Destination Stoke

Native Surf Filmmaker Screens Latest Flick

From magazines to movies, surf media has long suffered from time
delay. All too often local lineups and beachside parking lots will
be abuzz with tales of epic swells on foreign shores, heroic
contest results, and horrific wipeouts months before the physical
documentation of these events ever becomes available for widespread
consumption. Such is not the case this week when UCSB graduate and
Santa Barbara resident Josh Pomer unveils his latest surf film,
Destination Point, at the Victoria Hall Theater. Riding a wave of
sold-out Destination Point premieres from San Diego to L.A., Pomer
is coming home this Saturday night with more than an hour of
action-packed, fast-paced surf footage — much of which has been
filmed in the past month alone. Shooting and editing up until the
morning of the first screening, Destination includes 30-foot death
slabs from last week’s Mavericks contest as well as stunning
testimony to the mind-bending perfection that was Santa Barbara
surfing in early ’06. And that is not even the half of it. It has
been two years since Pomer, the mastermind behind The Kill
surf-film series, has made a movie and, judging by the contents of
Destination, it looks like he has been hoarding a serious
stoke-filled stash of celluloid. As he puts it, “There is no real
story line to Destination Point other than that it’s just the best
surfing footage I’ve taken in the past two years, and a lot of it
is from Santa Barbara County.” He’s got Tom Curren, the Godfather
of Style, pulling in deep and often all over the South Coast. He’s
got younger local standouts like Tarik Khashoggi, Josh Bradbury,
and Pete Mussio absolutely ripping waves that most everyone in a
Santa Barbara theater will recognize. As if that weren’t enough,
Pomer has thrown in choice cuts from two particular sessions from
last season that have since become the subject of local lore: a
certain rivermouth that went world-class for about a week and a day
along the Seacliff exit that must be seen to be believed. With that
said, Destination Point isn’t all 805 all the time. There is your
standard-issue dreamtime footage of a No Fear boat trip in
Indonesia, a healthy amount of Pomer’s native Santa Cruz surf
spots, a bevy of Mexican beach-break barrels, and the required surf
porn from the North Shore of Oahu featuring the likes of Kelly
Slater and Bruce Irons. From Rincon to Uluwatu and Santa Clara to
Pipeline, this movie is “all about surfers trying to find the best
waves they can and then capturing the magic of those rare days,”
said Pomer. And in that regard Destination Point is a definite
success. But perhaps the crowning achievement of the film is its
dedication and documentation of Santa Barbara’s very own Bobby
Martinez. The low-profile Westside native is the first local board
rider to qualify for the World Championship Tour of surfing since a
young Tommy Curren did it more than 20 years ago. Set to begin the
tour in Australia later this month, Martinez and his polished
goofy-foot attack take center stage in Destination Point, and the
result is guaranteed to make you scream out loud.