Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2016 i Surfer

When John Florence finished first in 2013’s Hot 100, SURFER Hawaii Editor Jeff Mull asked him how he would define success in the future. “That’s a hard one,” Florence said. “I think you have to always be redefining your view of success to move forward. I think you have to always be reevaluating what it means and always pushing yourself. You want to set goals, but when you reach them, you have to make new ones.” Here, Florence continues to surpass expectations at Himalayas, on one of the bigest days of the winter on the North Shore.…

It’s a small cove, maybe 100 yards wide, hemmed in by vertical cliffs blanketed by dense foliage cascading down to a pristine white-sand beach. The water is an almost unnatural Kool-Aid blue. From atop the cliffs, you can make out the rock formations beneath the surface of the water and schools of fish darting around them. The cove would be an idyllic place to drop anchor, were it not for the mutant righthand wedge detonating on the rocks and sending shockwaves into the channel. I’m with surfers Dylan Graves, Dane Gudauskas, and Wade Goodall, along with photographer Tom Carey, and we’re somewhere in the Caribbean, two days into a spontaneous swell chase based on some promising intel from Graves. He’s had his eye on this wave for quite some time,…

There wasn’t much to figure out about Nicky Wood’s surfing, which was fast and spidery and entertaining. As a person, though, Wood was a mystery. Quiet. Detached. Cool, for sure, but a little strange. I think it was Derek Hynd who nicknamed him “The Phantom,” and us World Tour punters of the ’80s and early ’90s, in a pre-social-media age, were left to wonder: Is Nicky shy? Simple? Mute? The new Michael Peterson? Those big, dark, slightly downturned eyes of his, along with my own little poetic flight of fancy, led me to believe that Wood was a bit of a melancholist. His knees had let him down, literally and figuratively, and that had something to do with it. Late puberty was cruel to Nicky Wood: he grew 7 inches…

IN THE WINTER of 2011, Korean-Australian shaper Sam Yoon was on the island of Kauai, living out of his van with his wife, Ecco, and their two young children, Moana and Reno. One day a text came through from Jaws paddle-in pioneer Lyle Carlson. “Friday Jaws” was all it said. Two days later, Yoon and his family were making camp on a bluff in an abandoned pineapple field that overlooks Jaws’ fabled reef. “It was night and we could hear the wave breaking,” Yoon recalls. “The whole family was nervous. Ecco knew I was planning to surf, and the kids didn’t know what was happening, but they could feel how tense we both were.” Before dawn the next day, Yoon made his way across the lava boulders that cradle Pe’ahi.…

2016 Winner Filipe Toledo is a man on the move, but after weeks spent tracking him down, I’ve finally caught up with the young Brazilian at his new family home in San Clemente, California. It’s my last chance to get a few minutes with the 20-year-old before he bolts for a meeting with the Brazilian consulate, packs his bags, and boards a plane back to his native coastline for a few weeks. I’d intended to join Toledo there, in Brazil, to get a real sense for what it feels like to be a national barely-post-teen phenom in a country that knows how to love its stars. But his team managers assured me that was not a good idea. Toledo is a hard man to pin down when he’s on his…

2016 Winner It’s a pristine January morning on the North Shore, and Pipeline is the best it’s been in years. Tube-riding savants are taking turns pulling into turquoise caverns, either getting chewed up by Pipe’s foamy molars or spit out onto the shoulder to a symphony of hoots and whistles. It’s an aquatic gladiator pit if ever there was one. Nick Marshall would love to paddle out, but something is holding him back. It’s not the fact that Marshall is only 15 years old and that one heavy Pipe lip could vaporize him (although no one would blame him if that were his deterrent.) The reason is that the Volcom Pipe Pro is on, and Marshall is not an entrant. The idea of Marshall competing in powerful Hawaiian surf, however,…

As the Internet continues its inexorable march, stomping all the best parts of human civilization into dust in the name of convenience, one of the first casualties littering the road to the Matrix will surely be the independent retailer. As if the looming specter of big-box chains like Walmart and Costco Pied Pipering the middle class away from Main Street wasn’t bad enough, your local indie retailer also has to fend off Amazon, a company so powerful and entrenched in our culture that it doesn’t even care whether or not it makes a profit on its tablets. And if you listen very closely, you can hear the eager buzzing of a million Amazon drones hovering just over the horizon, waiting to deliver whatever widget we can’t live without right to…

MEN 01 FILIPE TOLEDO UBATUBA, BRAZIL 4/16/1995 02 JACK ROBINSON MARGARET RIVER, AUSTRALIA 5/3/1997 03 MIKEY WRIGHT CULBURRA BEACH, AUSTRALIA 9/14/1996 04 KANOA IGARASHI HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA 2/9/1997 05 YAGO DORA FLORIANÓPOLIS, BRAZIL 5/18/1996 06 LEONARDO FIORAVANTI ROME, ITALY 12/8/1997 07 KOA SMITH KILAUEA, HAWAII 1/2/1995 08 PARKER COFFIN SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA 9/26/1995 09 NATHAN FLORENCE PUPUKEA, HAWAII 6/10/1995 10 MATT BANTING PORT MACQUARIE, AUSTRALIA 6/25/1995 11 SOLI BAILEY BYRON BAY, AUSTRALIA 3/12/1996 12 GRIFFIN COLAPINTO SAN CLEMENTE, CALIFORNIA 7/29/1998 13 SETH MONIZ HONOLULU, HAWAII 9/8/1997 14 HIROTO OHHARA CHIBA, JAPAN 11/14/1996 15 LUCAS SILVEIRA FLORIANÓPOLIS, BRAZIL 1/29/1996 16 JOSH MONIZ HONOLULU, HAWAII 6/27/1996 17 MAKAI MCNAMARA SUNSET BEACH, HAWAII 3/7/1995 18 NOÉ MAR MCGONAGLE PAVONES, COSTA RICA 4/17/1996 19 JAKE MARSHALL ENCINITAS, CALIFORNIA 11/12/1998 20 BARRON MAMIYA HALEIWA, HAWAII…

2016 Winner On a Hawaiian winter morning in 1996, then 33-yearold Tanira Guimaraes Weston-Webb sat out the back at Pipeline on her bodyboard, waiting patiently for a solid set. Although she’d surfed Pipe many times before, she was feeling anxious this particular session. Since relocating from Brazil to Hawaii, charging Pipe had become second nature to her, but pulling into heavy barrels while five months pregnant was uncharted territory. A few years earlier, she and her sister Andrea left their hometown of Porto Alegre to travel the world as professional bodyboarders. During a visit to Kauai, they met Doug and Kevin Weston-Webb, two handsome towheaded surfers who, as fate would have it, also happened to be brothers. One thing led to the next, and soon enough Tanira married Doug. Andrea…