Leave it to the Costa Mesa crew at Almond Surfboards & Designs to turn a brutal stretch of Orange County weather into a pocket sermon on perspective. In “Zoom Out,” posted October 19, 2026, Almond’s Dave Allee notes that “through fires and floods” stopped being a figure of speech this month: first a big hurricane swell stacked on high tide flooded the Newport Peninsula, then barely a week later offshore winds pushed wildfires through South County. And yes, those same offshores were grooming the lineups to perfection, so your feed had fire lines creeping toward homes right next to “all-time” barrels.
It hit close to the shop, too. Longtime Almond contributor Alex Swanson, husband of their Operations Czar Erica, is a fire captain with the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) and spent the fires on the front lines, sleeping on the ground between shifts. Allee’s answer to all of it is two words: “zoom out.” He compares it to watching your kids from 100 yards away at school drop-off, where they’re somehow cuter than when they’re dog-piling you on the couch, or to seeing your hometown from a plane window or a hilltop, where the traffic and the crowds blur into one big picture you can actually appreciate.
Call it the tube-ride theory of life. Tunnel vision is great inside a barrel and pretty rough everywhere else. Allee’s advice is to look up from the to-do list and the problems long enough to catch “sweet moments and reasons for thankfulness,” fires and floods included. It’s a short read and a good one. Paddle over to Almond’s blog for the whole thing.
Source: Almond Surfboards & Designs (Costa Mesa, CA). The original article and its photos belong to Almond. We link, we don’t copy.
