Show Me The Way - Cannon and Carson Carr issue 6 preview
Date: october 12th
Story By Ella Boyd
Photo: Timothy Ridenour, Wyatt Stark
Long before electric bikes crowded trails and turned the trip to Lowers into taking just a matter of minutes, surfers earned their waves at the iconic cobblestone break. They slipped through the marshes bordering Camp Pendleton, hid surfboards in the reeds to avoid Marine patrols, and occasionally watched live ammunition whistle overhead as they sprinted back toward the beach.
The risk only deepened the mythology. In the Encyclopedia of Surfing, Matt Warshaw calls Trestles "the longstanding epicenter of California high-performance surfing," a stretch of cobblestone pointbreaks that shaped generations of iconic surfers. None other than Miki Dora and Phil Edwards helped put the wave on the map in the ‘50s. Kelly Slater won his professional debut there in 1990. Since 1992, the National Scholastic Surfing Association's National Championships have crowned future champions at Lowers, cementing its place as California's proving ground for competitive surfing.
For decades, people have talked in circles, attempting to explain why San Clemente continues to produce an outsized share of the world's best surfers. The theories are all familiar: there are the breaks, of course. Lower Trestles breaks with machine-like consistency when it's on, and it’s on more than it’s not. Then there’s the surf industry itself, which has long clustered around town, putting young surfers within arm's reach of shapers, photographers, brands, and industry role models.
More recently, writer Sam George argued that San Clemente's Championship Tour boom could largely be credited to the rise of electric bikes, which transformed Lower Trestles from a long walk into an everyday training ground for an entire generation.
None of those explanations are wrong, per se, but they all describe the setting without fully explaining the culture. For San Clemente, the greatest resource isn't simply the waves, but the sheer abundance of free-flowing advice.
That realization settles in quickly while sitting down with brothers Cannon and Carson Carr. Cannon, 20, recently signed with Quiksilver and has emerged as one of San Clemente's brightest young talents, reaching his first QS final at the Outer Banks Pro in 2023 while chasing Challenger Series qualification.
Carson, 16, is following close behind, already competing in QS events after years of climbing through the amateur ranks. Despite the age gap, their conversation feels less like an interview and more like two brothers finishing each other's stories...
