areas. With that information, a map and a chart, he says, any savvy surfer can figure out where to go. “If you’re unwilling to do that,” he says, “then you probably shouldn’t be down there.”

And Collins says he receives far more compliments than complaints. Adult surfers, especially, appreciate his forecasts because they make it possible to juggle surfing with the demands of work and family. And he’s not above tossing a freebie to loyal followers. Jim Kroll, a harbor patrol officer in Morro Bay, uses Collins’ forecasts to guide boaters and plan his own surf trips. During one of their routine coversations, Kroll recalls, Collins asked him: “Jim, what are you doing a week from Wednesday? There’s going to be an all-time Southern Hemisphere swell coming. If you can get the day off from work, pick your favorite spot and be there.”

Kroll scheduled the day off and persuaded a few pessimistic friends to join him. On the appointed morning, the men headed to a spot called Abalone’s and beheld waves with 10-foot faces curling crisply down a point. Kroll and his friends surfed all day. “It was just fantastic,” Kroll says. “It was one of the nicest gifts he could have given me.”

Reminded of the story, Collins smiles. Sometimes, he says, he feels like he’s sending his reports into the void, forecasting waves he knows he’ll never ride. That can be a strange feeling. But he knows that somewhere out there, in Hawaii or Baja or on a remote island in the South Pacific, at least a few surfers who heard his forecasts are racing down some of the best waves of their lives, deepening their own connections to the sea.

“If they score,” Collins says, his face lighting up, “I score.”