Steamer Lane is a famous surfing location in Santa Cruz, California. It is just off a point on the side of cliffs in the West Cliff residential area near downtown Santa Cruz, providing easy access and a good vantage point for viewing. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum is housed in a lighthouse there. "Steamer Lane" is the preferred form of the name used by the people surfing there. Steamer Lane was named by Claude Horan while he was a student at San Jose State in the late 1930s. One flat calm day he and his friend Wes Hammond thought it would be a good idea to hire steamships to cruise back and forth to generate waves for surfing. It was at Steamer Lane that the modern surfing wetsuit and the leash were mainly developed by Jack O'Neill, who had his surf shop nearby for many years and lost his eye at Steamer Lane.
Read more about Steamer Lane: Geography, Santa Cruz and Surfing
Famous quotes containing the words steamer and/or lane:
“Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the “drisk,” with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour, we were undeceived. So much do the works of man resemble the works of nature. A moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)