Table of contents for August #59.4 2018 in Surfer

The first rays of sunlight are just beginning to rise over the dusty rubble of a once bustling coastal city. As the barren landscape warms, an offshore flow kicks into gear, grooming perfect (albeit highly-acidic and plastic-filled) peelers at the adjacent beach break. Our dystopian protagonist, who we’ll call Wasteland Wayne, pulls a yellowed single-fin out of his rust-bucket ‘80s muscle car and starts changing out of his leather jacket and pants, which are entirely too hot and impractical for the post-apocalypse, but everyone else seems to be wearing them, and the only thing worse than getting killed by mutant cannibals is being teased about your lack of modern fashion sense beforehand. After Wayne finishes waxing his board with a nub of Sex Wax that he won in a knife…

If you were to use a yardstick to compare the biggest airs of 1990 with the biggest airs of 2018, you’d see that above-the-lip maneuvers have grown vastly higher over the past three decades. But if you took that same yardstick and compared airs done by surfers with those done by snowboarders or skateboarders, you’ll quickly see that the latter two easily out-launch and out-rotate surfers any day. Find Danny Way’s 25.5-foot air on YouTube and contrast it with the 6-ish-foot alley oop Jack Robinson landed in West Oz back in March. It’s not even in the same league, let alone ballpark. Paralleling wave-borne punts with those done in snowy halfpipes or in concrete pools begs an obvious question: why the enormous difference? Will surfers ever be able to slingshot…

“The idea came from Gideon Silverman, an entrepreneur and a lifelong surfer who used to be a product manager at Google,” says Taylor Paul, the media director for the new board-sharing platform, Awayco. “He was on Maui traveling with his wife and he was trying to find a decent rental board and just couldn’t find one. He was like, ‘How is this not easier? Traveling with boards can be a pain, so why isn’t there a way you could travel without boards?’” Since their launch, Awayco has opened nearly 30 locations worldwide, stacked full of shortboarts, twin fins, asymmetricals, longboards and everything in between. And for $60 a month, members have access to whatever stick they want—either at home or while looking for waves abroad. In theory, Awayco could revolutionize…

The courtroom felt comically small, like a halogen-lit shoebox, even before people started cramming in. Tucked away on the basement floor of the Wellington High Court, the nondescript space seemed unceremonious, like where you’d go to protest a traffic ticket—not a venue for legal proceedings that could decide the fate of nearly 2,000 square miles of marine habitat. Yet one by one, a small regiment of black-robed lawyers filed into the room to speak for or against a highly-controversial seabed mining proposal. Behind them were dozens of spectators clamoring for the handful of seats in the cramped gallery, with spillovers grabbing chairs from the hall outside and blocking the walkway. The judge frowned at this chaos from the bench and signaled the court officer to clear a path, and, while…

Stop for a second and think about how amazing surf forecasting is at this moment in time. Thanks to modern technology, you can wake up, unlock your smartphone, and, while still in bed, pull up a global swell model to discover that a large purple blob will send waves to your local break two weeks from now (at which point you’ll likely be too “sick” to go to work). Sixty years ago, the heads of our surfy forefathers—who actually had to step on the sand and look at a real-life ocean to know if there were waves—would have exploded at such a thought. But even though computer-generated forecasting has improved exponentially over the past few decades, knowing when and where to surf during a swell still requires some guesswork. Raise…

Remember how just a few years ago, the thought of high-quality artificial waves with lengthy tube sections and air ramps seemed like the stuff of science fiction? Well, it’s amazing how quickly science fiction turned into science fact, and today our Instagram feeds are chock-full of surfers locking into 10-second drainers in Lemoore, California, or aerial artistes performing all manner of inversions above the lip in Waco, Texas. So now that we’re officially living in the surfy equivalent of a Blade Runner movie, where the lines are blurred between the natural and the artificial, what comes next? Well, for one thing, those lines may get a whole lot blurrier. “We currently have the technology to go out to any reef in the world, take photos of that reef and recreate…

The province of Nonthaburi, Thailand, lies just north of Bangkok and for many years the area has mostly been known for producing durian, a thorny-rind-covered fruit that tastes very good, but smells so much like rotten garbage that it’s banned from many hotels and forms of public transit across Southeast Asia. In recent decades, commercial sprawl spreading out from Bangkok has crept into Nonthaburi, with condominiums, office towers and industrial parks sprouting everywhere. The city of Nonthaburi, the province’s urban center, is really just a suburb of Bangkok, and home to some 265,000 people living along the winding Chao Phraya River as it snakes its way south, draining into the Bay of Thailand. Every single day, some of those 265,000 people, who may have once worked harvesting and packaging smelly-but-delicious…

CARLSBAD, CA — Yesterday, from Crescent City to San Diego, California, surfers paddled out en masse and proceeded to snake, back-paddle, burn, roast, sneer, snicker, dunk, brawl, cut leashes and smash fins as part of the surf community’s newly enacted “Purge” session. The statewide event encourages surfers to act on their baser instincts, committing the most heinous crimes in surfing, in hopes that they will “get it all out of their system,” according to Purge proponents. “The idea came from a horror movie that came out a few years ago,” says Newport Beach surfer and Purge supporter Mitch Mortenson. “In the movie, all crime is made legal for one night a year and for the rest of the time the crime rate drops to nothing. Some of my friends and…

Back in January of 2016, during one of the biggest swells of the recent El Nino season, Oahu native Aaron Gold sat out in the lineup at Jaws on a self-shaped gun. He was running on adrenaline, having gotten little sleep the night before, and when the wave of the day rolled into the lineup, he turned his board towards the shore and started scratching. “When I got to my feet, I didn’t really know just how big the wave was. But it felt like I was dropping in down the face forever,” Gold said in an interview afterward. He later learned that wave—a solid 63-footer—earned him the new world record for catching the biggest paddle-in wave to date. The feat was awe-inspiring to say the least—but it also wasn’t…

A few months ago, photographer Duncan Macfarlane organized an Indonesian boat trip and invited an assorted mix of characters — competitor Jack Freestone, West Oz slab-hunter Jay Davies, ride-anything stylemaster Tyler Warren and above-the-lip wizards Mitch Coleborn and Ryan Callinan—to join him for a week of barrel-and-ramp-filled bliss. “Variety is the spice of life,” says Macfarlane of the crew’s diverse takes on high-performance surfing. As you’ll see in the following pages, Macfarlane brought a pen, a journal and printer on the boat to document the trip in real-time. “We’ve all traveled for years together and all get along so well and are all interested in what each other is doing. Ryan [Callinan] is one of the best high-performance surfers in the world, but all he wanted to do was surf unusual boards…

“This is pretty much the most perfect breach-break wave I’ve ever seen,” says photographer Al Mackinnon of this golden-hued right south of the border. “Greg and I had been traveling a bit together, and when he saw the direction of this swell and the Santa Ana winds, he knew this beach break could be on. The surf ended up pumping all day. It wasn’t necessarily the biggest day, but the waves were the kind of inviting barrels where you know as soon as you pull in that you’ll make it out.”…