Surf breaks are valuable and rare coastal resources that provide notable recreational, ecological and cultural benefits. They often overlap with sensitive coastal features, including protected ecosystems and sources of blue carbon. The use of legal instruments to protect surf breaks is a nascent endeavor. Existing scholarship has focused on identifying legal tools that can be used to protect surfbreaks and on exploring how new laws can be drafted to account for surf breaks’ unique characteristics.  
An underdeveloped area of research examines the stories of surf breaks that have been destroyed or lost. These stories offer lessons about what legal tools or policies could have been implemented to avoid their demise. This article first examines the significance of surf breaks and introduces issues relating to legal tools and threats. Next, it identifies destroyed surf breaks and the circumstances that led to their loss, as well as surf breaks that are currently threatened. Finally, this article analyzes whether surf break protection legislation or other policies could have been implemented to save the surf breaks. Drawing on past examples where surf breaks have been successfully protected, this legal analysis synthesizes potential strategies to protect surf breaks that are threatened or could become threatened in the future.