Kelly capped a stellar season at Pipeline, Joel Parkinson etched his name on the Triple Crown, and guys like Owen Wright, Dusty Payne, Mitch Coleborn and Jordy Smith stood up to be counted. There was drama, there was controversy and best of all, there were massive frikken waves.
Also in the mag, find out what’s been going on in the world of SuperLairdHamiltonMan, get the lowdown on the hardest working man in pro surfing. We explain what’s up with all these pesky sharks, Bede shows you his backyard, and we catch up with recently-ripping Craig Anderson. Then there’s all the usual hi-jinx, shenanigans, tomfoolery and muckraking and if that's not enough you must check out the mindblowing Africa feature.
Here is a snippet of the story + a few sic pics
Digging up diamonds in deepest, darkest Africa
A one-to-five second tuberide is a trinket. A quick jolt of stoke to make your session or brighten your day. A five-to-10 second tube is a trophy, something to display on the mantelpiece and recount to your mates around the fire. 10 to 15 seconds of tunnel vision and it starts getting weird. Almost uncomfortable, like, maybe you better get out of this thing before it causes brain damage or fever blisters. But 15 to 20 seconds? That’s when you break into a whole ’nother dimension. Being enclosed starts feeling so . . .
natural, as if you’re supposed to spend the entire length of a 300-yard long wave in the barrel. Your mind drifts to other things. About the fruit salad you ate for breakfast and the sticky sweet taste of Nutella on your toast.
About getting the rental truck stuck in the sand for the tenth time and the disturbing smell of burning clutch. Only when you emerge from the tube do you realize what just happened. And that’s when the real dilemma occurs.
Until my recent trip to Southwest Africa, I would never have been able to tell you about the four stages of tuberiding, or the “real dilemma.”
Could be anywhere, right? Nor-west WA? Mexico? South Africa? Well, close. But not that close. Photo: DJ Struntz
For all my surfing life, I’ve been floating somewhere in the “trophy” zone of barrel realization, collecting gold-plated, quicktime memories for the archives. A double-spit here, a foamball ride there, but nothing close to what I – along with Pete Mendia, Hank Gaskell and a software developer named Brian Gable – experienced along a remote stretch of African desert. For more than two weeks, this two-kilometer lefthand sand point teased us. Threw us a few corroded Portuguese doubloons from a nearby shipwreck and kept us begging for more. The chosen destination for this year’s edition of the US Google Earth Challenge, Skeleton Bay looked even better in person than it did from space. An endlessly perfect sandspit, side offshore in the prevailing wind…but hopelessly small and fast. Attempting to surf it – especially backside – redefined the phrase “two-pump chump.” But just when we’d lose hope, a chest-high set would unfold from the top of the point in mesmerizing symmetry… one, two, three or more lines barreling in a holy trinity of sand, wind and swell. “Why can’t it be a few feet bigger,” we’d muse. “It’s like hooking up with the hottest girl in the world and taking her home,” said Hank, “but she won’t let you touch her.”
But then, at a point when we had given up, she put out. Bigger than we had hoped for and beyond what we had imagined. Best waves of our lives.
Twenty-second tubes all around - no exaggeration. You can ask Hank, Mendia or Gable, but don’t ask for proof, there’s no video. Google Boy forgot the camera in his room that day. And even though staff photographer DJ Struntz nearly killed himself trying to shoot the spot from all angles, desert flatness and the sheer length of the point made it like trying to capture a herd of charging elephants with an Instamatic. So, I understand if you cite “lack of evidence” and decide to call bullshit on this story. In fact, I hope you do.
Corey Lopez ducking and driving Photo: DJ Struntz
You’re a goofyfooter, yeah? So how come you’re still looking at this photo and not checking the price of flights to Africa? Photo: DJ Struntz