Tabla de contenidos para April 2016 en Surfer

Kelly Slater, prodigious and gifted as he may be, owes much of his success to the intimate, personal relationships he’s fostered with some of surfoard design’s greatest minds. Al Merrick, Simon Anderson, Maurice Cole, and Greg Webber all have built surfcraft for Slater, leaving their fingerprints on his approach in the process. But his most recent collaborator, Australian planing-hull enthusiast Daniel Thomson, has helped push Slater’s curiosity to new experimental heights. Here, we see the fruits of Slater and Thomson’s labor up close at Restaurants—a familiar turn on a familiar wave, made fresh and new by some unfamiliar equipment.…

I’D LAST INTERVIEWED BRUCE IRONS on the evening of August 27, 2011, in Tahiti. It was a crazy night after an even crazier day. We were perched on plastic lawn chairs in the middle of a yard party at Teahupoo, a dozen beers in, buzzed by mosquitoes and boozed partygoers, the air positively fizzing after the waves surfed earlier that day on the fabled Code Red swell. It was almost a year since Bruce had lost his brother, and, as Bruce put it, he felt like he’d been “on a mission to take myself out of here.” Bruce was running fast and loose and acting bulletproof. Earlier that day he’d taken one of the biggest waves ever ridden at Teahupoo, which blew him into the lagoon and blew his shorts…

“I’ve been on Tour for five years now, and even the transition within that time has been insane to watch. THE SUN HAD JUST SET OUTSIDE Turtle Bay Resort on the North Shore of Oahu, where I met an eclectic trio of world-class surfers— World Tour competitor Courtney Conlogue, Maui charger Paige Alms, and longboarding style master/filmmaker Leah Dawson. The conversation jumped between seemingly disparate topics, like Conlogue’s recent competitive performance at Honolua Bay, the monstrous tube Alms nabbed at Jaws in 2015, and Dawson’s unhinged approach to riding single-fins. But eventually the discussion turned to the complex topic of what it means to be a female surfer today. And while their voices are uniquely tuned by the different paths they’ve each taken, together they speak volumes about what women’s…

Q. So why did you want to do an interview issue this month? A. It seemed like the right time. Some of the surfers making a mark on our culture at the moment have really unique voices. As a writer, when you find subjects like that, sometimes it’s good to step aside and let them tell their own story. I’ve always loved interview issues for that unfiltered perspective. Our culture is filled with so many offbeat characters, and it’s always stimulating to climb into their heads, shine a light into some of the more obscure corners, and see what’s going on in there. Q. Oh yeah? Who were some of the most compelling people in the issue? A. Everyone in the issue is compelling for different reasons, but I was…

WE REALLY SHOULD HAVE PAID MORE ATTENTION IN MATH CLASS. Daniel “Tomo” Thomson clearly did, and now he’s making use of his interest in geometry and fluid dynamics to build some of the most bizarre and intriguing surfboards in the world. There was a time, not too long ago, when to stroll across the beach with a square-nosed, split-diamond-tailed, 5'1" surfboard under your arm meant you could expect plenty of smirks and “get a load of this guy” kiteboard jokes from parking-lot peanut galleries. But now, among the rows of stock-standard thrusters in your local core shop, as well as under the feet of Kelly Slater, you’ll increasingly find Tomo’s unconventional shapes. The son of legendary New South Wales shaper Mark Thomson, Tomo honed his world-class surfing at the bucolic…

MASON HO IS SITTING IN A RUSTY LAWN CHAIR in his overgrown yard in Sunset Beach, scratching his dog, Hurricane, behind the ears, reassuring him that he is, indeed, a good boy. “Well, except when you bite people,” Ho qualifies. Hurricane and his owner are both oddities: one is an old, three-legged pit bull mix, and the other is one of surfing’s strangest characters. Ho is best known for his unorthodox approach in the water, doing things like off-axis airs and cross-step floaters, sometimes on the same wave. He also gravitates toward weird surf spots, spending much of his time getting barreled and dodging jagged rocks at one of Oahu’s least-surfable slabs. While Ho’s playful, chaotic dance translates perfectly on video, which is how he’s made a name for himself…

It took two or three years of interviewing surfers before I figured out that the wave-riding part of the deal—turns, tubes, wipeouts, and whatnot—as a topic of discussion will leave you stranded at the corner of Cliche and Banal every time. Add competition surfing to the dialogue and at best you’ve got people’s attention up until the next event. No, surfing makes for worthwhile conversation only when it flits like Tinkerbell around a larger, more universal topic. With Phil Edwards, it was the oversold California Dream. With Kaipo Jaquais, it was fatherhood. With Pam Burridge, it was sexism. With Cheyne Horan, it was drugs, sexuality, apartheid; given that he was a high school dropout, and considering how stoned he was most of the times we talked (or maybe because of…

ADRIANO DE SOUZA HAILS FROM GUARUJÁ, BRAZIL, a touristy beach city 40 miles from Sao Paulo, Brazil’s economic epicenter. But he grew up worlds away from the luxury beachfront apartments where Sao Paulo’s upper-class families spend their weekends. De Souza comes from a neighborhood straddling the line between favela and working class—what could be called a ghetto—in an environment that grounded him and helped instill his fierce determination to succeed. De Souza was raised in a two-room house that also served as the family business; his hardworking parents ran a small liquor and grocery store from their home. “My father’s bar was literally inside our house,” de Souza recalls. “Only one wall separated it from our small living room and kitchen.” Angelo de Souza, Adriano’s brother, is 11 years older…