Tabla de contenidos para September 2015 en Surfer

Most surfers think they need to travel far and wide, racking up airline miles and bagage fees, to score perfect, uncrowded waves. Fergal Smith, on the other hand, has found incredible waves by going the opposite route. “This wave is an example of why I don’t travel anymore,” says Smith (pictured here). “I was traveling the world, chasing good waves, but generally I got the best waves at home in Ireland. They don’t come all the time, but when they do it’s nice to be grounded here, connected with the place I really love. I don’t need to go all around the globe looking for those waves. I’ll just wait until they arrive.”…

Réunion Island is the cruelest place in all of surfdom. The tiny Creole-flavored French outpost, 450 miles east of Madagascar, home to less than a million people, has been ripped by 17 shark attacks (seven fatal) in just four years. Swimming and surfing: banned. Tourism, once a thriving sector of the Réunion economy, is bleeding out. The Francophile commitment to biodiversity is the governmental line, but black-ops shark hunting is on the rise. What a change from 23 years ago, when this very magazine introduced Réunion to its readership as a place that brought “a new dimension to the concept of an island paradise.” Saint-Leu, Réunion’s hypnotic front-and-center reef-pass wave, was a “hybrid of Restaurants, Tamarin Bay, and Uluwatu.” Réunion was a place of dreams. Indeed it was the bright,…

“We’re moving Holly,” Fergal Smith said as he climbed into his van, pushing aside tools and a few seed jars to clear a space for me on the passenger side. Behind us, in a trailer hitched to his van, was Holly, a 250-pound pig that grunted happily as the old Ford rumbled into gear. “The pig was a big thing for me,” Smith said. “The moment you have an animal, you have a responsibility. There’s no turning back after that. It was a real game-changer.” It appeared that much had changed for Smith in recent years. Denim coveralls swamped his slight frame, and a flannel shirt and muddy gumboots rounded out the traditional Irish farmer look. But this was not just a strange new fashion choice. Smith, who was formerly…

“In Tasmania, the weather is usually horrible this time of year, with rain, squalls, and snow on the higher peaks,” says photographer Andrew Chisholm. “But this day in particular was sunny and fairly warm. This wave sits just outside of Hobart in a series of seven points that sweep inside a large bay. They’re all amazing waves on the right conditions, and when you fly into the local airport, you can actually see them all firing at once if you time it right.”…

Big data is all around us. It’s lurking over your shoulder even now (don’t look). Everything we’ve ever pointed our cursors at while perusing the Internet is recorded in a quietly humming database somewhere in Silicon Valley. Our phones drop little digital breadcrumbs everywhere we go, leaving a trackable and monetizable GPS trail. And now, for better or worse, depending on your personal threshold of technophilia, every detail about our surfing performance can be recorded, analyzed, archived, and—the holy grail of the Information Age—shared. TRACE, about the size and shape of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, is crammed full of inertial sensors, GPS antennae, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, among other pieces of whiz-bang digital gadgetry. When mounted on a surfboard (though smaller models that can be sunk into a surfboard’s deck…

JACKIE DUNN PIPELINE, 1977 [PHOTO: BARBOUR] "Everything about this photo completely blew my mind the moment I saw it. But as I get older, it only gets more mystic. The way the wave looks is completely out of this world: double-up, super glassy, with a dream roll-in to the back of Emerald City. On top of it all, it’s Jackie Dunn! I’ve always heard my dad speak very highly of him, so he’s been one of my heroes for a long time. I also love this photo because you can see where his hand skips off the face of the wave while he draws out the absolute perfect line.” [MASON HO] CHRISTIAN FLETCHER SALT CREEK, 1989 [PHOTO: SERVAIS] “This shot is so interesting because it’s old as hell—just look at…

You’re probably not accustomed to seeing Laura Enever charging solid barrels over shallow reef, but it’s a sight you should get used to. Enever loves big waves, and when she’s not scrapping for points on the Women’s World Tour, she’s keeping an eye on any purple blob that pops up on the forecast. Before jetting off on another strike mission, Enever chatted with us about rediscovering her passion for heavy waves, her new reef scars, and why women’s competitive surfing could use a few heavier venues. After I surf waves like P-Pass and Cloudbreak, I feel like, “OK, I just surfed real waves and now I can go to work.” I look at competition as my job, and chasing real waves is my passion. You can get caught up in…

If you’re the sort of surfer who takes time to read this magazine and aren’t simply flipping through the pages to drool over the photos, then I’m confident I can sketch a spot-on picture of you, dear reader. You’re a man, roughly 31 years old. You’re a goofyfoot, and you surf twice a week. You first got tubed on a trip to Costa Rica when you were 19. You work as a sales rep for a beer distribution company in Ocean City, New Jersey. You drive a 2009 Subaru Forester (blue; dent in right rear fender), you have an Australian sheepdog called Randy, your favorite band is The Pixies (well, you tell people that, but really it’s the Dave Matthews Band), your wife’s name is Robin, and she has a…

Alrik Yuill’s Costa Mesa, California, studio is practically a piece of art in itself. The floor is a collage of resin, foam dust, plaster, and clay all caked together in a beautiful mess on the concrete. Yuill is accustomed to this kind of disarray, spending nearly all his time in the space working on sculptures or mowing foam in the attached shaping bay. He even sleeps in a loft above the workspace. In the countless hours he spends working on stylized plaster waifs and unconventional hand-shapes, Yuill has developed a knack for using his hands to bring abstract concepts to life. Which came first: shaping or sculpting? I’ve been sculpting since I was 5, I guess. I used to do “sculptures” out of wax at the beach. I would go…

Photographer Nolan Hall grew up at Capistrano Beach, California. As a kid, he slid waves up and down the Orange County coast with style masters Alex Knost, Tyler Warren, and Robbie Kegel—though not quite as well as Alex Knost, Tyler Warren, or Robbie Kegel, so his career traversed a different path. Hall’s dad gave him an old Nikon shooter when he was a teenager and he’s been snapping shutters ever since. His day job is wrangling the Vans surf team all over the world, a colorful crew that overflows with both inspiration and subject matter. Hall is also a card-carrying member of the Deadbeat Club, the painfully cool zine-printing artist collective helmed by Ed Templeton. Hall shoots on film, mostly black-and-whites, though with an occasional splash of color. His candid,…