THE WILD MEN OF THE JUNGLE DANCE IN CONCERT WITH IT ALL. PHANTOMS OF SKIN AND GRISTLE AND SWEAT, STOMPING AND SPINNING, THEY TRANCE AND EXPEL A DEEP BREATHY CHANT. THEY ARE FESTOONED WITH BRIGHT FEATHERS AND BAMBOO SHOOTS AND SLIVERS OF JUNGLE LEAVES, THE TINY EMBERS FROM THEIR CEREMONIAL TOBACCO SMOLDERING IN THEIR UNTAMED HAIR.

They are surrounded by a circle of sunburned and grinning Kandui Resort surfing guests. The dance is a treat for the guests on their last night at the resort, but the wild men of the jungle are very real and their performance is very real and there is some confusion about this. Tour- ists are more used to the insincere. These surf guests who have been staying and surf- ing at the Kandui resort have had their 10 days. The next 20 guests were just arriving at their hotel on the mainland, global travel exhausted, readying for the dawn ferry out to this place across the 100 nautical mile strait to the Mentawai Islands off West Sumatra. The guests watching the danc- ers at the resort would be shipped back to the mainland and the new guests would be shipped in as they have been like clockwork for years and years. The waves never sleep in the Mentawai. And these waves are the heartbeat of all who visit or live or work here. And the wild men of the jungle dance in concert with it all.

From his usual place on the small bench across from the bar, the owner of the place, Ray Wilcoxen, watches on as he untangles a snarl of fishing line attached to the prized lure of his 10-year-old boy, Jaden. A wicked looking thing this lure, smelling of seawater and stained with blood, armed with three treble hooks the …

Fifty-six-year-old Ross Clarke-Jones likes to remind you that he was born on the 6/6/1966. He’s not trying to suggest he is somehow in commune with the devil, but surfing’s loveable wildman can’t help but chuckle at the symbolism. We caught up with RCJ recently for a Better Beer and asked him to reflect on a few defining aspects of his life.

Growing up on the NSW Central Coast

Growing up on the Central Coast was, for me, the best training or best place to grow up for a big-wave surfer. You know, I started at Terrigal, and you’ve got The Haven. That was the big wave for me. And then we’ve got Forresters, we’ve got Banzai, which is like Backdoor. You’ve got the Lefts which is a big wave. TheCentral Coast is a great start to any young, big-wave surfer’s career.

Mad Wax

I learned from ‘Mad Wax’ I would love to be an actor, but I don’t think I could be. I mean it was such a fun thing for me. It gave me notoriety in the surfing world. It was like I was a nobody. I had a third in the amateur World Titles, and I was turning pro and then I met Tom Carroll, and my heroes Gary Elkerton -‘Kong’ Rahh – these guys are you know, they’re like untouchable movie stars. And I was like, wow, am I one of those. But I just remembered, like from the Central Coast taught me, Just don’t be a big-headed, f#$kw&t – dickhead. So, that kept me grounded my whole life. But Mad Wax was a turning point, too, for me. Bruce Raymond was like, ‘You’re going to be a star.’ But I was like, ‘Pull your head in, keep it on the ground. The Central Coast taught me …

As we stand in the empty parking lot, a street hawker mentions an abandoned fishermen’s village haunted by old imazighen folklore. The possibility of
Surfing a wave no one else dares to is too tempting to ignore, but how do we find something that may not even exist.

Achraf shrugs his shoulders. “Can you We live by what the sea provides us. You sessions and interviews, but as the sun set pass me the tea, please? Shukran.”

I watch him prepare his cup of tea – first, the leaves. A soft ‘ting’ when the spoon hits the tea cup, follows. Boiling water pours from heights most of us wouldn’t entertain. The teaspoon wraps the porce- lain cup a second time. “Sugar. I need more sugar.” I nod, trying to get the waiter’s attention. Achraf clears his throat and takes a sip of his tea, which takes much longer than anticipated.

“There’s no way I’ll go there with you, but sometimes fish around the village when I can show you where it is.” His words echo through the busy roadside cafe in the vortex of Taghazout. “What now?” I ask, still trying to chase up some sugar.

On our third day in the country’s South West, we crossed paths with a street hawker trying to sell us mint tea, and Moroccan delights, at one of the more exposed breach breaks between Taghazout and Imsouane. We were the only ones in the parking lot. As the wind turned onshore, and the sun was about to go down, we exchanged pleasantries with a man we got to know as Taib. In a country with a vibrant trade culture, such small talk seemed familiar.

Taib moved to Agadir as a teenager, but he’s originally from a small village about two and a half hours …

Maybe you have a fleeting memory of Sam Yoon from his celebrated cameo in Andrew Kidman’s film ‘spirit of akasha’? Or perhaps you were at Kirra one time and hooted a supple-limbed natural-footer spearing through muscular, eight-foot tubes on a 7’10” fish he’d crafted.

Or maybe your daily Instagram scroll was halted by the image of a surfer crouched in a warrior stance, taking a direct line at light-bending speed. A ‘Flying Soul’ as his handle suggests. It’s also possible you have your own personal anecdote about Sam, after your paths crossed in some place where a hefty swell was colliding with a challenging outer reef. It could have been Hawaii, J-Bay, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Japan, Mauritius, Tasmania or Morocco… There’s not many places on the map, with a holding coastline he hasn’t been.

However, it’s more than likely you’ve never heard of Sam or his distinctive, super-sized twin fins, and to be honest he’s just fine with that Sam Yoon’s family immigrated to Australia from South Korea in the late 80s when he was 11. His dad had run a successful car-wrecking business in Korea but was convinced a better way of life beckoned on the sun-kissed shores of the so-called Lucky Country. Initially, the Yoons landed in Sydney, where Sam went to school at Turramurra High in the city’s leafy northern suburbs. A tossed pearl of wisdom from a geography teacher was probably the most important thing he took from his education. “She always said to us, go travel around the world. But she strongly suggested to travel Australia too.”

Sam and his son Reno chasing rainbows

Over the phone, Sam speaks in a mellifluous accent that somehow folds his Korean roots into Hawaiian pigeon and Australian twang. He mentions another light-bulb moment from his youth. “One thing …

Antarctica has a distinct but very limited appeal as a surf destination. On the plus side it’s in the middle of the Southern Ocean, has more coastline than Australia, friendly Locals (Penguins) and it just screams super- Fucking crazy adventure.

Surf-wise it’s still largely unknown. If you want to follow the intrepid footsteps of a surf pioneer like Peter Troy, Antarctica offers a clean white sheet. Sure it gets hysterically cold but nearly freezing to death is good for the mind, body and soul, according to the Iceman, Wim Hoff.

Ok, so you’ve made your decision. You’re going to Antarctica. Puff that chest out and grow a beard because very few humans even make it to this point. You now have three options. And a beard! You can depart from southern Chile and cross the notorious Drake Passage on a very expensive cruise ship. Or you can fly to the military base on King George Island and join a very expen- sive cruise ship there. Once on board you’ll have between seven and 30 days exploring the frozen continent, weather depending.

Unfortunately, you definitely can’t take a surfboard. Even if you managed to smuggle an inflatable craft onboard, you wouldn’t be able to just jump overboard and paddle to a little iceberg left. Antarctic operators follow very strict landing protocols and while some offer heli-skiing, and even scuba diving no one does surfing. So you have one option if you want to surf the frozen continent. You need a friend with a yacht and a wild streak.

Happily, you have to be a little crazy to own a yacht so you’re really just looking for a yacht. If its owner is recently divorced, unemployed, drinks too much, has a beard like Barton Lynch, or a glass eye then perfect. You’re …

“Nazaré is like a grand canyon. One of the deepest canyons in the world runs just outside (the break). A deep trench attracts all of the swell in the ocean and once that swell hits and rolls into the canyon it accelerates. All this power of water is shot up into one direction once it hits the shallower part closer to the cliff… All of that energy facing the shallower part just ejects up. That’s what it feels like in the water. All of a sudden out of nowhere you have these 50-foot waves popping up.It is incredible, like staring at a moving mountain that’s coming in your direction to eat you alive.” – Nic Von Rupp

In the quote on the opening spread of this story, Nic is of course talking about the world’s biggest wave, which is located in the town of Nazaré, Portugal. Locally it is known as ‘Praia do Norte’ or North Beach.In the season between October and March, the break can whip up faces in the realm of80 to perhaps 100 feet. To give you a little scale that’s a 10-storey building or three school buses stacked end on end. Von Rupp has surfed at other big wave venues like Pe‘ahi (Jaws) in Hawaii and Mavericks in Northern California but admits that the size of the waves at Nazaré are second to none.

Von Rupp calls it a “perfect mess” but indicates there are certain patterns to the lineup. “There’s three main peaks. The bombs are gonna come in one place, the second peak is gonna come in one place, and the third peak is gonna come in another place. But the water is constantly moving around. Those big first peak waves are right in front of the rocks.”

In the past decade, Nazaré has …

Four Very Different Stories Test The Water On Wave Pools

An Innovator’s Utopian Dream To Create The Ultimate, Artificial Surf- Suburb In Perth: A Life-long Surfer Wonders If Wave-pools Are A Donkey Or A Unicorn For the Future Of Surf Culture: A Travelling Australian Enjoys A Freshwater Flirtation In Switzerland: The Boardriders Club That Can Guarantee Barrels On Contest Da y

Surf Park Petri Dish: A New Frontline In The Surf Culture Wars

Written by Ben Mondy

Post surf, beer in hand, my wife and I are watching my new-to-surfing kids, nine and11, riding waves at The Wave in Bristol. Of the 400 waves the Wavegarden’s modular electromechanical system had provided in an hour, they’d stood up on around 15 each.

It had cost me roughly $160, and I was doing an internal balance sheet of the financial liability verse the obvious kids-smiles-on-dials asset. Was this, “The Ultimate Surfing Experience” as advertised on the site? Every minute or so, however, our view would be obscured.“Just what are the grown men doing on those long skateboards,” interjected my non-surfing wife. “And why are they gyrating like Spider from School of Rock?”Spider, you may remember was the sinewy, snake-hipped character who replaced Jack Black’s Dewey as a guitarist in School ofRock.Now, these men weren’t wearing leatherjackets which only consisted of the sleeves and collar but were punters doing reps of the pool’s flat pavement on longboards.They were mostly aged between 30 and 45; white, muscular of deportment, postures of preening peacocks and giving off the whiff of men who had turned up for the day in an Audi Quattro.Her next question, the more pertinent one, was, “Does this happen at the beach?” Or to paraphrase, is there such a thing as wave pool surf culture? And was this it? And just where …

Perched on the plain between Mauna Kahalawai, the high-point of west maui’s volcanic peaks, and the towering Haleakala crater that dominates the main part of the island, Waikapu is an unassuming little town on route 30. Once a sugar plantation hub, it was in even earlier times one of the Ahupua’a of Nā Wai ‘Ehā, also known as the four waters, named after the streams that run down from Mount Pu’u kukui and find their way to the ocean at Kahalui.

Today, Waikapu and its neighbor Wailukuare exurbs of Kahalui, as the encroaching sprawl of development renders their demarcations almost unnoticeable. Subdivisions sit along the highway, interspersed with what once were country stores, their wooden roofs and walls sagging, their doors and windows shuttered. Upslope on the flanks of the Waikapu Valley, old plantation houses line dead-end streets where yards are resplendent with breadfruit trees, citrus, ti leaf, and bougainvillea. Some homes have boats in the yard. All have a direct view of Haleakala reaching to the heavens across the plain, glowing golden in the late afternoon light, the peak of its cone brightly visible above the clouds. It’s a sight Dane Kealoha can see from his house, too.

The history of professional surfing is littered with cautionary tales of would-have-beens, could-have-beens, and should have-beens. Some competitors came to fame too young and flamed out early. Some spontaneously combusted. Some simply self-destructed. But Kealoha stands alone as the only top-ranked professional whose career was completely destroyed by fiat.

Surfing’s pro tour was still in its infancy in 1977 when Kealoha dropped into the fray as five-feet and nine-inches of Hawaiian pride and muscle, his surfing pure and powerful and propelled by heart. He didn’t approach heats with the strategy and tactics that were then being developed for man-on-man format, introduced …