Sean Collins, last year in Huntington, giving some love to the crew in the office upstairs

Surfline.com has hung up on providing surf forecasts via telephone, a goodbye to the innovative company’s first venture into giving surfers advance notice on when the waves would show up.

Many long-time surfers might remember 976-SURF, started in 1985. The service revolutionized the surf world - no longer did surfers have to drive all the way to the coast blindly, only to have to head home in disappointment if the waves weren’t cooperating.

The folks at Huntington Beach-based Surfine.com have always been ahead of the curve - jumping onto Internet forecasting before others  - and still continuing to try new things as technology advances.

 Recently, they teamed up with Oakley to develop an Iphone ap that lets surfers check their favorite spot on their phone. 

I met up with Sean Collins, chief forecaster, a few weeks ago to catch up, and to his surprise there were still a few hundred people a year calling up the old 976 number to get surf conditions. What an interesting look case study for how we operate, and how habitual people can be.

And who knows what surf forecasting will look like in 2020, Collins writes …”Maybe we’ll be sitting in the lineup using our GPS-enabled watches that access a real time satellite orbiting overhead that monitors ocean waves, confirming that a good set is on the way and will arrive at our exact position in the lineup in 2 minutes 13 seconds, and that the third wave of the set will be the biggest. So all we need to do is to snooker that wave hog on the longboard over there to go for the first or second wave of the set. You laugh? We’ll see….”

Click here to read the nostalgic article by Collins, which also includes an except from the first phone forecast in 1985.

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