Thanks to culturally significant portrayals of surfers over the last few decades as dummies (see also: Sean Penn as Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), surfers as a group are often been pigeonholed as lazy and unintelligent. Things have evolved in recent years – a surfer from Hawaii is currently vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, and a surfer wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir in 2016 – and it would seem that these days if you look around your local lineup you’ll see surfers from all walks of life representing a diversity of career tracks, including doctors, lawyers, and mechanical engineers.
With a newly-earned mechanical engineering degree, Michael “Waterspider” Darling fits squarely into the category of brainiacs who also surf very well. So well in fact that he has the backing of Vissla and Nixon. Is he the best surfing mechanical engineer on the planet? You be the judge.
