The footage was horrific, though it could have been far, far worse. Recently, a surfer in Cabarita, Northern NSW, was viciously flung off his board by a large shark, then lunged at again, before miraculously paddling to shore with body and board unscathed.
It wasn’t surprising that a webcam captured the viral footage. It’s a safe bet to say the researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, including Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, back in 1991 couldn’t have foreseen this near-death experience being broadcast.
The pair had got tired of walking to the “Trojan Room”, one of the main computer labs, only to find the coffee pot empty. They pointed a camera at the pot and wrote custom software, so the image could be displayed on everyone’s screens in the office. The grainy grayscale image, updated at about one frame per second, ran on the internal university mainframe. They were only 128×128 pixels, but it was enough to show if the coffee pot needed refilling and shame co-workers into doing so. It was a highly technical, passive-aggressive move, sure, but it started an optical revolution.
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Two years later, in 1993, when web browsers gained the ability to display images, other researchers connected the coffee pot images to the web, making it the first webcam. It became an unlikely global sensation, and it ran for a full decade before being switched off for good.
“30 years ago, February 1996, Surfline installed our first camera overlooking Huntington Beach,” wrote Surfline CEO Ross Garett in a newsletter on September 29. Founder Sean Collins had installed the very first surf camera at the Huntington Beach Pier, timed around the U.S. Open of Surfing. It wasn’t real video; instead, it used a piece of software called “Snap and Send” paired with a closed-circuit security camera to push a single still frame to the world roughly every five minutes. Crude, maybe, but it was the first surf-world descendant of the Trojan Room cam. A fixed, slow-refresh camera that meant, for the first time, surfers could check the surf away from the ocean.
“For the next couple of decades, our Premium paradigm was clear. All cameras were free so long as you watched a 30-second ad. If you didn’t want to see ads, you bought Premium,” continued Garrett. The network has now expanded to 1,250-plus cameras, but yesterday’s announcement also came with a sting in the tail. “We are done with that: Going forward, anywhere in the world, all live Surfline cameras are exclusively available to Premium members.” Or as one commentator put it, “Surfline just put a price on a surf check.”
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That comment shows just how far webcams have infiltrated surf culture. And how they haven’t always been accepted with open arms, free or not. Controversy has often followed the cams. One of the first high-profile cases was in 2007, when Jimmy Minardi, a 45-year-old East Hampton native and fitness instructor, mounted an $8,500 video camera and pointed it at the ocean east of Georgica Jetties and linked it to the web. The camera was promptly stolen, and East Hampton Village police had a pretty good idea who took it. They first questioned local surfers in search of a suspect.
Since the start, surfers have directly blamed live cams for funnelling crowds to breaks that used to stay relatively secret. If there was ever an inanimate tool that could whip up a strong “locals only” mentality, it was a cam. Even if most of the haters were checking the cams themselves to get eyeballs on the banks and the crowds. Old-timers lamented the loss of the classic IRL surf check, and the 20 minutes talking shit in the car park and the eternal debate whether to go out or not. Some say surfers have lost the ability to trust their instinct and their own eyeballs, and have outsourced those skills to algorithms along with cameras.
Far more recently, in 2022, Swellnet fixed a camera to a private home on the cliffs of Jan Juc overlooking the Bells Beach reserve. Like Surfline, its footage is paywalled, so only subscribers can watch it. That didn’t stop The Surfrider Foundation’s Surf Coast branch from launching a “Remove the Winki Pop surf cam – respect Bells Beach” petition. It had more than 2,500 signatures in two weeks.
Yet, these are only isolated cases, and have proved no bulwark against the march of the machines and webcam proliferation. If you add other surf forecast platforms, plus the many cams run by surf schools, hotels, resorts, lifeguard services, businesses, councils and individuals, there must be tens of thousands of surf webcams all over the planet. Yet most are either subscriber-based or independent and unlinked. Trying to find a free webcam without multiple searches, an army of pop-up ads or dead ends can be frustrating.
Surf-Forecast.com is one forecast site trying to fix that problem. They have recently launched webcams on their site. However, the company doesn’t own any of the cams, but has simply tested and aggregated all the free ones available. It seems a strange coincidence that in the same week that Surfline put all their cams behind a paywall, one of their main competitors decided to launch a free service.
“All the cams on Surf-Forecast were already running before we linked to it,” said their Chief Forecaster Rob Davies. “They belong to the people who run them, so we test all the links, put a cam button right next to the forecast and don’t charge anyone for their use. A new worldwide map shows all the locations of the working cams, which we are adding to all every week.”
Now this resource won’t include rewind facilities, or increasingly AI-powered tricks where you can download your own footage that come with paid services and webcams, but it seems to be one of the best free aggregated cam resources out there.
Whatever the platform, or how you access it, in just over 30 years, the humble cam has gone from some IT nerds keeping tabs on an empty coffee pot to being able to the ability to watch surfers (almost) get eaten in real time. That’s a good thing, right?
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