Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 424 i Surfing World Magazine

Back in July, Kai McKenzie was surfing Port Macquarie’s North Wall on a Tuesday morning when he was hit by a great white, a big one. The shark smashed through the tail of his board and took his right leg. Kai was lucky to live – a bloke walking his dog on the beach used the dog lead as a tourniquet, and they got him to hospital in time to save his life. Kai, now recovering, is planning not to waste his second chance. Great white attacks on surfers have become an increasingly common story around the Australian coast in recent years, as white shark numbers return to some kind of natural level and surfers find themselves floating around in an evolving environment. But what’s not common is Kai’s attitude…

In many ways, Instagram is fucked. The app, along with its coterie of imitators, has much to answer for. It has ruined our attention spans. Done untold damage to our mental health. Eroded the very fabric of our society through its malignant algorithm of confected narcissism. But it’s also introduced us to surfers like Dakoda Walters. The NSW North Coast local had been known on the scene from a young age. He was a mainstay in the grom comps while setting alight the core crowd. But he really hit the collective ‘gram consciousness when he and younger brother Harley started posting clips riding boards from their old man Jeremy’s vault. It was futuristic surfing on some pretty primitive equipment. Many ‘like’ buttons were tapped. Dakoda’s style has only rounded out…

Nothing goes to waste around Addy Jones. Anything organic goes back into the ground to become soil. Old surfboards get second and third lives. Council tips brim with opportunity. Roadkill? A quick kick to determine freshness, and into the truck. The cult star of Patagonia’s surf/gardening mashup series, Farm Boys, Addy once ran his own vintage surfboard shop in Byron, passed down to him by Byron legend Ben King. He then moved south to Tassie, and these days lives on Flinders Island in Bass Strait, where he’s got a parcel of land and lives with his wombats, overlooking his own righthand point. His business these days is “Earth repair” although it’s not really a business. He’ll show up on your property for two weeks with an excavator and garden tools…

It’s only after I get off the phone with Sam Jones that it dawns on me. For half an hour, we’ve just talked about the wave he loves, the wave where he’s regarded as the best guy in the water, and he didn’t mention it by name, once. I’m not sure whether it’s superstition, or a reluctance to buy into the hype around the place, but he didn’t invoke the name ‘Deadman’s’, not once. But that’s also Sam’s style. I first ran into him by chance a few years back down at Shipstern on a late autumn morning. There was a decent-sized paddle swell in the water, but an onshore front was forecast to smash in by lunchtime. We’d hoped that would keep the morning crowd down, and walked in…

If you’re hanging out in the Djarrk car park in the last week of May each year, you’ll hear him before you see him. The booming voice with more gravel than the car park itself, the most distinctive voice in Australian surfing, travelling on the wind through the moonah trees, the bellowing laugh and the scratchy “Yeah brother!” as he catches up with a mate he hasn’t seen since last year, the whole scene flooded with big-hearted vibes. It might not be his Country but he’s good for a welcome, anyway. Robbie Page has been turning up to the Australian Indigenous Titles for over a decade now at Djarrk, and the place has become a second home. A few years ago, they closed the border on him, and he was…

It feels strange to talk about Nathan Hedge as ‘middle-aged’. Famous at 14, the fact the lion-hearted Narrabeen goofyfooter is now 45 might make a few of us stop and consider the ticking of our own clocks. But for surfers at least, ‘middle-age’ is a term that has pretty much lost all meaning these days. Hedgey is one of the guys responsible. But as with most middle-aged men at some point, things for Hedgey have become complicated. He’d already been through the post-tour crash, the loss of his dad, drinking and rehab. He’s now been sober for over a decade. In recent years however, it’s been life as a single dad to daughter, Summer. “A few moves up and down the coast” is how he sums up his past few…

“Well, I’m not that interesting, in my own mind. I am still working out who I am. I’m frothing on surfing so much sometimes that I neglect other parts of my life. I love chasing swells and getting epic waves, but I’ll just as soon grovel on an epoxy when I get there if the waves don’t show up. “My first surf coach was Munga Barry. He taught me a lot. It’s been a good thing to have my surfing influenced by a surfer like him. Munga’s an oracle in the ocean. He would go to the North Shore for the contests and stay when everyone else left and I carry that on from him. Hawaii is such a vibrant culture with such great history. It’s character building. Locals are…

Thomas Robinson’s first surf in eight years was almost his last. It was in Ireland, a few winters back during the filming of Harry Bryant’s Motel Hell. He was there to shoot photos. “He’d told me before we went,” recalls the film’s director, Dav Fox, “‘I want to get a bomb at Riley’s’ and I was thinking, yeah, sweet, whatever. Like, it’s a fucking gnarly wave to try and surf. We rocked up that day and it was super heavy. Haz was way too hungover to surf. Craig and Wade were there but neither of them wanted anything to do with it. But ‘Lob’ was like, ‘I’m just gonna go get one.’” In the plus column, Thomas had been a pro bodyboarder in a previous life and had actually travelled…

There must be something in the water at the North Shelley Boardriders. The club has become a production line of intergenerational quality. Not only do the Central Coast crew rip, they look like they’re having fun doing it. Nobody embodies that spirit better than club junior, Hughie Vaughan. We’ve all seen the clips. We know the talent. It runs in the family. But it’s the character in Hughie that gets him on this list. That cheeky grin. The shock of blond hair. Chuck him in a pair of Birdwells on a Hobie skateboard and Hughie could be straight out of the pages of a 1960s Surfer mag. “He’s a quintessential grom,” says his team manager, Stace Galbraith. “It’s so hard to find kids these days with that kind of character.”…

We all paddle, slide, get rinsed. In all the ways that matter, the fundamentals of riding waves pretty much stay the same across time and place. But it’s tough to ignore that surf culture is changing. The lineup looks different than just 10 or 15 years ago. The industry is catching up, or flailing. TBD. Right of centre, the new crop of competitive female surfers has risen with nearly normalised support from brands, the industry and media. A foundation of financial and community backing allows them to stretch personal and performance boundaries. It’s an exciting time. Caity Simmers’ Pipe declaration and Molly Picklum’s Sunset snap captured many of our imaginations – a rarity from the rubric of competitive surfing. Left of centre, surfers like Ruby Southwell are nonchalantly broadening the…

Laura Enever is just returning from the vet, where her dog Ziggy has just had ‘the chop’. Poor little guy doesn’t sound real happy with Laura as he barks away in the background, a couple of notes higher than he did yesterday. There might be a metaphor here for what Laura – and a movement of other women with 9’0”s strapped to the rooves of their cars – have done in recent days to the alpha dog world of big-wave surfing. Laura will be the first to admit she is an unlikely Big Wave Dave. Laura is not Laird. A party girl, Narrabeen slasher, prone to blowing away in strong offshores, Laura breaks the underwater rock-running stereotype, and yet here she is. Even she finds it hard to believe. When…

We’re now 40 years into the Kelly Slater Experiment. On video, in magazines, at the tip of our scrolling thumbs, and for a lucky few of us, in person. We’ve watched as Slater has performed untold miraculous feats. His competitive record, his longevity, needs no recounting here. At times he has been more God than human. “Profundity in motion”, to quote the late David Foster Wallace. Kelly captivates us just as much on land as he does in the water. We’ve ridden through almost every era of his life with him. The ‘80s and ‘90s poster child. The celebrity girlfriends. The bands. The Hollywood stint. The zany business ideas. The rivalries. The pool. The irrepressible competitor constant in all aspects of it. Kelly has always been there for us. Accessible.…

“When I was 12, I got my first twin-fin for my birthday, and that was when I first experienced a different approach to riding a wave. It connected really quickly. Like, ‘Oh, this is something that feels good.’ “While I was still competing on tour, I went on my first proper Quiksilver trip, a Radical Times shoot in South Africa. We were at J-Bay, and alongside the other surfers there were some skaters and some snowboarders, as well as creatives like Ryan Heywood, the photographer, and Wade Carroll, who’s a cinematographer. Being around people who appreciated a different side of surfing and were psyched on the style side of things was really cool. Normally I would have been surfing to try airs and get clips, but here I would come in…

Not Momentum: The Musical, nor Morning of the Earth: The Musical. Think maybe more Doped Youth meets Rocky Horror. This is Juju, Jaleesa Vincent’s new “narrative fantasy surf musical film” and it’s exactly what the predictable and colourless world of surfing needs today. “Well, I don’t know if it’s very necessary,” concedes Jaleesa, “But hey, why not?” It’s the day after the final cut of the movie has been sent off, and there’s a Juju-sized void in Jaleesa’s life – she scripted, directed, choreographed, scored, starred and surfs in it. “We’ve been working on it since February,” she says, “and it’s been a pretty big project.” While the idea of a surfing musical takes some effort to imagine, for Jaleesa it’s been playing in her head since she was a…

In the millennial heyday of surf magazines, there were two types of surf magazine editor; those who were everywhere and those you never saw. The Everywhere Editor embraced the rarified status of the role and the largesse of surfing at the time. He (always he) was a player and would turn up to any gig or free trip. He created his own weather and his own agendas on a stuffy little planet of surf. He had a bigger profile than many of the surfers he was covering. The Nowhere Editor meanwhile was a more classical rendering; a guy who realised his role, at its core, was to make the publication – and the surfers featured within – shine through his efforts. His own writing – and his own stories, often…

Sam McLennan is on Flinders Island, sheltering from a wild week of gale-force west winds, waiting for them to back off before he makes a run for it, north across Bass Strait. The voyage is treacherous enough, before you even consider how Sam is about to do it. The Tasmanian surfer is sailing from Hobart to Sydney in a raft made entirely from marine rubbish – three-quarters of it plastic from storm-damaged salmon farms. His goal is to highlight the mess we’re making of the ocean, but at the same time highlight the lack of respect we have for ourselves that’s allowing that to happen. Sam’s original plan a few years back to turn the old Mirambeena ferry into an “Innovation Island” was scuppered when the state government sold the…

Wednesday morning, 6am, Iluka. It’s the second day of spring but howling offshore and bitingly cold. Two days before broke a record for the hottest North Coast winter day ever. Work that out. It’s so cold, local dawn-stalkers have started a fire on the breakwall to keep warm. Pacha is nearby, wrapped in a traditional poncho, watching the surf. It’s like she’s emerged from the mist of the Ecuadorian Andes, which, it turns out, is where she was born. Her mum Anja is with her, as are the family dogs. Anja is walking along the breakwall in bare feet and shorts. Growing up, Pacha’s parents were environmental activists, social crusaders, musicians and Bohemian spirits. The kids – Pacha and brother Yani – were along for the ride. All of it.…

For a satirist, modern surfing is, as they say, a target-rich environment. From woo-woo at Canggu to theWorld Surf League, surf culture has never had so many absurd corners. In fact, the only problem for the satirist is that modern surfing is sometimes soooo absurd you couldn’t possibly take the piss out of it better than it does itself. But for almost a decade, New Zealand’s Luke Cederman and his Raglan Surf Report has gone there, skewering surf culture with mini-mockumentaries, Flight of the Conchords meets a Surfline cam. A former pro surfer himself, he’s made a career taking the piss out of pro surfers and everyday surf culture, saying more about surfing with a two-minute skit than a thousand Inertia articles could ever do. We find him at Uluwatu,…

You wouldn’t even have known he was out there. Cloudbreak is a solid six feet, a coupla feet bigger on the sets, and around 30 people are drifting and scrapping through the lineup. Hedgey is getting too many waves because he can’t help it, and Billy Kemper not enough because he’s sitting too far up the reef. A couple of resort guides are scoring, and a couple of Australian sneakers are getting their share. Then halfway up the line on the first ledge someone with a red board and red shorts is suddenly on the wave of the morning. He slides to his feet like he’s stepping out of a limo, and everyone stops to watch… What? When did he paddle out?? World champions don’t normally just vanish in a…

All winter, Tahlija’s troopy has been parked out the point. The South Oz plates don’t worry anyone; it’s not like she’s from Queensland. And anyway, Tahlija has made a second home here, or maybe it’s a third or fourth home. Her life these days moves around the Australian coast following the waves and the fishing seasons. For now, she’s here on the North Coast and she’s been surfing plenty. It’s been a good winter on the point, and she’s made up for lost time. She’s had a tough run. She was slammed into a sandbank last year and badly concussed, which then triggered other complications that kept her out of the water for months. This winter’s been a healing. On smaller days she’s ridden short twins on the inside corner…

It’s been sunny for an hour; a shower looms from the sou’-east. The billy boils. An old school Northern Rivers winter has repeated for weeks. Damper cools by the small fire. Thick cuts of jewfish sit crisped black on sticks next to it. Flies laze about. Dave has raised the mid-afternoon fare. A few metres away one catamaran hull sits low in three slings in a long and narrow split shed, blocked off from sou’-east squalls but open to nor’-west light. Time and motion of this day in the life of Dave and Torren and friends has repeated for weeks: work stint then rustic food, couple more hours, then rest. The Gannet in stage one form is set to shallow rocker/draught. It seems to relate more to the arcane as…

My mum is part of a group up on the Gold Coast called The Surfing Witches. It’s a women’s social surfing club who surf all over the Goldy, but it’s a lot more than that. My mum is actually a part of a splinter group within the club who call themselves ‘The Spring Chickens.’ It’s a dozen or more women in their sixties and seventies who’ve come to surfing late in life and just found how incredible it is. When Mum’s partner of many years died a year-and-a-half ago, The Spring Chickens just kept kind of turning up at her door. “Let’s go for a surf.” “Let’s go check Fingal.” “Let’s go check the north end of the Goldy.” “Let’s go surfing.” And they helped her through all that, and…

When we spoke with Steph a couple of weeks back, she was in California. She’d just returned from a surf trip to Mexico with mates, and then spent finals day down at Trestles. She originally wasn’t going to go (“too hot, too crowded”) but the prospect of Caity Simmers winning a ground-shifting women’s world title felt too important to miss. Steph hadn’t been back to Trestles since she came from the clouds to win her eighth world title there two years ago, a win that sealed her status as some kind of quasi-religious surfing icon. It’s unlikely anyone will ever match her. But while she hasn’t officially called time on the tour, you feel her surfing energy in the years ahead will be more diffuse, radiating out into more remote…

Lennox Head has changed a lot in the past 20 years. But even as the Range Rovers move into town and the salty old locals decry the influx of people who don’t seem to know how to slow down, there’s a few things that remain reassuringly the same. One; on any decent swell you’ll always catch Brocky smiling and greeting everyone on the Point runaround – “see this angle, this is just the perfect angle. Reminds me of a day with me and George back in the ‘70s!” And two; waves around Lennox continue to breed surfers with styles you just can’t teach. The first time I saw Jai Glindeman in the water at Boulders he was riding twin-fin, midweek in springtime. It also happened to be uncrowded. Weirdly enough,…

You sometimes get a sense Drew has been summoned from the seventies to save the future. The blue denim and chambre shirt combo, the blonde mop and sideburns, the love of single-fins and throwback craft all create the visage. He was also living at Angourie for a few years, which really warped time around him. But beyond all this Drew has a very seventies way of seeing the world… and it’s a world that needs saving. Drew grew up in Catherine Hill Bay, south of Newcastle, and watched on as the heritage coal town was transformed into suburbia by the sea. He then discovered, to his horror, that the ocean north and south of Catho was an active gas exploration lease, with plans for gas rigs along the horizon. He…

“Clouds have got a lot to say to you.” Skipper Dave Wyatt is perched on the fly bridge of the Velocity, watching a wayward wisp of cirrus drift off above the Breakseas. We’re about as south as you can get, steaming along out there at the very edge of everything. The rolling smells of kelp, diesel trails and half-burnt toast drift on a sweet, wild wind blowing in from the east, across the great quartzite mountains that stretch out before us, as far as the eye can see. Before I can ask what the cirrus is saying, Dave clocks some imperceptible shift in the engine’s grumblings and is off down the ladder like a flash. Light of foot and perpetually in motion, this legendary waterman has surfed and fished the…

That wave at Cloudbreak. That wave at Shipstern. That fuckin’ right at wherever-the-hell that is… Solamon Storm Bailey, has, in the first half of this year, packed more aquatic cones than the whole of Byron Shire in the last half century (aquatic and herbal combined). Soli Bailey’s new edit, Conehead has just premiered in a large surf shop on the Gold Coast. Pizzas have been demolished; beers drunk. A large crew of Soli’s old Byron High mates are holding down a corner. As the cheers and whoops die down from the film’s cinematic, slo-mo denouement, Bob Bain takes the stage for a few words-from-our-sponsor and to do the raffle draw. “Wow,” he says, peering into the crowd against the bright lights. “Soli, that was great… wherever you are.” Soli, kilowatt smile…

The question was always going to be, what happens when Jack Robinson makes it? There was never any doubt he would – that was fated – it was simply a matter of what shape his surfing took. He was a kid like we’d never seen; raised in the wild, outside of the system, surfing Tombstones at 10… we were always going to get something special. Well, his surfing at the world’s trophy waves has been everything we hoped it would be. Fearless, instinctive, brilliant. He’s won the events we all thought he’d win: Tahiti, Pipe, G-Land, Sunset, Barra de la Cruz and of course home at Margaret River, twice. But when the waves aren’t vortexing, the vortex shaman still finds ways to win. Sitting in lotus position before heats, eyes…

It’s a cold Thursday night in Torquay when, by chance, I run into Noa Deane at a bar. By this point, the beers are drinking themselves. Earlier that day, Noa, Ben Howard and Noa’s Hawaiian mate, Bryce surfed a left slab down the coast. Ten-foot. Howling offshore winds, dry reef, the only guys out. And they got royally flogged. Only one wave was made all day, and they spent more time on the reef than in the water. It seemed like a write-off, but in Noa’s eyes, it was one of the best days surfing he’s ever had. Red-eyed and rinsed, he’s celebrating. “I went out there and got absolutely fucking handled, four in a row,” Noa said of the day. “Copped absolute floggings every wave, straight up on the…

Caity Simmers was already top of this list months before she won her world title, declaring live to the world that her win was, “fucking crazy.” That’s Caity. In just two years the 18-year-old Californian has zapped the tour – and surfing more broadly – back to life. From teenage girls to middle-aged men, Caity Simmers is now everyone’s favourite surfer and leading a hydra of surfing movements. When she won Pipeline earlier this year, she put herself amongst a group of women now seemingly comfortable in any surf. Overlooked, she’s also led a youth insurgence, threatening to return surfing to its rightful owners. But even more than that, she looks set to upend a production line of sameness that extends beyond the pro tour and into lineups around the…