Watch: Dustin Barca Talks the Old North Shore and the Death of Surfing Etiquette

It's the latest in a series of interviews conducted by Keoni "Burger" Nozaki for Blak Bear Surf Club, that's offering $10,000 to the surfer who scores the Slab of the Season.

Opening the convo, Burger asks:

"How was it when you came to the North Shore for the first time?"

"A lot different than it is now," Barca answers. 

He continues:

"There was still a pecking order. I used to come here and stay with Uncle Bryan Suratt, and we'd pretty much see somebody get beat up every time we went surfing. It was a lot different than it is now."

"It was a little bit more Wild West," Burger adds.

Barca recalls being "the youngest guy" in that group of people regulating the area and "pulling some order back into the water over here." 

For around a decade, he lived in the Oakley house at Pipe that former regulator Rico Jimenez recently discussed. 

He lived with Bruce and Andy Irons, Kai Borg Garcia (Nathan Florence's father-in-law), and Chava Greenlee, paying his dues with housework and pushups.

"I don't think anybody got slapped more than me by Kai Borg," he says. 

During that time, Barca "beat up the RipCurl team manager" and got banned from the surf industry for two years. 

Eventually, Barca acknowledges surfing as a "selfish sport" with a lot of jealousy, where it's "every man for himself" out to get the best wave. 

"Now that I'm out of the scene, I can be real truthful about it," he said. 

Today, he says, there's no respect in the water, and surf etiquette is "dying."

"Gotta really start teaching the next generation the etiquette of surfing," he says.

His advice is simple:

"Number one, respect the locals." 

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