Surfski.wiki was conceived and launched by Dan Mayhew of Bellingham, WA, USA in 2019. As you will learn if you ever visit Bellingham or spend much time on this website, Bellingham is a great place for paddlers, particularly if you can wrap your paddle around cold water (with the right cold water clothing and adherence to safety it is easier than most people may think to paddle here year round).

In announcing the new website Dan described it in the following manner to our local paddlers in Bellingham:

It’s a wiki so anyone may edit it. The point of the site is to learn about technique, safety, places to paddle, and equipment. Surf skiers from everywhere are invited to share their expertise. B’hamsters, edit any topic you like, but please edit the Bellingham page. If we can build an awesome page it can help us and inspire other communities to do the same. Then we can discover new places and go paddle with them.

Maybe or maybe not. Our impression by mid 2021 was that learning to use our wiki editor is not as straight forward as we had hoped. The folks who have spent the most time editing the website have discovered enough small glitches and annoyances to conclude that it would be simpler for most paddlers to just email us their information (included in email or as email attachments - text docs, Word docs, jpegs, pngs, pdfs, etc.) and let us enter it into the wiki. (We have also had problems with spammers, etc. registering on the wiki and had to disable new registrations in 2022 ) So if you do have additions for the wiki please email the information to us - surfski.wiki email

It is only natural that the creators of this wiki have home town bias. Bellingham waters and the Pacific Northwest are what we know the best. But surfski.wiki aspires to be an international surfski site, and it can only become more so if it adds the kind of detail about other great paddling locations that we have tried to provide about Bellingham and the local paddling waters that we are most at home in. Our first and foremost source of information has been our local paddler discussion group, Whatcom Paddlers (since 2004), which has provided a ton of worthwhile information, advice, and humor. Our wiki editors have also drawn a lot of content and many references from prominent surfski websites like surfski.info, tcsurfski, and surfskiracing as well as from hundreds of online videos. We appreciate all of these rich resources but we believe the organization of information on the wiki also adds something valuable.

In any event - please, when you have the time and inclination, send us some beta about your favorite paddling locales. We hope this website will encourage surfskiers around the world to visit Bellingham and other great places to paddle and meet the locals there who love this sport.

More TOW!

Dan Mayhew, Paul Reavley