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Twenty-five years is a long time.
Hell, a fair few of you reading this won’t have been on this good earth that long. But the mag is officially 25 years young this season. When Chris Power started the mag, with Louise and Mike Searle, things were a tad different out there. Sure the basics of boards, fins, leashes, surfer plus wave equals fun applied. Boards you’d recognise, although they’d probably be a bit skinny and rockered for modern tastes, that and the fins were glass-on which was a pain in the derriere for travel. But surfing was basically as it is now, just less air based. Kelly Slater was of course in the ascendant, he had his first title under his belt in ’92 and nailed his second in the year Carve started: 1994, which is absolutely redonkulous when you think about it. How many sportsmen that aren’t golf batters stay at the sharp end of their sports for over a quarter of a century? Lisa Andersen was starting her rewriting of women’s surfing, and surfing, in general, was transitioning from the old school to the new school. Taylor Steele’s classic Momentum came out in ’92, but the beloved Focus hit in 1994. Another epoch-changing time as surf films went from lovingly crafted, shot on 16mm, expensive film projects to punk Hi8 edited at home jobs viewed on VHS. The Momentum generation has shaped surfing ever since. The WSL, then known as the ASP, had just settled on the Dream Tour concept, prioritising the best waves at the right time of year as opposed to crowded, shitty city beaches of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. In short, the mid-90s was a hell of a time. Surfing was on the up, surf magazines were how we got our dose of surf culture, the surf co’s were coining it in, the web was starting as a concept, and social networks were a decade from beginning to exist.