LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Surfers speak a language all their own, as you will see in the cover story on page 30. Phil Edwards, the world's best at both surfing and speaking about it, promised Associate Editor Bob Ottum, "One ride and you'll be stoked for life." Ottum tried it. "I didn't exactly shoot the curl," he says, "but I was, as Edwards promised, stoked, pumped and jazzed."

Then they began shooting a photo-instructional on surfing (page 36), and when Reporter Curry Kirkpatrick joined them at Virginia Beach they had a new victim. They wrestled him onto a board, aimed him shoreward and launched him. Kirkpatrick struggled to his feet for a split second, looked happily startled and did a wipe-out. The resulting sequence of candid photographs could only be captioned "The Stoking of an Innocent."

PHOTO

EDWARDS AND OTTUM LAUNCH KIRKPATRICK ON HIS FIRST AND ONLY RIDE

THREE PHOTOS

LOOKING WORRIED, KIRKPATRICK CAUTIOUSLY LURCHES UP TO HIS FEET, TILTS CRAZILY AND...GOES INTO THE SOUP. HIS REACTION: "DID YOU GUYS SEE ME HANG TEN?"