The shop began in 1975, when two craftsmen — Marc Adam and John Kies — who had cut their teeth at Koast Surfboards, decided to take a risk. With tools in hand and salt in their veins, they opened a place of their own. Not much in the spirit has changed since then — the door still exhales the scent of wax, the walls still echo with surfers trading swell forecasts, and the boards remain sacred objects. Marc still presides over the store, and John still shapes — his Kies Custom Shapes line tying the present to the shop’s earliest days.

In the dim hush of pre-dawn, when Oceanside still yawns and the Pacific hums just beyond the pier, Asylum Surf waits with its neon promise. The old awning, shaped like a curling wave, feels like a wink to every surfer who’s ever rushed down Mission Avenue with wax in one pocket and sand still clinging to their feet. The shop itself has weathered decades—born in the late ’80s under another name, reborn as Asylum in the ’90s—and it carries the patina of continuity. Fathers and sons have owned it, families have worked its counters, and generations of surfers have passed through, each leaving behind a trace of their saltwater stories.

Mitch’s is woven into the identity of Solana Beach, standing as both a time capsule and a living, breathing part of North County’s surf lineage. For countless surfers, the memory of pulling into the shop before a dawn patrol session, wax still cool from the night air, is as much a part of the experience as the first drop into a clean left at Seaside Reef.

South Oceanside has always carried a certain grit softened by salt air. Long before the city polished its edges, this stretch of Coast Highway was home to working-class families, roadside diners, and a raw, unfiltered surf culture. Dawn patrol meant empty streets, headlights cutting through marine layer, and surfers heading toward the jetties, Buccaneer Beach, or Oceanside Pier before the town stirred awake. Here, surfing wasn’t a pastime—it was an identity, baked into the rhythm of life.

Leucadia has always felt like one of those sleepy coastal enclaves where time hangs suspended just before dawn—the streets still quiet, the smell of salt in the air, and the Pacific waiting at the end of every road. For decades, this pocket of North County San Diego has been a haven for surfers chasing something more than just waves: a sense of identity, rebellion, and community. It was into this landscape that Bing Surfboards found its way, carrying with it a deep-rooted heritage in shaping the sport.

Every surfer who came of age in the South Bay carries a memory of ET: a first board, a last repair, a conversation that unlocked the secret of a wave. At dawn, when the streets are empty, the shop becomes myth, and to pass it is to acknowledge that surfing is not just an act, but a way of belonging.

Oceanside has always been a frontier town for surfing—where the military’s grit meets the dreamer’s salt-soaked freedom. And here, in the dark before dawn, the surfer steps past JS’s glowing insignia, a reminder that every ride is part craft, part faith, part history. The shop is still shuttered, but its spirit is awake, whispering to those on the hunt for that first clean wave of the day.

At 3:30 in the morning, Oceanside is emptied of its noise, stripped of its daytime disguises, and what’s left is a kind of naked poetry. The surf shop on the corner — Gary Linden’s place — sits there like a sentinel, humming under a sodium lamp glow.