Tidal Life

To the untrained eye the above image is simply six dots. But to Whidbey islanders this mark, like the Z of Zorro, identifies a vital message from a swashbuckling local hero. It probably makes a few of us salivate.

Of all the islandy things I’ve featured on Tidal Life, by far the most popular is Two of the 10,000 (at least) reasons Whidbey Island will keep on rocking my post about the online activities of two helpful citizens of Whidbey Island and the net – Van Van Horn and Drew Kampion.

Van’s Quote of the Day is inspiring and I recommend it, Drew’s offering though promises more immediate gain of one kind, or another.

Instant gratification

Drew’s List is THE PLACE to buy, sell, promote, advertise and generally find out what’s happening on the south end of Washington’s Whidbey Island.  (I’m not sure how Drewslist works for those on the north end, can someone report?)

It wasn’t always this way…

The start of Drewslist

When Drew first started sending messages about Whidbey events and such to his friends and acquaintances, not everyone was pleased.

I remember one friend saying something like, “All that stuff Drew sends, it just gets to be too much.” (Hah! Back then, we didn’t know from email overload.)

I personally missed several months of Drew’s emails when I changed my address. I contacted him to be put back on the list when the number of his messages that were being forwarded to me by friends just became ridiculous.

The turning point for the list

Drew continued in his informal way until one day a hole developed in Island communications. The Langley Forum, another popular local information source that was run as a community service by Langley Councilman Robert Gilman, became too politicized. When Gilman announced that he was discontinuing the forum, those who used it to keep up on events and exchange information bemoaned the loss of what had been a helpful resource.

Someone posted a bit of virtual hand wringing, crying “what will we do?” and asking someone to start a new site where announcements could be posted, minus the name calling and snark.

And someone else responded: “We already have that, it’s called Drewslist.”

When I read that my eyes popped. “Yikes,” I thought, “poor Drew is about to be inundated by the hordes that have been raising Hell on the Forum.”

Drewslist goes island-viral

Apparently Drew was thinking bigger than I. He welcomed the Forum refugees, expanded his list and just kept on hitting Send. More and more people sent him things they wanted to share with the community – the plant sale to benefit the Land Trust, the offer of gardening services, registration information for an art class, a plea for help finding a ring lost at the playground, whatever, Drew shared it, free of charge.

When the flood threatened to overwhelm us all, Drew made the list more user friendly (and probably more creator friendly as well) by formatting the emails into categories, always set apart by those triple colons.

Now every day he publishes -

::: Housing Report :::

::: Jobs & Services :::

::: Events :::

::: For Sale, Wanted & Free :::

::: Classes :::

::: Health & Healing :::

::: Restaurants :::

And every now and then – amazingly infrequently given the amount of work he has taken on -

::: Drewslist :::

which is his understated request for donations to keep the dots, and what’s between them, coming.

What has any of this got to do with water?

Drew happens to live, and publish to his list, on an island. But there’s far more that connects him to Tidal Life.

A water person, Drew spends a lot of time thinking about ocean things. His life and his career have been based on interaction with constantly moving water.

The former editor of Surfer magazine, Surfing magazine and Windsurfing magazine, he continues to write for those and other water sport publications and websites. He is also author of many books about surfing and the sea, including, Stoked: A history of Surf Culture, The Book of Waves, The Way of the Surfer, Waves: From Surfing to Tsunami, Greg Noll: The Art of the Surfboard and The Lost Coast.

Noteworthy is the fact that I’ve never seen any of these books advertised under the Drewslist ::: For Sale ::: banner. That, in these days of 24/7 marketing, shows remarkable restraint. I don’t have to be so reticent though. I will tell you that you can buy Drew’s books via his website, www.drewkampion.com and that you should go there and buy them now.

Drew Kampion with Jack O’Neill

As we speak, Drew is off to another set of islands, somewhere in our watery world, for another surf related project. It may be Surf, Sex and Sandals: The Latin Art of Mixing Business with Pleasure, the autobiography he’s working on with Fernando Aguerre, co-founder of the Reef sandal and surfwear company. (My own beloved old Reefs appear in this Tidal Life self-portrait!) It could be a PR for the story of Jack O’Neill, inventor of the modern surfing wetsuit, Jack O’Neill: It’s Always Summer on the Inside, published just last month. Or perhaps Drew the surf photographer is snapping photos of big wave surfers at the Billabong Pipe Masters competition on Maui’s North Shore.

Hey Dude, I just came here to sign up for Drewslist

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: Last year 100,000 people bought electric drills. But not one of them wanted a drill. What they wanted was a hole.

A certain segment of the visitors to this site that talks about he wonders of oceans, marine mammals and living on the coast, will have arrived because they have something to sell.

They didn’t come here to learn about the activities of people who love the ocean. They weren’t looking for great surfing books to give as Christmas gifts. They didn’t want to hear about a guy named Drew who had a clever idea for getting the word out. Though they may have searched for Drewslist in hopes of unloading a used wetsuit, which would be kinda karmic.

Well then, here’s how to sign up for Drewslist: send a friendly email to drewslist at whidbey dot com, and in a friendly way, ask to be put on the list. That’s all there is to it. But I hope you find that you get more than you bargained for, and that you’re glad to know the surfer dude behind it.

Drew signs each email with this touch of surf philosophy:

Life is a wave. Your attitude is your surfboard. Stay stoked & aim for the light!

I would argue that getting that reminder every morning is actually the biggest benefit of subscribing.

Photo of Drew and Jack O’Neill is from O’Neill South Africa