The surf corner

As you head down toward the water, take a second for something this stretch of coast is quietly world-famous for: surfing. You're standing in one of the sport's genuine home grounds.

Start down the coast, where a point called Rincon peels off long, perfect right-handers — surfers call it the "Queen of the Coast," and for a certain kind of wave it's holy ground. That wave helped make Santa Barbara a surf town. And the town made surfers into craftsmen. Back in nineteen fifty-nine, a shaper named Renny Yater opened one of the first surf shops in town, and his boards — the Yater Spoon especially — are still spoken about with reverence.

But the name that traveled furthest started right here, in nineteen sixty-nine, when a shaper named Al Merrick founded Channel Islands Surfboards. From a small Santa Barbara shop, Merrick became maybe the most influential surfboard builder alive. He shaped for Tom Curren — a three-time world champion and a local hero — and then for a whole dynasty of champions after him. When you see the letters "C.I." under a surfer's feet at a contest anywhere on Earth, that's this town. Their flagship shop is still here, a few blocks up this same street.

That's why this corner earns its place, even without a monument: the boards that changed the sport were dreamed up in these cheap Funk Zone workshops, the same cheapness that drew the artists and the wineries. Different craft, same ground.

Keep going to Cabrillo Boulevard, then turn west one block, toward a fountain full of dolphins at the foot of State Street.