Wetass Hall of Fame–Surf’s Up, Again…And Again…And Yet Again: Dale Webster is 55 and very, very tired. Why? Well, how about because a week ago, on Sunday February 29, he completed his 10,407th straight day of surfing. He’s been at it for more than 28 years, and hadn’t missed a day since he started in 1975, and then pledged on Sunday, February 29, 1976 (a Leap Day) to continue to surf every day until Leap Day fell again on a fifth Sunday in February. Maybe he didn’t realize at the time that he was committing himself to almost 3 decades of riding the waves. Maybe he did. Either way, he stuck to it and pulled off one of the most pointless–yet undeniably inspiring–surfing quests in the history of a sport with no shortage of pointless quests. At 10,000 days he went into the Guinness Book of World Records. At 10,407 he retires into the Wetass Hall of Fame. Here’s part of what one Cali paper, the Press Democrat had to say about the feat:

“There were costs– financial, physical and emotional. Webster put off marriage for 10 years while his girlfriend, Kaye, now his wife, recorded the daily surfings for posterity. He took low-paying night jobs so his mornings would be free. He never went on vacation.

He remembers the morning he woke to such excruciating pain that his wife had to drive him to the beach and he crawled on his hands and knees to the edge of the water. After he’d surfed, his wife drove him to the hospital where doctors said he was passing kidney stones.”

I am not making this up, I swear….



Weary Webster: “I was in the water so damn much, I shrunk….”