Photo: fijiansurfphotos
Imagine this: you’ve got a broken hand, you haven’t surfed in four weeks, you’re a little down on your pro surfer luck and then you walk into a café in Bondi for your morning brew and Kelly Slater says, ‘Hey, you seen this swell about to hit Fiji?’ and in one generous, insightful moment, inspires you to book a flight across the Pacific and start a relationship with one of the world’s best waves.
Well, something like that happened to Mitch Crews recently, and it’s a pretty good yarn.
“I bumped into him at Porch and Parlour in Bondi,” Mitch tells me. “He just mentioned it, said keep your eye on this thing going up the coast. If you want to go get waves you should definitely look at it. And I was like, fuck that’s a brilliant idea actually. I should go to Fiji and get tubed. So I went!”
“Did you look at the swell?” I ask, wondering what exactly the protocol is when the best surfer of all time gives you the heads-up. And what happens if it doesn’t look that good? I mean, he hasn’t been in the best form lately, and you don’t want to get skunked.
“I wasn’t sure, like, what I was exactly looking at,” Mitch admits, with an honesty that makes me feel stupid for even entertaining that last thought. Kelly knows his swells, beyond any of our reckoning. “I mean, it looked like it was going to be good,” he offers.
So armed with the sacred word from Slater, and having caught wind that a few other well-known tube hunters were on their way, Mitch called up good mate and ex-Fiji Pro wildcard Mitch Coleborn to see if he wanted to come. Having sampled the place plenty of times before, the big goofy-footer didn’t take much convincing. But Mitch hadn’t had the same good fortune.
“I only went there for the world tour event and it was like one foot,” he tells me, recalling his one previous experience with the place, an experience that resulted in a less than stellar round 2 loss. “I just wanted to see what it was like at six-to-eight foot.”
So did he score? Did Slater come through with the good oil?
“The first two days were a little bit of a letdown,” he begins. “But sure enough, this one day was like six foot with some bigger sets and just … fuck, I mean, after that I’d say it’s got to be up there for one of my favourite waves. I can’t even believe the tubes you get on that wave!”
“So good, right?”
“Pumping! Like Koa Rothman, Nate Florence and all that were there, Nate Fletcher, and they were getting some sick ones … Coleborn got an absolutely stupid one! He just stood bolt upright in the thing and got drained across the whole reef … I got a couple of sick nuggets … I just had a ball! It’s a wave I’m going to go to again and again.”
So is this something that’s on the cards permanently now—a hot tip from Kelly, a last minute plane ticket, a hit and run mission to some dreamy destination?
Mitch laughs, playing down the Slater thing. “In the end it wasn’t a secret that it was going to be good, I don’t think. But it’s just funny that he triggered the idea of it … but yeah, whatever pops up, if it’s something like that, I’m going to jump on it.”
Jump away, you lucky bugger.
