The Ghosts of Comanche Crossing
In 1981 three Black teenagers drowned while in law enforcement custody during a Juneteenth gathering at Lake Mexia. Four decades later, Texas’s proudest Emancipation Day celebration still hasn’t recovered.
Lake Mexia, seen from Booker T. Washington Park, known locally as Comanche Crossing, on April 21, 2021.
Photograph by Michael Starghill
Every Juneteenth, as soon as Pamela Baker got to Booker T. Washington Park, she’d race to the merry-go-round, squeeze through the swarm of shrieking kids, grab one of the shiny rails, and hold on tight. After a few minutes, she would jump off and dart up the steps of the nearby dance hall to survey the throngs below. She and her brother Carl would weave through the crowd, looking for cousins from Dallas and Houston they hadn’t seen since the previous year. Eventually, her whole family would congregate under an oak tree their ancestors had claimed as a gathering place a century before, in the years after
All-Time: La Bomba Dishes Out a Wedge Rarity Thursday April 29, 2021 Staff
Tommy Cantrell center stage in the photo of the swell. Photo: James Ferrell
In the big leagues of surfing’s most photographed waves, Newport Beach’s Wedge ranks high. Give Orange County just a sniff of a South Swell each spring and you’re guaranteed the crowd on the beach will outnumber the crowd in the water next to the jetty, fully equipped with news vans parked in every nook of the peninsula and lenses of every kind pointed toward the horizon.
All the hype could make one believe they’d seen every angle there is to see of the wave. We recognize it by shape, landmarks, we know where each photographer lines up on the beach or swimming around in the shorebreak in almost every image. But it never gets old.
Highlights, La Bomba Part 2: California
Tricky conditions and moments of brilliance grace the Golden State
Photo: Fred Pompermayer
Link copied to clipboard
We covered the heck out of last week’s solid south swell, which turned out to be the biggest of the season thus far especially in Central America and Mexico where, unlike California, conditions were largely favorable. South-facing breaks in the Golden State saw no shortage of long period swell as it peaked on Saturday, but man, those winds…less-than-ideal in many spots, though places like the Wedge and Malibu which can both deal with some wind and act as catcher’s mitts to straight south swell managed to see some fine moments.
Photo of the Swell: Tommy Cantrell, Wedge, 04/24
Freezeframe from a behind-the-peak moment
Marcus Sanders
Link copied to clipboard
Tommy Cantrell. Photo: James Ferrell
As you may or may not have noticed, we’ve spent the last while following along as the first big south swell of the year hit the West Coast of the Americas. We’ve seen probably a hundred great rides on video and thousands of photographs from all over the place, which we’ve been happily curating and posting in realtime. Every once in a while, though, a single surf photo from a particular swell stops us in our tracks. Put it this way: over the course of many, many years of seeing all kinds of crazy photographs from the Wedge in Newport Beach, from all kinds of angles, this shot of Tommy Cantrell, captured by James Ferrell on Saturday morning, stopped us in our tracks. There were expletives (all positive). There were emojis (some of which no one really understood). There were questions (did he make it?) Most of
West Coast Spring Fling, Part 2 surfline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from surfline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.