There’s 100 surfers in the water on a good summer day in Busan. Fifteen or 20 on a pumping winter swell in Yangyang. These aren’t huge numbers by global standards, but a lot in South Korea, where surfing is barely older than its youngest competitors. Kanoa Hee-Jae Palmiano, 18, has spent his whole life inside that growth curve.
Long before Kanoa could stand on a board of his own, he was riding tandem on his dad’s paddleboard off Korea’s east coast – his father being the man credited with bringing stand-up paddling to the country in the first place. “I started surfing with my dad when I was four,” Kanoa said. By six, he had his own soft-top. It wasn’t so much a sport being passed down as a scene being built in real time, with Kanoa growing up inside it from close to day one. He calls himself part of the “one and a half generation” of Korean surfers – young enough to have grown up fully immersed in the culture, old enough to remember when there was barely a culture there at all.
South Korea is a peninsula, with waves wrapping in on three sides, east, west, and south, depending on the swell direction. His home break sits in Yangyang, on the east coast, now the unofficial capital of Korean surf tourism. It’s a beach break the entire way up the coastline with consistently shifting sandbars. “It changes a lot,” Kanoa said, “but it’s still fun because you get new waves every day.” The one exception is Jeju Island, far to the south, home to the country’s only reef, and, by Kanoa’s account, one of the places where Korean surfing’s earliest chapters were written.
Winter is when Yangyang delivers – the east coast’s best swells, cold and often overhead. “When it gets good, we can get some really good overhead barrels and some long waves to do a lot of turns on,” Kanoa said. “That would be like the perfect day for me.” The trade-off is brutal: 5mm wetsuit, boots, gloves, and a hood just to be out there. Plenty of Korean surfers make the opposite call once the cold sets in, heading to Australia or Indonesia for the winter instead. Kanoa’s own version of that used to be the Philippines – where his family lived for two years when he was around 11, and where he actually learned to surf properly. It’s also where he started working with coach Brad Gerlach, who still guides his surfing today. These days, though, he’s more likely to stay and take on the cold himself: this January, he spent a month surfing Yangyang alone almost every day. “We had waves every day, and it was really clean and glassy. I’d be surfing every day out there by myself,” he said.
What’s striking is how quickly Korean surf culture has moved from informal to commercial. That shift shows in the basics now in place – surf shops, surf schools, and international brands like Rip Curl, Quiksilver, O’Neill, and Roxy all present in a country where the sport didn’t exist a few decades ago. For quite some years, longboarding has been the default, a product of waves that are, in Kanoa’s words, “really small and mushy often.” But that’s starting to shift too, with the wave pool giving more people access to the kind of punchy, consistent conditions shortboarding rewards.
In July, Kanoa became the first Korean surfer to ever win a WSL event, taking the longboard title at the Korea Open, held at the country’s own wave pool – a result that captured exactly the kind of dual-discipline surfer he’s built himself to be. He’d competed in both the shortboard and longboard draws that week, and while the shortboard run ended in the semifinals, the longboard final was where it came together. “I was super bummed to get knocked out in the semifinals of the QS shortboard, so to come and win the longboard is super special,” he said afterwards. A few weeks later, at the Asian Surfing Championships in Mahabalipuram, India, he showed up again – this time in the form of a double gold, winning both the Open Men’s and Under-18 divisions, a result that also locked in his Asian Games qualification.
For all his instinct to spread himself across two disciplines, Kanoa is clear-eyed about where he’s headed. “My goal is to represent my country in the Olympics, but also to make the CT and proceed as a professional surfer,” he said. He’s currently sharpening his focus on shortboard, the discipline that carries Olympic weight, though he’s careful not to close the door entirely: “We’ll see. I never know what will happen.” That same shift, from hobby to profession, is playing out around him at a national level. Kanoa paddled into his own first contest at just seven or eight years old, in 2017; less than a decade later, there’s a wave pool hosting WSL-sanctioned events, a national team qualifying for the Asian Games, and a generation of young surfers for whom competing, not just surfing, is increasingly the point. At 18, with a WSL title and an Asian Championship double gold already behind him, he’s arguably one of its clearest products.
