With the crowds like they are on the North Shore of Oahu, a lot of times when you get a good wave it is at the very last second. Some one misses a gimme, falls up the line, or the guy in position passes—and with no time to think or prepare, you spin and go. Often, that late drop is the ticket to paradise. Other times, the lack of time to sus out the wave puts you in a bad place at a bad time.
Not sure who the guy is. But this was taken at the Backdoor shootout. If you look closely, you can see the nose just snagging enough water to launch this poor bastard into a world of hurt.
Backdoor Pipeline is pretty lousy shallow too. If you can take the beating form a fall, you can look forward to an elongated series of beatings on the way back out. Enjoy.
I am always trying crappy, lo-fi cameras. They have a way of screwing up in visually interesting ways. With film, I would always push reciprocity failure. With digital, really cheap lenses are my favorite. With light leaks, color shifts and grain, you can create some neat stuff.
Just as the sun cracked the horizon, a small wedge peak popped up. Add a really awful camera and you have a cool photo.
This shot, for example, I love. This is not something you would see with the natural eye. and nothing you could replicate with an Instagram filter or photoshop manipulation. This is just straight up lo-fi and it is stunning.
Barca is gnarley. Trying to stay on at Pipe despite the writing on the wall. Hero!
The 48th Street Zone. Sunset, November 2004.
Ocean City based photog Will Hall was at Cloudbreak when it was going bonkers last year this time. Taj Burrow showed up on a yacht. Kelly Slater flew in on a helicopter. Pretty huge disparity between even privileged surf travelers and the top pros. But then again—big, thick Cloudbreak proves that some people are better than others at handling critical waves.
These photos got squashed by Quiksilver since Kelly was wearing some new boardshorts. Quiksilver never used them. Although some of these have appeared without Will’s knowledge in various media outlets during the year. A year later we present these truly incredible photos. See if you recognize some of images from Quiksilver’s current trunks campaign. Will is back in Fiji right now. I am sure we will see some more great photos soon.
All photos ©2011 Will Hall
Good old Knopp. Making the seemingly worthless waves very fun. Hawaii 2012, still laughing.
One of my favorite surf sessions ever, and a story I have retold ad nauseum, is one that involves a bodyboarder and some closeouts.
Not just any bodyboarder, but my main man and roommate at the time, Tom Knopp. And not just any closeouts, but large, mean, clean, heaving, 25-block-long, hurricane closeouts right behind our house.
So no one was around. No one really wanted anything to do with it. Not because it was so scary. But because it was just not really fun.
You could rush and get the view for a second, but there was no real graceful way to bring your ride to an end. No matter what way you went, it was the wrong way.
So as we sat there an looked over ledge after ledge, and pulled back again again, Knopp waited for bombs and smirked as he spun and went into the oblivion.
What at first looked like just unrestrained stoke coupled with some optimistic aneurysm turned into a show of how functional aerial surfing could be. Right as you are ready to write him off and look away, down the beach a lot farther than you would have imagined, Knopp’s body would soar out of the lip, into the air—upside down sometimes—and reconnect with the falling lip before disappearing again.
We had a reunion recently, more than 20 years after that day. And I gotta say, all of those memories came rushing back. I was so stoked to see Tom doing his thing. Making the lackluster surf all of us older surfers grumble at, look fun. Just like that day in 1987 behind Our Place At The Beach with Ricky B and Chris Street. Every time you looked back, Knopp was smiling from ear-to-ear at the “less-than-perfect” waves.
Right where the glasser managed to put a laminate upside-down, and install the glass-on bonzers in the wrong place, a hole where one of the fins was smashed out. Sweet.
Not that long ago I wrote about how much difficulty I had shaping and glassing my bonzer: Shaping in Kauai and the Birth of the Hydro-Matic® . Since that was written, I had let other people ride it. On a few more occasions I gave it a go to see if I could really get a feel for it. In the end the board seemed to be cursed. So much energy, time and money went into it. It was to say the least a heart breaker.
It only really functions in a certain size and type of wave, namely 3-5′ Hawaiian scale, hollow and down-the-line. Not a great beachbreak board. Not for hot-dogging. It goes very straight and fast and stable in the tube. That is pretty much it. Kind of a superfluous board to say the least.
I found myself surfing that very type of wave recently. Maybe a touch bigger, but my step-up was recently broken, so this was the best call. After battling the current running off the point for two hours and only catching one good wave, I was over it. I was alone and there was great waves coming through, but the energy required to get to and stay on the peak was crushing me. I decided I would give it my best effort to get onto the corner of the reef and go on the next set wave. Period.
When a set appeared I put my head down and sprinted into position knowing I was going regardless. There was a terrible rip coming off the end of the reef causing quite a bit of chop right at the peak, plus it was chucking out pretty hard. I spun around, gave it some paddles and pushed into the wave. It was a sweet one, lined up all the way across and nice and steep. I lost sight of what was happening for a nanosecond when the offshore spray hit my eyes. I stayed low grabbing pig-dog and began driving down the face.
All felt right in the world. After two hours getting bupkis, I finally was pulling into a solid one. I was even feeling I was far enough back to get shacked right at the takeoff. Then I hit a big chunk coming up the face. It knocked the board out from under me. The leash came off like I forgot to attach it. My front arm, which was behind me in a traditional pig-dog, got wrenched back hyper-extending my elbow and I went down hard. I went back overt the falls and came up in the impact zone right next to the corner where I took off and took three more on the head, each one causes lightning bolts of pain in my elbow.
Seems so apropriate that the logo get smashed. By a tank though?
When I surfaced I noticed I was moving in the current down the beach and out to sea like I had been on my board. Now I had to swim in against the current with one arm. I got three-quarters of the way in and began getting sucked out again. Eventually someone else paddled out and on his way past he mentioned that my board probably went down the beach in the current. I was thinking the same thing. I would get in and then have to locate my board and swim out to it and paddle it back in. Not cool.
When I stood up on the beach a guy up on beach by the reef was holding my board. Weird. It seems to have gone against the current. Maybe it just rode the white water straight in? As I approached the guy said, “Sorry. I didn’t see it until too late.” The board looked like someone attacked it with an axe.
The board that cost so much money to glass, took so much time in research and emotional energy was mangled. It seems it found the one solid obstacle in the entire 10 mile long beach, a tank tread that sticks out of the water at low tide. The leash wrapped around it and the board volleyed onto the tank over and over.
You can’t make this shit up.
Every once in a while a really nice looking wave breaks, and I happen to be pointing a camera at it. And sometimes the exposure is right and it is in focus. Sometimes.
Here's a short abrupt right barrel for all of the body surfers and boogie nation people.
And during a discussion with a friend, we joked about me not wanting to go on a surf trip unless I was going to go left. I am a goofy foot and I like lefts. But I realized that winter is the opposite, all rights, and sometimes you just gotta go backside. So here are a couple rights to get us all psyched for winter, who can’t come soon enough.
