This was my third year missing out on booking a room directly at the Golden Sails Hotel. It takes a while for me to get my calendar in order. The previous two years I had gone for whatever cheap motel I could find on Hwy 1. I gotta say though, it's a pretty boring area. Trust me, I walked like 3 miles from my motel to the Golden Sails one year. So this time I thought I'd nestle myself a little more into Long Beach, and stayed at the Beach Inn, which was within walking distance of the Beach and the Queen Mary. It was about 4 miles away from the Golden Sails, still not a huge distance. I could either check out the town or head to the Golden Sails because this year they had breakfast and music from 9:30 to 11am at the pool.

It's hard to beat surf music in Southern California. Surfguitar101 was ostensibly a meetup for online forum members with a nice lineup of 10 bands, Today it stands as the premiere surf event of the US and possibly the world, with a globe-spanning lineup of over twenty bands, and I believe Saturday night was the biggest I'd ever seen it. Organizer Jeff "BigTikiDude" Hanson, modest pool cleaner by day, has been slowly tweaking the event and his support team to grow the event organically into something uncompromisingly accessible and genuine.

10am is generally a pretty agreeable time to do anything. Plenty of time to wake up, have breakfast etc. I mean that's noon back in New Orleans time. Yet when doors opened on Sunday it was a bit like a trickle. I get it too -- I still felt a little worn out from The Bomboras the previous night (check out my writeup of that), and my ears certainly weren't back into shape.

SurfGuitar101 is back and, to embrace cliche, bigger than ever. This year organizer Jeff "BigTikiDude" Hanson partnered with a few other organizers, dropped the moniker of Convention, and moved to the 3-day weekender model, held at the Golden Sails hotel, where I failed to get a room before it filled up.

It's another Bandcamp Friday, which means bandcamp isn't taking a cut of sales on their platform and 100% of your money goes to the artists. If you've got money burning a hole in your pocket, today is a good day to spend it, and I'm here to help you decide what to spend it on. This isn't all of the surf music released on bandcamp in the past month, and there were good releases in the past month that weren't on bandcamp (and therefore not on this list) but these are some of the standouts.