The reason I feel bad about Dale getting cut from my SURFER Archive column this month is that 10 years ago I did a short profile on him for Outside

which also, for reasons I don't recall, never got published. For that one, I drove up to Dale's place in Valley Ford and spent the afternoon with him. A lovely, earthy, honest, strange man. He was completely obsessed with his streak—yet very much aware of how ridiculous it was. The streak was his lifework and a burden, at the same, and I admired how clearly Webster himself understood this. He was and remains the very best kind of eccentric. The streak continues. Here is the Outside article.

The biggest and best swell of 1975 hit Northern California in early September, and Sonoma County regularfooter Dale Webster charged it for a week straight. “Seven days in a row,” he said recently. “And then I said to myself, ‘Why not just keep going?’”

So he did. For 10,407 straight days, usually riding near his Valley Ford home, Webster went surfing. He surfed through vaporous fog banks, flood-tide currents, hailing winter storms and catatonic summer flat spells. He surfed while his wife was in labor. In 1988, when a kidney stone left him doubled-up in pain, he got his minimum-requirement three waves then crawled up the beach and went straight to the hospital.

Webster, a 55-year-old school custodian with gray-blonde hair and sad eyes, talks about his streak in lofty, even spiritual, terms, describing it as a “mission” or “quest." Then he’ll turn around and admit that the goal all along was to make the cover of 

 magazine. Webster talks also about the cost of the streak; how he’s been unable to travel the world, or even visit landlocked relatives. “It practically brings tears to my eyes, thinking of how obsessive I got with this whole thing,” he says, confessing that he wouldn’t cut the lawn for fear that the mower blades would kick a rock back, hit him in the eye, and take him out of the lineup. He thinks he’s finally ready to get rid of his bizarre collection of streak-related artifacts, including 10 year’s worth of scrapped-off surf wax leavings, which he’s mashed together into a grungy 25-pound petroleum ball—a surf-world oddity without equal.

Webster announced in 2000 that he’d end the streak on February 29, 2004, after completing a full lunar cycle. He kept the date even when it was pointed out that a lunar cycle is 28-and-a-half days, not years. Reporters covered Webster’s final session, and a big party was held that night in his honor. The next day, March 1st, dawned rainy and windy. “My wetsuit was damp,” Webster said that afternoon, “and my butt was black-and-blue from a wipeout the week before. So I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have to surf today? Great!’” He tried to go back to sleep. 

A half-hour later he quietly slipped out of bed, dressed, threw his board on the car and drove by himself to the beach to go surfing. “I don’t know,” he later said in a resigned voice. “It’s just easier to keep surfing than to stop.”

BALLAD OF DALE WEBSTER: PART TWO

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