Ever since Pat Farley stood up on a surfboard at Cowells Beach in 1959, it was the only thing he wanted to do.
“That’s it. Nothing else,” says Farley, grinning, during a recent conversation near the San Lorenzo Rivermouth, his favorite spot in the 1970s. “Nothing else ever interested me. I’m not interested in football or baseball or basketball or tennis. Or anything else!”
Farley’s surfing knowledge landed him a spot in Last Paradise, a New Zealand film about the sport’s evolution since the 1960s. It’s slated to hit Santa Cruz’s shores this fall, says director Clive Neeson. In the meantime, a shortened version will screen at the Banff Mountain Film Festival on Saturday night.
“I love the footage,” Farley says of the film’s sun-tinged shots of surfing and the origins of modern wake boarding. Last Paradise, which will not include Farley’s interviews in Saturday’s night’s briefer Banff edit, also tackles changes in surf society that parallel Farley’s own observations. The movie covers disastrous ecological transformations in coastal Bali, New Zealand and Australia from silent villages and dirt roads into packed tourist destinations. It’s part of a larger, unfortunate evolution Farley witnessed firsthand as surfing gained momentum.
Farley, a Vietnam War veteran, saw tourism take off in Mexico’s Puerto Escondido and coastal Washington. Closer to home, he witnessed an explosion in surfing during the economic boom of the 1990s that crowded 38th Avenue and Pleasure Point and frustrated his friends into water retirement. Elfin Schaeffer, a fellow surfer and advertising manager for O’Neill, corroborates the change, having seen it from both a surfing perspective and a retail one.
Today, Farley serves as Sergeant of Arms for the Santa Cruz Surf Club Preservation Society, which is in a fundraising climb to keep the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum open. (He says he couldn’t be vice president because meetings often conflict with good waves.) And in an attempt to slow the erosion of surfing manners, Farley sometimes “barks” at risky, selfish surfers who cut the others off. “I’ve never heard anything negative about his etiquette in the water,” says Schaeffer of O’Neill. “He wants people to respect the culture and the surf spots.”
The Last Paradise star and avid surfer fears Santa Cruz County’s North Coast is doomed to suffer the over-developed fate that Puerto Escondido did if no one intervenes.
“There needs to be a moratorium: no building between here and Half Moon Bay. Period,” says Farley, his blonde locks blowing in the wind and occasionally straying into the corners of his mouth. “And just leave it. Because if they don’t, we’re never going to see it again.”
Last Paradise screens at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, Saturday Feb. 26, 7pm at the Rio Theatre.
