Kook Out

Mollusk Surf Shop's next art show will be Dec. 7th for Thomas Campbell's show "kook out," with music by the Mattson 2.
7-10pm. Stoked!

Northern Baja Travel Advisory

Recently, the news in San Diego has included reports of surfers from the U.S. being robbed and/or assaulted while on a trip to Baja California. As occasional Baja surfers ourselves, we are alarmed to hear such reports. Until authorities get a handle on the situation, we urge anyone planning or considering a trip to Baja, to be aware of these recent events, be careful and be safe. Click here and click here for some of the stories reporting the recent troubles in Baja.

Minds In The Water

Dave Rastovich, renowned professional free surfer and star of “Blue Horizon” and “Life Like Liquid”, has joined the global groundswell to end commercial whale and dolphin kills once and for all. Using the power of media and the Internet, Rastovich has launched “Minds In The Water”, a grassroots activist campaign aimed at bringing worldwide public scrutiny to bear on the few remaining whaling nations that continue to hunt whales and dolphins for profit.



Rastovich unveiled the Minds In The Water “Visual Petition”, an interactive website where anybody can upload a photo of themselves holding a whale or dolphin portrait as a powerful and highly personal statement of support for marine mammal welfare. These petitions, hopefully thousands of them, will be presented to the officers of the International Whaling Commission this Spring as irrefutable proof that the vast majority of people on this planet will no longer condone the commercial slaughter of these highly evolved sea dwellers.

“I feel like the surfing community has a deep bond with whales and dolphins,” says Rastovich. “We are inter-species kin united by surfing and by the warm blood in our bodies and that we love to be in the ocean. I think you have a natural feeling to appreciate and protect your family members if they’re being threatened or harmed or disrespected.

Minds In The Water Visual Petition

As you can see above, the Minds In The Water Visual Petition is an easy but extremely effective way to make your voice, and face, count on the issue. Supporters need only log onto the website, download a dolphin photo of their choice, print it out, take a picture holding the photo and then upload to join the thousands demanding an end to the slaughter.

Rasta encourages anyone, surfer or not, to visit the site to get the facts and sign on for the challenge. At stake, he says, is our future.

“If these ‘drives’ go unchallenged we will all be responsible for the extinction of yet another species of dolphin or whale due to the relentless pursuit of money,” says Rastovich. “A world without dolphins is too sad a notion to consider. As ocean people it’s up to us to do something. The time is now…full stop.”

The Taiji Issue

Of particular concern to surfers and other cetacean lovers the world over is the ongoing commercial dolphin slaughter and captivity trade in Taiji, Japan. Each year local fishermen herd large pods of dolphins into small bays where they are brutally slaughtered to be sold as “whale meat” in Japanese supermarkets or in school lunch programs, despite the fact that dolphin flesh is shown to be highly contaminated with mercury and other toxic chemicals. An estimated 20,000 dolphins and small whales are killed annually by dolphin “drives” and other methods. To view video of the dolphin drives visit: http://www.seashepherd.org/taiji/taiji_video.html

Rasta’s Mission

Throughout 2007 “Rasta” has traveled the world from his home in Australia to Alaska, to California to Tonga and the far-flung Galapagos, enlisted such surfing notables as Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning and Andy Irons, along with music and film celebrities such as Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, Esai Morales and Hayden Panettiere. Thus far Rasta has met with a tsunami of support including arguably the biggest names in surfing.

"It's unthinkable to me that anyone would want to kill whales or dolphins,” says Kelly Slater, 8-time world surfing champion. “It brings out that instinct to protect. It also creates an energy of what you give is what you receive and getting involved with something like this is a way for me to become more aware of what effect I have on this world."

See here Dave Rastovich speak at Xavier Rudd's Byron Bay Concert on Saturday 3rd November...



If you can help, please do... We all can make the difference!

Time Out

Thought it was time to display a Patagonia field report by the very talented Elissa Pfost..

"You gotta be kidding, right? I thought that was your dog. This from a silver-haired, dawn crew regular as he paddles up next to me. I don’t know what to say, so I shrug my shoulders, cock my head and turn my hands palms up, body language for “I’m as mystified as you.”

I’m astride an old-school single fin and there’s a sea otter chillin’ between my knees. He’s stretched out lengthwise on his back with his head propped against my thigh, diligently grooming his high-maintenance coat. And he’s been there for 10 minutes. From the outside, I am the embodiment of calm: hands still on my knees, head tilted down in humbled awe, spine straight. I could be meditating. On the inside, I’m churning, all at once thrilled, excited, scared, and at the same time trying to lodge every detail of this encounter into permanent memory.

About seven guys have gathered a respectful distance away, bobbing in the pink slick of this dawn magic, all twittering like birds about the giant furball who’s taken up residence on my board. “So, is this a regular thing with you and this otter?” asks one guy. “I think he likes you ‘cause you’re a girl,” says another. “He looks like he weighs more than you do,” says a third. “It’s definitely a boy,” says someone else.

Otters are not unusual here, but this is definitely not a regular thing. I had just returned to the lineup after catching my first wave of the session when this otter back-paddled by. I said “hey buddy,” and watched in total disbelief as he changed course, swam to the nose of my board, did a little pull-up maneuver, and inch-wormed down the stringer to where I sat. Balancing on his back end, he sniffed my face with his white whiskered one before settling into relax mode on deck.

Under the weight of two, my board sat a little low in the water. A strand of kelp drifted across the deck in the current, and the otter, flipping frontside, began to pat at the moving frond with his perfectly round forepaws. “I think he wants to play,” someone said. I eased into the water, snapped the algae’s shaft to better make use of the “toy,” and wriggled it up and down the centerline of the board. The otter chased it like a cat for a few laps before sliding into the water next to me. His little beady black eyes met my wide-open brown ones for a moment, then he was gone.

Everyone erupted into chatter. We all had these huge grins on our faces, like we’d just caught the wave of the day – only everyone seemed to have forgotten about surfing. I felt ready to burst, I was so high. But what hit me the most was the transformation. In a town with one of the nastiest in-water vibes anywhere, no one could be too cool. For a few minutes, an infectious joy touched everyone. I’m hoping we never forgot it."



(Elissa Pfost is currently honing her disappearing act. “It’s a good skill to have whether I’m spying on critters in the wilderness or avoiding getting mugged in New York.” She writes and makes art from her current home-base of Santa Cruz, California, where “the natural beauty of the place and an abundance of great people keep me humbled and in awe, every single day.”)

Your Today Is Their Tomorrow

The new installation a New Image Art Gallery. Ooening November 17th (7-10 PM), a new exhibition titled "Your Today is Their Tommorow" which is showcasing Alex Kopps & The Gothic Dolphins while also featuring "Voyage of the R'ship" by Alexis Amann. Going to be amazing! Go check it out.



New Image Art Gallery
7908 Santa Monica Blvd. , West Hollywood, CA 90046

Help Needed!

The official clean-up from the Bay Area oil spill has finally begun at Ocean Beach. Here are a few links for information on how to help out:

zunasurf.com/oilspill/
zunasurf.wordpress.com/
sfoilspill.blogspot.com/

Toxic Soup

A Patagonia Environmental Essay from John Dutton--



"As a kid I surfed almost every day – rain or shine, surf or no surf. I progressed from mat surfing (there were no boogie boards back then) to body surfing and ultimately board surfing. Just being in the ocean was a joy: I mat surfed beachbreaks on summer south swells, tucked into Black’s barrels with only fins and a wetsuit, and surfed Pleasure Point at speeds that made the surfboard’s fin hum.

Forty years later I surf much less, but not because I’m more discriminating or jaded. No, it’s a matter of knowing too much in an increasingly polluted world. Where I used to surf 12 months a year, rain or shine, today I make the most of the fall days with glassy head-high surf. When the rains come in January, my surfing stops until the rains stop. We’ve all seen the water-quality reports and the off-the-charts fecal coliform counts and known friends who got a stomach or sinus bug when they surfed too soon after a storm.

But if you think it’s bad in the lineup for you, consider the animals. You might suffer a sore throat and a stuffed-up nose or a case of the runs after surfing your home break, but it’s far worse for the organisms that live there 24/7.

Surfers on the central California coast might not notice it, but sea otters are taking a hit. After a high in 1995, the otter population dipped 10 percent to a low in 2002 and then slowly rebounded. But of the otters washed up dead on the beach, a higher percentage are dying from disease rather than other causes. In a 2002 study conducted by a team at UC Davis, researchers think they found the main culprit: the Toxoplasma gondii that plagues cats. “We think that the eggs from the parasites in cat waste may get transported to the ocean from fields and yards by surface runoff after storms ...” concludes Melissa Miller, the study’s lead author. The parasite kills otters by causing brain infections that result in seizures and paralysis and interferes with the otters’ feeding – a far cry from an ear infection, a common cold or the runs.

In Kaneohe Bay, O`ahu, where turtles and surfers coexist in polluted waters, the green turtles have been developing fibropapillomatosis (FP). FP is a disease that riddles turtles with multiple fibrous tumors, both internally and externally. What is unusual about FP is that it is the first recorded pandemic in a species other than humans. The disease is associated with human viruses, heavily polluted coastal waters, agricultural runoff, biotoxin-producing algae and areas of high human density. It was first reported in the late ‘30s in Florida but now has reached epidemic proportions around the world. Like sea otters, sea turtles are already at risk of going extinct. FP is also reported in loggerhead, olive ridley, Kemp’s ridley and flatback turtles. If left untreated (read surgically removed), the tumors result in death by hindering the turtle’s ability to see, swim and feed. Once the tumors become internal, there is no treatment.

Surfers on the Outer Banks know all about the danger in the estuaries of North Carolina. Pfiesteria piscicida, a dinoflagellate, is killing fish and causing more than sore throats and colds in humans. It can rapidly change itself, acting like a mild-mannered dinoflagellate feeding on algae and other tiny organisms one moment, and then transforming into an “ambush predator” when a school of fish swims by. It gives chase, stuns the fish with a neurotoxin, and secretes a compound that causes hemorrhaging lesions to form on the skin. It then turns into a carnivore and starts devouring the fish’s deeper tissues. P. piscicida was responsible for the massive fish kills in the 1990s in North Carolina and Maryland estuaries. The dinoflagellate has been linked to untreated sewage from hog farms. And this is where it gets personal for surfers: P. piscicida has been implicated in lesions, respiratory distress and neurological symptoms (like memory loss) in humans.

The outbreaks in North Carolina are just the tip of the iceberg in “an apparent global epidemic of novel phytoplankton blooms,” according to Theodore Smayda, a leading expert on the subject. Most of these algal blooms – called red tides – are naturally occurring, but humans are exacerbating the rate and severity of the blooms. Nutrient enrichment from pollution and agricultural runoff, changes in sea temperature from global warming, and the transport of invasive algae in the ballast water of ships all contribute to the problem.

No one knows this better than Southern California surfers who witnessed a summer of epic red tides in 2005. They have also seen the dead and rotting, or seizure-ridden and dying, seals and dolphins on the beach caused by domoic acid, a naturally occurring toxin produced by a particular form of red tide that has been intensified by nutrient enrichment. The neurotoxin concentrates up the food chain from baitfish all the way to marine mammals and seabirds. Once the neurotoxin reaches high-enough concentrations, it ultimately results in death.

I might surf less these days because I know more than when I was a kid, but I also know what to do about the problem. Although it might seem too big to tackle, the solutions are there; all it takes is the right choices in our day-to-day lives. Buy organic food and fibers to help eliminate chemical fertilizers that contribute to nutrient enrichment of coastal waters. Pick up after your pet and don’t let leaves, yard waste, motor oil or cleaners get in the street gutter – everything that goes in the gutters ends up in the ocean. Fight developers who want to fill in wetlands that act as natural water filters. Write your representatives to beef up sewage treatment facilities and strengthen the Clean Water Act. We can clean up our oceans; it’s just a matter of knowledge and action."

Sink and Swim

Some photos from the Sink and Swim art shows in Australia this past week. Featured paintings and drawings by Jeff Canham, Andy Davis and Alex Kopps.

Mandala's Sea Lion

Stumbled on this Mandala fish, with artwork done by the "Nat"-orious S.F. surf artist Nathaniel Russell. So sick, thought I'd share!

Opening Gala

...this weekend! Saturday, November 3rd, is Mollusk Venice's grand opening (well event anyways, they've been open for business for a few months now but eh), and there will be great music, nice people, cool boards, possibly free goodies and an art show, in which some of my favorite artists will be apart of. So sick! Be there or be round!