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Enduring and highly disciplined switchfoot surfer from San Diego, California; winner of the 1972 United States Surfing Championships; the last top-drawer California surfer to give up longboarding, in 1968, and one of the first to take it back up full-time, in the late '70s. "Dobson's style, so much his own" Drew Kampion noted in 1969, "is one of the most unique and creative in the business, [and] he is one of the best surfers in California."

Dobson was born (1947) in Washington State, spent his early years in National City, California, with his grandparents, then moved with his mother to San Diego's Pacific Beach. He later said that he left home at age 12, two years after he began surfing. 

Influenced in the early '60s by ace switchfooter Butch Van Artsdalen of La Jolla, Dobson, a born goofyfoot, soon became an ambidextrous wave-rider, able to ride nearly as well in a regularfoot stance.

Dobson was something of a surf world curiosity when he notched his first big competition win, in an early 1968 Santa Cruz event. The shortboard revolution at that moment was in full swing, and surfers had taken to the counterculture, with long hair, beads, and bell-bottoms; the strong-jawed Dobson had a crew cut and rode a 9' 6" longboard. "Instead of making a big jump to a small board," he said at the time, "I'm working down slowly. I think it's important to fully understand the difference in speed and finesse that occurs between the long and short board."

Dobson over the next few years was one of California's most dependable competitors, placing highly in the elite AAAA-rated Western Surfing Association events between 1969 and 1972, and winning the 1972 U.S. Championships. The results kept coming. In 1973 he won the U.S. kneeboarding title, and in the 1975 U.S. Championships he placed third in men's division, second in longboarding, and third in kneeboard.

As longboarding began to return to West Coast surf breaks in the late '70s, the perennially fit Dobson came out of semiretirement, perfected the noseride 360 (while hanging-five, he'd spin the board around in a full circle), and proved nearly unbeatable in longboard competition. He placed first in the 1981 Peff Eick/Dewey Weber Invitational Longboard Classic in Manhattan Beach, and six times won the prestigious Oceanside Longboard Contest during the late '80s and early '90s.

Dobson appeared in more than a dozen surf films and videos over the decades, including 

Dobson, Dale

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