Innholdsfortegnelse for #367 - Winter 2023 i Surfing Life

For many, living a life revolving around surfing is a distant dream. But for Jarvis Earle, chasing waves around the world is his reality. It’s no wonder the eighteen-year-old goofy-footer from Cronulla has a grin so contagious it would send us into self-iso. From supergrom to fully-fledged professional athlete, Earle’s metamorphosis is on the verge of completion—except he’ll take flight from his chrysalis with carbon-fibre wings. With school in his wake, Jarvis plans on committing 2023 wholeheartedly to his surfing career. “It was kind of stressful [last year] with all the exams, coming home from a trip and getting straight into the books,” Jarvis chuckles then adds, “but I found a pretty good balance. I was still surfing every day and training a bit and still going pretty decent in…

Congratulations to Josh Tabone! Rising through the ranks, like a mid-season-cut pro on the Challenger Series, Tabone placed tenth in the POTY’s inaugural comp, fourth last year and is now feasting on chicken dinner. No need to fansplain why his masterpiece won the 2023 Photo of the Year. Tell us about what went into shooting this photo. I have a real soft spot for this wave. It’s incredibly fickle, but when it’s on, it’s one of the best in the world. We had driven around like idiots the two days prior and got nothing. We were tired, running on little sleep, and I said to Craig, “Let’s get up at sparrows, one last time—could be good.” He was keen. He’s always keen deep down, haha. Walking out there, it was…

Through peaks and pockets of our liveswe welcome their deepest traitforcing us to bemore intelligentmore courageousmore innate. In this modern wildernesswe, too, must be a waveeither stagnate and dissolveor use life’s stormy windsto grow and evolve. Winter to Spring Spring Issue: On sale September 7…

A once-bustling hospital in 2011 lays dormant, cold and desolate, in the early hours of a rainy Melbourne night. Patient monitors stir, buzzing away like crickets, guardian angels keeping watch in the darkness. A weary brigade of nurses shuffle through the drowsy hallways, checking vital signs, doing their best not to wake the fragile faces enveloped in the mask of sleep. Halfway down the hallway, where the sicker children reside, lies a small freckled girl in a bed more familiar than her home. Her eyes are closed, her angelic features look tranquil as the lights of the monitors swathe her face in an alien-green glow. These walls have been her home from the first hours of her delicate life. But life has told her from day dot, “She can’t.” Her…

Let’s get one thing straight; there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to surf a twinnie. The beautiful part of this particular surf craft is the freedom it allows the operator: mentally, physically, and spiritually. The great Mark Richards is credited with popularising the twin fin in 1977 with his Free Ride-era self-shaped twin fins. But, if you go back in surfing history to the late 1940s, you’ll hear tales of San Diego, California designer and surfer Bob Simmons, riding his unique take on the twin fin, along with experimental twin-fin designs made by Bear Mirandon, Steve Lis, as well as the Eaton-McCoy and other under-the-radar designs happening in pockets around the world. When Mark Richards burst onto the scene with a signature twinnie under his feet, the surf world felt…

What is the allure for surfers to travel? Most surfers have their best session at their home break, mainly because they are there for the best swell and wind all year long and can react when it’s on. So why travel? Long before Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer, surfers have had the itch to travel. You’d probably need to go back to Peter Troy, often noted as the first of the travelling surfers, heading into the unknown. So, if it’s not for the best waves of your life, what is it? And why would you head to Chile? Drawing on our collective experience and knowledge, we believe it’s simply for the adventure—the experience, and if you do it right, it’s to immerse yourself in the local culture in an authentic…

Groms: I predate the term. When I started surfing in the very early 1960s, they didn’t exist. Occasionally, you’d hear the term “gremmie” since, in those days, practically everything in our surf culture was borrowed from California, but I can’t remember ever being called a gremmie to my face. Mostly, it was “Hey, you!” or “Come here, little @#! [Richard Cranium]”, which is not to say that grem (or grom) abuse didn’t already exist. It did. Believe me, it did. My home beach, at the northern end of a long bay, was relatively isolated, with the surf club and the flagged swimming area way down the other end, so it was wide open to antisocial behaviour by the older boys—both in the surf and in the adjacent sand dunes. Undoubtedly,…

Carbon is crazy stuff. One of the most common elements in the universe, the basis of all life on Earth, the foundation of organic chemistry, and part of one of the most common atmospheric gases—carbon dioxide, which imperils the planet via its role as a greenhouse gas. A major part of carbon’s ubiquity is its ability to form stable polymers such as carbon fibre. Like its parent element, carbon fibre is also mad stuff. Carbon fibre is five times stronger than steel and twice as stiff. Carbon fibres can be extruded thinner than human hair and woven into mats, which can be glassed with resins to create light, stiff, waterproof structures resistant to chemical attack. These properties make it ideal for manufacturing surfboards. Carbon fibres have been used to make…