Table of contents for December 2017 in Surfer

I felt like the odd man out sitting on the boil at Rockpile, flanked on either side by a half dozen pros known for rushing the heaviest Hawaiian surf. Seeing as how I’m known for writing things like this magazine intro from the safety of my San Diego office, and not for throwing myself over mutant ledges in front of a literal pile of rocks, I thought maybe I’d crashed the wrong party. There was one surfer, however, who seemed even more out of place among the logo-clad surfing elite. An anonymous, middle-aged man had paddled through the gauntlet of pros earlier in the session, wearing a helmet and a bulky life vest, on an oversized board that had “garage-sale find” written all over it. He had moved well past…

Look at the two fresh-faced Aussie pros in the above profile from May 1999. Danny Wills and Mick Campbell had just wrapped an astonishing year on the World Tour, streaked into the pro surf scene like meteors in 1998, shone as bright as suns, and they did it against some of the all-time greatest competitors, no less. World-title races in the 1990s were not exactly kind to lesser-known competitors. The decade was bookended by Tom Curren winning his third and last championship (1990) and Occy winning his first (1999). In between, Kelly Slater won six titles, Damien Hardman picked up his second and Derek Ho brought the trophy home for Hawaii. Just a step or two below these heavyweights on the podium were names like Rob Machado, Shane Beschen and…

IT was just past 11 a.m. a few weeks before the start of the Hurley Pro, and a solid south swell was producing overhead sets at Lower Trestles. The air was hot and sticky and the lineup was crowded, looking like a tepid pool dotted with gnats between sets. As I stood near the water’s edge, I watched Gabriel Medina, Ian Gouveia and Filipe Toledo trade lefts in preparation for the upcoming World Tour event. But it wasn’t Brazil’s best that brought me to the cobblestone break. I was there to meet the pride of another nation — one seldom mentioned in discussions about top-tier surfing. Conversations in Mandarin filled the air as seven visiting Chinese surfers — three women and four men, ranging from 14 to 27 years old…

In a rush to gather his things from the competitors’ area at Jeffreys Bay after breaking his foot, 11-time world champion Kelly Slater accidentally left behind a small piece of yellow notebook paper titled “Last One: To-Do List.” From the contents of the note, it seems that Slater is in fact talking about another world title — the grand finale of the GOAT’s career. Here is a scanned image of his list. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)…

“You have no idea what you are capable of until you challenge yourself. You are so much stronger than you think.” Sometimes girls feel like they have to prove themselves. Growing up on Kauai, I felt like the guys were especially hard on me because I was a girl. Even when I would do something awesome, they wouldn’t give me a lot of credit for it. But when we got a little older, that all changed. You have to be scrappy and resilient when you’re the underdog. Having that mentality is always beneficial, because life will throw shit at you. When someone is critical of you when you’re young, it can leave a really negative mark. I was told so many discouraging things as a grom. I’ve been called everything…

Do you have other interests besides surfing? Other life-consuming hobbies or sports, complete with their own unique cultures, charmingly peculiar vocabularies, verbal signifiers of who’s part of the in crowd and who’s not? Can you move freely between the languages of surf and your other interests? I ask because I’ve spent the past few years spiraling deeply down the fly-fishing rabbit hole. Surely fly-fishing has a codified lingo, a jargon indecipherable to the outsider that immediately separates the newbs (me) from the long-timers (Ted, the fly-shop dude). But if it does, I have yet to learn it. When I walk into a fly-shop (which, by the way, does not feel all that different from a surf shop — neoprene-footed waders even give the place a rubbery, surf-shop odor), my vocabulary…

Admit it: Before Connor O’Leary blitzed the World Qualifying Series in 2016 — winning the whole damn thing and qualifying for the World Tour — you had no idea who he was. And that’s OK. Neither did we. The half-Irish, half-Japanese goofyfoot from Cronulla, Australia, has always flown under the radar. He never won a junior championship title — hell, he never even qualified to compete for one — he’s never had a six-figure contract and he’s never been hailed as “the next big thing” by pro-surf pundits. So when he won the Qualifying Series (QS), besting a highly touted group of World Tour qualifiers that included Leonardo Fioravanti, Ezekiel Lau, Ethan Ewing and Frederico Morais, a lot of people (us included) asked, “Connor … who?” But even if you…