When we catch Ivan Florence, he’s just back from a late-season run to Mammoth Mountain in California, honing his snowboard act before the big melt.   “… I’ve been hitting some bigger jumps,” he enthuses. “I love it up there, and finally got to go and hit the park, which I think is one of the best in the world… I’m stoked to get the very last little bit of it.”

It sounded like another charmed episode in the endorphin-fuelled life of Ivan Florence, which these days is neatly triangulated between his surf, skate and snow ambitions – a boy’s life but all grown up. As we chat over the phone, brother Nathan swings by to drop something off and Ivan puts the phone aside to holler, “I’m doing something,” signalling he can’t engage in the kind of fraternal banter that might play out on any given North Shore morning for the Florences. 

After his stint in the snow, it’s officially hunting season for Ivan now – wave hunting that is. Over Hawaii’s summer months, he and Nathan will be dialled into the charts looking for good reasons to jump on a plane and chase down a swell; maybe even a rendezvous with brother John on his 60-foot Cat’, as he circumnavigates the globe. Ivan outlines a capricious travel philosophy that allows he and his brothers to roam on the whim of a swell. “Honestly, pretty much anywhere it could go off, and we would just go.”

If the youngest Florence goes on a strike mission or an extended stay in some wave-blessed fringe there is one item in his luggage his brothers won’t have – a skateboard. Each time he travels, he carefully removes his trucks and wheels from the deck and ...