This article is a translated version of an original feature from Surf Session Magazine. We’re grateful for the opportunity to share this story with our English-speaking audience, with full credit to the original publication and creators. Dane Reynolds rides with MANERA, and we’re proud to stand behind his vision, creativity, and commitment to surfing.
Dane Reynolds. Known & Unknown.
Everyone thinks they know him. Very few have truly understood him.
01/24/2026 by Surf Session
With Known Unknown, published in Surf Session magazine, Dane Reynolds offers a deeply personal look at his journey—between surfing, creation, and freedom—through a project that stands apart in the surf world. In Surf Session issue 398, our editor-in-chief Olivier Dézèque delivers a rare and profound interview in which Dane Reynolds opens up as he almost never has before. Far from podiums, numbers, and media noise, he talks about what truly drives him: surfing as an intimate language, creation as a vital necessity, and family as his anchor. An icon despite himself, Reynolds reflects on childhood memories, his complicated relationship with competition, his dizzying successes, and his quiet falls—without ever being dishonest with himself.
From Ventura to far-flung trips, from perfect waves to moments of deep doubt, this portrait moves between light and shadow. We discover an extraordinary surfer—clear-eyed about the evolution of surfing, critical of social media, and deeply attached to a more human, more authentic vision of surf culture.
Enhanced by the powerful images of Morgan Maassen, this article is far more than an interview: it is a dive into the mind of a man who chose to remain free, even if it meant questioning everything.
A sincere, inspiring, sometimes unsettling story—an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it truly means to live surfing.
Full article — in our Surf Session magazine No. 398 (Winter 2026 edition)
© Morgan Maassen
The Surfer’s Journal Issue 35.1
In November 2024, I made the five-hour drive from Santa Cruz, where I was living at the time, down through the yellow hills of California’s Central Valley, swerving past tumbleweeds and stopping only to pee behind a gas station whose restroom was out of order, and arrived in Ventura just in time to watch Dane Reynolds open up a surf shop. I had no idea how he’d receive me. He’d been ghosting my texts for the past week.
Despite his reputation for being aloof, Dane has never been easier to find. Just plug 89 South Palm Street into Google Maps and follow the pleasant woman’s voice down to a windowless, brutalist structure that looks like a cross between a crummy old high school and a prison—except the highmost end has been freshly painted white. There, above the entrance, you’ll find a typoic name scrawled in minimalist font: “CHAPTER 11 TV.” This, the Google Maps listing will tell you, is the ironic “global” headquarters of the only surf shop of its kind in the world.
It’s here you can find him—one of the greats, most influential surfers of the modern age—working the register, screen printing T-shirts, editing surf videos, taking out the trash, scraping human shit off the back stoop, and draining tiny Coors Lights with a ragtag crew of young local rippers he’s dubbed the “Academy of Idiots.” You can visit him between the rough hours of 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., from Tuesday to Sunday most weeks, with the occasional “gone surfing” note taped to the door when the waves finally get good; just tell him I told you—or don’t. It’s hard to tell if he cares.
Full article — The Surfer’s Journal Issue 35.1
