Tabla de contenidos para November 2015 en Surfer

Nearly four years ago, Keala Kennelly took a spill and went face-frst into the razor-sharp reef at Teahupoo. She needed 40 stitches across her face and left the End of the Road with serious doubts about ever returning. But when this massive swell hit Teahupoo in July, she just couldn’t hold herself back. “I had a serious conversation with myself,” says Kennelly. ”I was so traumatized from that horrifc injury. But when I tow into those massive cylinders of water at Teahupoo and get spit out, there is nothing else in the world that makes me feel more alive. The thought of living out the rest of my life without experiencing that ever again, I think I was more afraid of that than the actual wave itself. Not that I…

Just over a year ago, 31-year-old Matt Hannon left his stable job directing commercials in Melbourne, Australia, and flew to Washington to buy a Kawasaki KLR 650. He fitted the motorcycle with a checkered aluminum sidecar that would securely store his surfboards and camping gear throughout the long trip ahead. The plan was to ride from the tip of Alaska to the base of Patagonia, searching for waves along the way. Now 20,908 miles into the trek, Hannon calls us to chat about his journey and what inspired this moto-surf trip. Tell us a little about your itinerary. The goal is pretty straightforward: I’m riding my motorcycle from the top of the world to the bottom, following the swell seasons down through North, Central, and South America and documenting different…

Best time and place to be a surfer? Malibu, after the war, before Gidget. Dave Sweet would take your board order right there on the beach. Matt Kivlin, same thing. Joe Quigg, too, if you didn’t mind waiting. Simmons was still around. Hell, Velzy had a woodworking shop just south of the pier. There were only a few hundred surfers in L.A. at the time, so demand wasn’t high, but in a lo-fi, handmade, incredibly scaled-down fashion, Sweet and Velzy and the rest did for board design what Lockheed and Douglas did for aerospace. Round rails instead of square. Rocker instead of flat. Fiberglass and resin instead of lag bolts and spar varnish. The shortboard revolution was a bun fight in comparison. But why here? Why Malibu? Many reasons, industrial…

If you stand on the right part of the beach in Cape St. Francis, South Africa, facing the right direction, you can almost trick yourself into thinking it’s 1963, and that Bruce Brown, Mike Hynson, and Robert August are going to pop out from behind a sand dune at any moment and paddle out for a solitary session. From that angle, all you see is a lineup filled with sandbars being fed by a dreamscape of windswept dunes. It’s hard to get the angle right, though. You have to walk way down the beach from the lighthouse at Seal Point, past hundreds of vacation homes, stop with your back to Cape St. Francis Resort, and face due north. I can drop a pin for you if you’d like. From a…

It was a hot summer afternoon and I was paddling frantically. The water was warm and the conditions were glassy, but I was having a particularly frustrating time. My arm muscles were cramping and I felt like I wasn’t going anywhere—probably because I wasn’t. I was on a surfboard paddling my ass off inside something called a flume, which is essentially a 16-by-9-foot aquatic version of a treadmill with a controllable current of water flowing from one end of the flume to the other. I had heart-rate monitors fastened around my wrist and sternum that were tracking my pulse, and a VO2 mask strapped tightly to my face to measure how well I was utilizing oxygen. I had volunteered to become the latest lab rat in a series of surf…

A massive event scaffold loomed above the white-sand beach and EDM beats washed over a crowd of teens busy scribbling things like “free hugs” on each other with Sharpies. Luxurious beachfront hotels overlooked a lineup occupied by world-class competitive surfers struggling to ride dribbling 2-foot waves. It felt as if I had fallen through a crack in the Earth, straight through the core, and somehow emerged at the U.S. Open. Kauaian Alex Smith bobbed around in a listless ocean while his fellow competitors tried to conjure scores out of ripples. In years past, the Ballito event had been pummeled by waves barreling so hard that their lips pitched out at 90-degree angles. This year, it was hard to tell if the event was even at a surf spot. I was…

This past June, when San Francisco surfer McNair Evans and friends left California for Indonesia just in time for the best swell in decades, they had no idea that Murphy’s Law would punch their long-planned surf trip right in the mouth. Here’s a timeline of maybe the most frustrating Indo mission ever, through no fault of their own. ■ MARCH–APRIL Indo plan hatched while surfing blown-out, freezing San Francisco. Charter a sailboat to the little-surfed Banyak Islands. Leave on June 21. Yew! (Coincidentally, 99 percent of trips to Indo are planned while wearing a hood and booties.) ■ MAY 29 Entire balance of boat charter paid for. Spoiler alert: This boat will never actually arrive. ■ JUNE 16 Charter company relays message from boat captain: “He can’t get to the…

Of all the movies in which aliens learn everything they know about life on Earth from watching our TV shows and films, Galaxy Quest is by far the best. Tim Allen acts his ass off as the star of a hokey space-adventure drama modeled on Star Trek. A hapless planet full of literally humorless aliens has been watching the show for years and has mistaken it for a historical documentary series. It’s absolutely brilliant, and you should watch it. I recently did, and then I spent the next few hours deep in thought. What kind of images have we been broadcasting out there to the non-surfing world for the last 25 years? To find out, I poured myself a beer, picked out a handful of DVDs completely at random from…

The Indonesian dream is still alive. There are windows where you can still score great waves at the popular spots and be all alone. It’s just a matter of really knowing the winds and the weather. I don’t miss where I grew up in Australia at all. Not with its $23 packs of cigarettes. Indonesia is a poor country, but the surf is perfect six months out of the year, the food is absolutely great, and it’s the land of endless smiles. I haven’t put on a wetsuit in longer than I can remember. The majority of the year, I surf all day. For a surfer, I’ve got the best job in the world. Even after all these years, I’m still just as excited when I motor up to a…

Heath Joske was 16 hours from his birthplace of Nambucca Heads, Australia, driving across the Simpson Desert at dusk with 17 surfboards strapped to the roof of his beaten ’90s Honda, when he hit a kangaroo and totalled his car. He laughs as he retells the story: “The whole front of the car was rooted. I ended up hitching a ride with a couple of good cobbers that had an empty trailer. I was sitting up front, but I hadn’t had a shower in a day and a half; I can’t even imagine my stench. We spent the next 11 hours together backtracking to the town of Wagga Wagga.” Joske was headed home after competing in the Burton Pro, a World Qualifying Series (WQS) event held this past February in…