Used to be one of the batting wanes and liked you for that.

My first real appreciation of Lauren Hill was in Jason Baffa's 2013 documentary surf film, Bella Vita.

The film follows surfer Chris Del Morrow on a pilgrimage to and through Italy, his ancestral

homeland.

Lauren along with Dave Rostovic joined Chris for some of the trip, as do Connor and Parker

Coffin and a few other pros.

And the film, by the way, remains to be one of my favorite documentary Serf films,

and I highly recommend watching it or re-watching it.

And in fact, I actually loved it so much at the time that we hosted a theatrical screening

of the film when it was released.

And I also interviewed the filmmaker, Jason Bofa, which is episode number 50 of Surf Splendor,

published August 27th, 2014.

Strangely, almost six years to the day that we're recording this.

And so dig into that if you want to take a deeper dive into Belavita.

But at any rate, I had seen Lauren peripherally previous to that film.

Maybe in a Bilibong ad, I've always been a big fan of Bing's surfboards and I believe she was

riding their boards at the time she still is now to this day. So I had seen a little bit of her,

but after Bella Vita I discovered her blog, Seekin, where she exercised her muscle as a writer,

exploring ideas for a more inclusive surf culture and a more sustainable surf industry.

And if Seekin wasn't comprehensive in its inclusivity, it certainly provided a much-needed counterpoint

to the portrayal of a homogeneous surf culture

that legacy surf media had continually churned out for decades.

...