Three Princes, One Wave: The Town That Started American Surfing

Three Princes and a River Mouth

Long before "Santa Cruz" meant board shorts and boardwalk lights, it meant three teenage Hawaiian princes cutting redwood into surfboards. In the summer of 1885, David Kawānanakoa, Edward Keliʻiahonui, and Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole — students at a nearby military academy — paddled out where the San Lorenzo River meets the Pacific and rode the swell home. It's the earliest documented account of surfing on the U.S. mainland, and it happened not in Malibu or Huntington Beach, but on a quiet stretch of Northern California coastline that had no idea what it was about to become.

Forty Years of Keeping the Light

That stretch of coast is now watched over by the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse at Lighthouse Point, a working beacon that doubles as the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum — the first surfing museum in the world, opened in 1986. On September 26, 2026, the museum marked its 40th anniversary with a "Keepers of the Light" celebration and the unveiling of a newly restored lighthouse lamp, still standing sentry over Steamer Lane, one of the most storied breaks in American surfing. Roughly 70,000 visitors a year climb the spiral stairs to see century-old redwood boards, salt-worn photographs, and the quiet proof that this town invented something the rest of the coast just borrowed.

Built for the Lookout

Our Santa Cruz pieces — Where Summer Stays and Between the Giants — were made for people who'd rather watch the swell roll in from the point than read about it later. They belong in the same company as our other U.S. destination pieces: apparel built around places with a real story underneath the postcard, not just a skyline silhouette. Santa Cruz earns its spot for the same reason Montana and the Gold Rush foothills did: because someone was there first, and the place never really let go of it.

Curated for the journey.

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