The Ironman and the Sea

His solitary journey atop the sea is perhaps best understood in the sand.

On a chilly July morning, at the grasping fingertips of a cold and irritable Pacific Ocean, several sets of footprints head north.

Only one set heads west.

The footprints heading north are of sneakers and sandals, crossing one another in dizzying patterns, skipping toward distant spots of brightly colored laughter.

The footprints heading west are of a webbed foot, marching straight into the surf, toward a pale, lumpy speck bobbing alone in the blackest of water.

The white part is a surfboard. The lumpy part is Dale Webster.

Stoked for the 10,179th consecutive day.

Hanging 27 consecutive years.

*

Endless summer is not just some idea plastered on a movie screen or a piece of cloth sold in a surf shop.

Endless summer lives in a weed-choked cubbyhole on the Northern California coast, longboards hanging from a sagging ceiling, the Sandals spinning on a rickety turntable, a 54-year-old school janitor riding a lifelong wave to nowhere and everywhere.

Endless summer is Dale Webster, leathered and

scarred and admittedly a bit loopy as he nears the end of a quest to surf every day for 28 consecutive years.

His hair dangles off his neck, his cars are beaters, his world is the ‘60s, and his questions come without answers.

“Why am I doing this?” he asks. “By the time it ends, I hope to find out.”

The journey began on Sept. 3, 1975, his only motivation being that he had just purchased a used Ford Falcon for $250 and finally had his own ride to the beach.

“A good enough reason for me,” he said.

He surfed every day for a week, two weeks, a month, and by the beginning of 1976, he figured something special was happening.

“All life forms came from the ocean,” he said. “I felt like I was going back.”

In the beginning, foam philosophies aside, most folk thought he was all wet.

He delayed his marriage for 10 years so his then-fiancee could serve as an impartial witness to his daily rides, each lasting at least three waves.

“The Guinness Book won’t accept the record if the witness is a relative,” he explained.

He refused to take any job that would cause him to miss his morning surf, leading to a string of menial and minimum-wage positions in restaurants, bait shops and motels.

He refused to move any farther inland, so he has lived in his tiny rented home in the one-surfboard town of Valley Ford for three decades, on a lot overgrown with weeds but only seven miles from the sand.

“My in-laws used to think my pursuit was only a quick-thinking, poorly executed plan to avoid visiting them in Utah,” he said.

He initially set a goal of surfing what he believed was a lunar cycle of 28.5 years. Twenty-five years into his mission, though, he learned the lunar cycle was only 18.6 years. He shrugged and decided to finish what he started, his target date being Feb. 29, 2004.

“When I first heard of him, frankly, I thought he was a bit off,” said Steve Barilotti, editor-at-large for Surfer magazine.

But then one day led to another, one incident led to another, sightings became stories became legends.

As the surfing community was cracking and shifting underneath a tidal wave of commercialism, Dale Webster was one surfer who never changed, and people noticed.

“People started believing in him, because they wanted to believe in him,” Barilotti said. “We all wanted to believe in him.”

There were stories of how, when the tiny rural road to the beach was flooded during winter storms, he would paddle his surfboard across the road and hitch a ride from stranded motorists on the other side.

There was the three-day period when he surfed while suffering from kidney stones so painful, his wife Kaye would carry his surfboard to the water and then drag him back to the car.

He has surfed with ice on the sand, amid gales that turned his face blue, and once just beyond the mouth of a hungry white shark.

In the back of his house is a pile of the 24 wet suits he has used during his adventure, all of them faded and torn.

Next to the wet suits is a giant ball of all the surf wax he has used during the pursuit, a souvenir the approximate weight of a small television.

Family and friends have seen him surf before the birth of his child, after the death of his parents, and early on his wedding day. He surfed during wars, gas shortages, national tragedies, the terms of six presidents.

He has spent so much time in the water, and under the sun, that the pupils of his eyes contain small growths and his clogged ears require an operation.

“What I’ve done to myself is just insanity,” he said.

But it’s an insanity that surfers have long embraced, this idea of their sport as something that reaches far beyond the tube.

It is, Webster reminded them, a sport that is explained not within the conventional lines of a scorecard, but the boundless wonders of the mind.

This is, after all, a man whose consecutive games streak is more than those of Cal Ripken Jr., Lou Gehrig, Everett Scott, Steve Garvey, Billy Williams and Stan Musial ... combined.

“There is a crazy wisdom going on here,” said Drew Kampion, renowned surf author.

Finally, this summer, that wisdom has been certified.

Webster will appear for several minutes in the acclaimed surfing documentary, “Step Into Liquid,” opening in area theaters Aug. 8.

And he has, at long last, been knighted by Guinness, his notification arriving last week via e-mail.

Thank you for your claim for the most consecutive days surfing. The researcher has looked at this claim and is recognising it as a Guinness world record.

News of this formal acceptance was followed by a friend’s e-mail congratulations more suited to Dale Webster’s radical world.

That’s absolutely 100 percent full-tilt over the moon bitchin!

*

Surfing’s latest fad awakens every morning in a time warp.

Lining the ceilings and walls around Dale Webster’s bed are three decades’ worth of faded surfboards.

Above his head hang exactly 13 Pendleton plaid shirts.

In one corner of his living room are stacked old surfing magazines. In another corner are piles of surfing videos.

Vinyl records are everywhere, most of them by ‘60s bands singing surfing songs.

His daughter Margo, a high school senior who lives outside his house in a small trailer, comes inside for breakfast and points to the wall.

Amid surfing photos and posters is her certificate for perfect school attendance.

Since kindergarten, she has never missed a day of class.

“Dedication is something that’s always being taught here,” she says with a grin.

Webster logs onto the Internet to check out the local tides.

He used to do this in Los Angeles, back when he was growing up in Alhambra, crediting the weekly surf charts with sparking his interest in the sport.

He actually learned to surf while visiting relatives in the Midwest. He would ride rafts on the giant wakes of barges churning down the Ohio River.

Back home, he began surfing off Orange County coasts, and was hooked.

“The only ‘A’ I ever received in school was for swimming,” he said. “I took one look at the surfers and thought, this is my destiny.”

He wound up north of San Francisco in a bend in the road called Valley Ford -- population 126 -- because a buddy wanted him to work at his Mexican restaurant.

He stayed, despite the constant need for a wet suit, because the small-town security fed the streak.

He pays $224 in rent. It is a 10-minute drive in his faded Geo Storm through rolling hills to the often deserted beach.

He works in the afternoons as a janitor in a local three-classroom elementary school. He hangs out with his family and surfing videos at night.

“I think it’s good for him,” said wife Kaye, a surfing saint. “It’s a lot better than other things he could be doing.”

But no pursuit of high-paying jobs? No vacations that aren’t within sight of the ocean? No visits -- ever -- to the in-laws?

“Yeah,” she acknowledged, “certain things have been hard.”

Then, of course, there is the constant presence of sand in the house. Looking into Webster’s blue eyes and shaking his wrinkled hand, there is a feeling that he never really leaves the sea.

“I know when the afternoon comes, I feel like my scales are drying up,” he said. “I think by now, I must be an honorary amphibian.”

When he arrives at the beach, he pours two gallons of warm water down his wet suit and places an emergency card on the dashboard of his car.

“And then he goes into the wilderness,” Kampion said. “Every day, this man goes into a wilderness where he has no idea what is going to happen.”

Yet he is not afraid. Once in the water, far off the coast, many waves from the “Surf Unsafe” sign, he doesn’t flinch from the wildlife.

He says he talks to them.

He says he can communicate with seals by bringing his ear to his shoulder.

“A lot of them know me by now, and they tip their heads when they see me,” he said.

He said he can also communicate with the dolphins by tapping old surf tunes on his surfboard.

“I’ll be tapping away something from Taj Mahal, and they’ll be jumping out of the water like they recognize it,” he said with a grin.

His insistence on remaining in the water for at least three waves sometimes means he is there for a couple of hours.

After nearly three decades, it also means that his body is on the brink.

“If I don’t stop in February and have that ear operation and fix my eyes, then I really do need to get my head examined,” he said.

When he began his streak, he used to emerge from the water looking for witnesses to sign a book.

“But people looked at me like I was crazy,” he said.

So many of his years have been surfed on the honor system.

“But the surf community is pretty tight, and he wouldn’t have lasted this long if he wasn’t real,” Kampion said. “This guy is totally credible.”

Those who don’t see him surf might see him stripping to his bathing trunks afterward and showering with two more gallons of warm water.

Then he dresses in his car before perhaps stopping by a local coffee shop.

“He’s a major fixture around here,” said Jim Irving, owner of Roadhouse Coffee in Bodega Bay.

Once at work, with his board still fastened atop his car, he covers it with old towels and clothes, and everybody in town knows.

Everybody knows where Dale Webster has been, and where he’s going, this man who has defined himself by his refusal to be defined.

“Surfing has been so commercialized, so sold out, surfboards on runway models, surfing as a reality show,” Barilotti said. “To many people, Dale has become one of the last real surfers.”

As of now, there is no party planned for February. Dale Webster says he doesn’t need a party. He says a life of dedication has led to a life of understanding, and that’s celebration enough.

“Seeing the wave is the future,” he said. “Its curl is the present. Its break is the past.

“You ride a great wave, you turn around, and all you see is foam, nothing to show for it, a memory.”

Then, as Dale Webster has shown us, you paddle out and do it again.

Many years before longboards and sunscreen, the poet Robert Blake wrote, “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”

Epic, radical and right on.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com