Tabla de contenidos para October 2015 en Surfer

If you were determined to charge The Right’s monstrous caverns during a mega-swell, a finely tuned tow board would most likely be your equipment of choice. But for big-wave rider Mark Mathews, that couldn’t be further from the truth. “It was 15 to 20 feet for four days straight,” says Mathews. “This was the last day of the swell, so I took out my 5'6" soft top. It’s crazy how riding a soft top completely tricks your brain into thinking you can’t possibly get hurt. It lightens the mood in a heavy situation.”…

Fifteen or so years ago, I lucked into a miracle surf session in Baja. After hours of dusty, axle-grinding driving along the wind-blasted coast near [REDACTED], my friend pulled his truck off the jeep trail near a crumbling precipice overlooking a secluded rock-strewn pointbreak. The spot wasn’t on any of our surf maps, but a few days earlier we’d thought we’d seen rideable waves breaking there, albeit among a minefield of boulders. We got out of the truck, walked to the cliff ’s edge, peered over, and watched an azure right-hander peel flawlessly between two big rocks. Just as the last section threw over, a figure streaked out of the tube, trailed by a fine mist of spit. We raced down the cliff and stumbled right into paradise. A topless…

During summertime in California, we deal with a lot of small waves, so to stay stoked you have to find boards that let you get creative in those conditions. The theory behind this quiver is to get the most fun out of anything under shoulder-high. To do that on a shortboard, you’re going to need some extra width and thickness, and some variation in the tails and fins. With tails, I think there are two routes you can take in small surf: wider tails that make the board feel skate-y, which is really fun in mushier waves, or pulled-in tails for more drive in waves with more of a bowl. For fins, I like to go with quads or big side fins and a small trailer fin. Those setups make…

When surfers who were around in the early ’80s think of the name Ace Cool, they likely think of Alec “Ace Cool” Cooke’s grabs at big-wave notoriety. Because he’d do nearly anything to climb the ranks of the North Shore’s big-wave-surfing elite, Cooke routinely boasted that he’d take on the challenge of riding huge surf at Oahu’s Kaena Point, considered at the time to be the most ferocious big-wave break on the planet. After surfing a few large, but not spectacularly large, waves at Kaena Point in 1984, Cooke shifted his gaze to the far greater potential for legend-making rides along Pipeline’s Third Reef. He’d enlisted the aid of photographer Warren Bolster, who’d been snapping photos of Oahu’s huge winter surf from the air and was intrigued by Cooke’s act.…

Here’s Australian surfer and motocross madman Robbie Maddison, outrunning the lip of a Tahitian bomb. It took a custom-built surf-cycle outfitted with three attached skis, modified paddle tires, and emergency airbags to pull off. That, and a mildly insane rider. Maddison has backflipped the Tower Bridge in London, cleared the Corinth Canal in Greece, and scaled the Arc de Triomphe in Las Vegas on the back of a bike. All that, and he tells SURFER, “I’ve never felt like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time more than I did right here.” And that was before the four-wave hold down.…

About six years ago, while I was attending college in Santa Barbara, California, I had a chance encounter with one of the greatest surfers of all time. Our paths didn’t cross in the lineup at Sandspit on a pulsing swell, inside The Cove at Rincon on low tide, or anywhere else you might expect to see one of the greats. I was at a smoothie shop on State Street, waiting by the counter for my peanut-butter-and-banana beverage, when he appeared: the most stylish surfer in history, the three-time world champion, the mythical Tom Curren. Curren glanced over at me, probably confused by my staring, and then he approached the counter. “Uhhh…hmmm…yeah…I’ll have the tropical pineapple,” he said to the cashier. “Errr…wait…no…I’ll get the red pineapple.” Then he handed her a…

When he’s not surfing around Orange County, California, 33-year-old Brandon Jennings is likely in his garage, spending hours tinkering with old Nikonos underwater cameras. As a passion project, he finds and repairs the discontinued 35mm waterproof setups, ships them to people all over the world, and updates his blog (Nikonosproject.com) with the photos that he gets back from participants. The resulting images are as unique as the surfers who shoot them, and with hundreds of cameras out on loan, the project has taken on a life of its own. What led to the inception of the Nikonos Project? When I moved to Orange County, I took a superstressful office job and decided to learn how to shoot digital cameras at Lowers and Salt Creek as a release. I started getting…

“All I can tell Rabbit,” North Shore legend Craig “Owl” Chapman once said, “is that Kirra Point sucks.” Chapman was comparing Kirra to Maalaea, a ludicrously fast right-hand barrel that breaks on Maui’s south shore. The wave is fickle as hell and can go years without producing a tube big enough to stand in. But when it does, it becomes one of the world’s longest, most impressive barrels. Think Nias, but faster and windier. In theory, a surfer could travel for nearly 300 yards in a barrel at Maalaea. Chapman loved Maalaea, and in the mid-’70s he was nearly untouchable at the break. The Shortboard Revolution had only recently allowed proper tube-riding, and Chapman busied himself with getting deeper than anyone. One of Chapman’s sessions at the Maalaea drag strip…

Equal parts eccentric genius and humble introvert, Tom Curren is surfing’s most mythic figure. Because he does so few interviews—in fact, we tried to talk with him for this piece, to no avail—he’s strangely unknowable, despite being one of the most popular surfers in history. To shed some light on the legend, we asked some of his contemporaries and friends to share their favorite Curren stories. They didn’t disappoint. SHAUN TOMSON 1977 World Champion I first surfed against Tom in a contest at the 1981 Katin Pro/Am in Huntington Beach. He was 16. A lot of top competitors were in the event and Tom was still surfing as an amateur. I remember coming against him in the final, and the surf was perfect, 4 to 6 feet. I just—just—scraped out…

Men’s R1® Front-Zip Full Suit The best wetsuits are the ones that feel like they’re not even there. They should provide the stretch and performance you need without sacrificing durability, as we believe wetsuits should last longer than one season. But that’s not all—they should also be made in a way that causes the least environmental harm. Achieving this means paying attention to each and every material used. That’s why our R1® suits are lined with high-stretch 100% recycled polyester, and the exterior face fabric blends 88% recycled polyester with 12% spandex for increased flex and stretch. They’re made with the most recycled content possible. By choosing recycled, we’re able to give new life to scrap material while decreasing our reliance on the petrochemicals used to make conventional polyester. It…

One Bar To Rule Them All In the winter, San Francisco’s Ocean Beach is 3 miles of shifty, hulking peaks blitzing two distinct rows of sandbars. On mortal-sized days—say, up to 6 feet or so—the action takes place along the Inner Bar. When the Aleutian storm factory is in full production, huge waves begin unloading like howitzers hundreds of yards out to sea along the Outer Bar. On the astonishingly big days, mammoth swells rise to dizzying heights a full 3 miles into the Pacific on the granddaddy of all sandbars: the Great Bar of San Francisco, an enormous horseshoe of sand that extends from the Potato Patch, outside of the Marin Headlands, to the South Patch, which runs to Ocean Beach, a full 5 miles away. Nobody had been…

In a weathered hut near a crescentshaped beach, Bapak Carel lit his lantern and began telling us the story of his island. Carel had lived on Morotai his whole life and thought he was somewhere between 98 and 109 years old; he couldn’t say for sure. His voice was shaved down by the ages to little more than a whisper, and he told us about a very different time in his small village when he was a young man. Back then, he was strong enough to climb trees to fetch coconuts, which he was often asked to do by the Japanese soldiers camping in the jungle nearby. At the time, there were hundreds of Japanese soldiers living on the island. It was 1944, Morotai had strategic importance in the Pacific…

With nearly every pro surfer on the planet flying to the South Pacific in June to chase the hyped-up “swell of the century,” it’s hard to believe that perfect waves like this weren’t congested. “Because so many spots in Indonesia were forecasted to be good, Nias wasn’t too crowded. Nobody was hassling each other out there,” says Anthony Walsh (pictured here). “This was the first time I had been to Nias in over eight years, because I’m usually searching for empty left-handers. But the conditions were looking so good that it seemed worth going backside for a change.”…