The Surfer's Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick

Born in 1953, raised in Hawaii, Keone Downing started surfing at age five at Waikiki. He's won many surf contests, but his crowning achievement, undoubtedly, is winning the 1990 Eddie, on a board shaped by his father, the late George Downing, one of the founders of modern surfing, a big-wave pioneer, a design innovator, and a Waikiki beach boy.
Keone inherited his father's waterman ethos. A devoted outrigger canoe paddler, he and his team won five Molokai to Oahu races in the 1980s, and Keone was the 1988 World Canoe Surfing Champion.
Today, Keone and his sister, Kaiulu, run Downing Hawaii, the shop their father launched in 1968. Keone shapes, surfs, fathers, grandfathers. He's attuned to the ocean and conscious of surfing's roots, history, and spiritual leanings in a way that's palpable.
In this episode of Soundings, Keone talks with Jamie Brisick about his father, the birth of modern surfboard design and the influence of wartime innovations in aerodynamics, the values of teamwork, and surfing Waimea Bay.
Presented by Rainbow® Sandals

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett
Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin)
Become a TSJ member at surfersjournal.com

Born in Florida and raised in Puerto Rico, Dylan Graves is widely known as the creator and host of Weird Waves, a web series in which he chases all manner of freak waves, among them the Severn Bore in England, the Eisbach River in Germany, and the Bono Seven Ghosts in Indonesia, where he got a five-minute ride and did something like 46 turns.
It wasn't always like this. Graves started out doing contests and dreaming of a more conventional kind of pro surfing. But he followed his bliss and took his career into his own hands.
A couple years back, Graves launched his own YouTube channel. His episodes are personal, diaristic, offering a strong sense of who Graves is and from where he came via traveling to locales and waves that most surfers would bypass altogether. Graves does the writing and the editing. The episodes are along the lines of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, but instead of pork dumplings and pastrami sandwiches, we get waves kicked up by ship wakes and calving icebergs.
Travel is at the heart. And traveling brought Graves to the Gold Coast of Australia, where he now lives with his wife and their son.
In this episode of Soundings, Graves sits down with host Jamie Brisick to talk about the joys of being an outsider, chasing rarity in the water, grief, the editing process, and preparing for the unknown.
Presented by Rainbow® Sandals 

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett
Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin)

Become a TSJ member at surfersjournal.com

Born in 1950, raised on the west side of LA, Craig R. Stecyk III is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans film, fine art, commercial design, writing, and photography. 
He's widely known for the "Dogtown Chronicles," which featured in Skateboarder magazine in the 1970s. In fact, Stecyk co-founded Zephyr, which spawned the hugely influential Z-Boys. During that time, in addition to documenting the scene through his writing and photography, he applied his singular graphic design sensibility to create the Rat Bones and the Dogtown Cross. Later, he co-wrote the award-winning 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys with Stacy Peralta, which further chronicled the Dog Town scene and its characters.
Since the 1970s Stecyk's written many pieces about surfing, most notably "The Curse of the Chumash," which appeared in Surfer in 1976. Focused on Malibu, it blended local history, surf-skate mythology, and a heap of counterculture irony. His art installations include Road Rash, in which he scraped up roadkill, bronzed it, and returned it to the exact spot where he'd found it. In 1989 he made Papa Moana, featuring Hawaiian objects and artifacts. He helped curate Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing, a 2002 exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. He's written essays for several surf-related books, among them 1936-1942: San Onofre to Point Dume. A surfboard shaped and painted by Stecyk resides in the permanent archive of the Smithsonian.
As filmmaker and artist Thomas Campbell puts it, "Craig's our patron saint of outsiderness, of being creative without bounds. His influence is so omnipresent you don't even see it."
In this episode of Soundings, Stecyk sits down with host Jamie Brisick to talk about growing up in coastal Los Angeles, the Dogtown era, the strange artifacts that find their way into an artist's life, the challenge of making something that withstands time, and getting checked out of school by Miki Dora to go surf. 
Presented by Rainbow® Sandals

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett
Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin)
Become a TSJ member at surfersjournal.com

Dion Agius burst on to surfing's global stage with a spectacular Gorkin Flip in the 2009 surf flick Secret Machine. He fell in with filmmakers Joe G, Taylor Steele, and Kai Neville, appearing in a slew of films, among them Castles in the Sky, Stranger Than Fiction, Modern Collective, Lost Atlas, Dear Suburbia, Cluster, Year Zero, and Strange Rumblings in Shangri-La. Agius' parts punch—he surfs with a powderkeg intensity. Every hack, every blowtail, every fanging air is done as if his life depends upon it.
A man of style in and out of the water, Dion co-founded Epokhe Eyewear, The Octopus is Real, Standard Procedure. He's the creative director at Ritual Vision. He's collaborated on shoe and clothing collections with Globe and Former, and surfboard models with Hayden Cox.
In 2024, while nursing a broken leg, he created NOID, an art project in which he upcycles old, broken surfboards into sculptures, side tables, lamps, mirrors, and more. Dion currently lives on the southeast coast of Australia.
In this episode of Soundings, Agius sits down with host Jamie Brisick to talk about his favorite surf movies, moving from rural Tasmania to the Gold Coast of Australia as a kid, traveling the globe, his surf heroes, and shaping old foam into artwork.
Presented by Rainbow® Sandals

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett
Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin)
Become a TSJ member at surfersjournal.com

Jack Johnson is a multi-platinum-selling singer-songwriter, surfer, and environmentalist.
Before turning to playing music professionally, Johnson had designs on a career as a pro surfer. Having grown up on the North Shore of Oahu, and, in particular, having made his way toward the center of the peak at Pipe, he was well on his way by his early twenties. However, he headbutted the reef out there, got more than 100 stitches in his forehead, and lost teeth. 
Johnson subsequently went to UCSB to study film. He and his friend Chris Malloy cooked up the idea for what would become the seminal surf flick Thicker Than Water. A couple years later, they followed up with The September Sessions.
Johnson had been playing guitar and writing songs since childhood, and on one of the trips for his movies, he wrote a song called "Rodeo Clowns," which related to a trick his buddy Kelly Slater was working on. Johnson recorded the song with his friend G. Love of G. Love & Special Sauce. "Rodeo Clowns" became a hit.
His music career took off. One day he was a shy kid playing to a small crowd at the Belly Up in Solana Beach. The next he was on every radio station. Nine records, many hits, and a laundry list of awards followed.
In 2008, he and his wife, Kim, created the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation, a non-profit public charity supporting environmental, art, and music education worldwide. They have three kids and live on the North Shore. Johnson still surfs regularly. In fact, his life is not terribly dissimilar to the one he knew growing up—though he's now a household name, sells out major venues, and sometimes hears his own music playing in the supermarket.
In this episode of Soundings, Johnson sits down with host Jamie Brisick to talk about growing up in Hawaii, his early dreams of pro surfing, the art of the soundtrack, connecting with nature, the making of Thicker Than Water and The September Sessions, penning lyrics, and the accident that changed the course of his life.
Presented by Rainbow® Sandals

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett
Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin)
Become a TSJ member at surfersjournal.com