Oftentimes there’s a lot of fluff surrounding surfing. It can be frustrating and distracting. The best thing you can do is to attempt to strip it all away and remember why it is you surf in the first place. For most of us it’s not a ‘sport’, it’s a healer, a playground, a stress reliever, a lifestyle, a saviour.
The O’riginals series by O’neill goes a long way in doing just that. Featured are three surfers who you may not have heard of, but each has a really cool story to tell about their love for surfing and the ocean. They’re authentic, engaging and relatable.
Billy Bain is living in the city, going to art school and frothing about surfing crowded weekend slop whenever he comes home. Lachie Rombouts is holed up in the bush, growing his own veggies and charging slabs on 12-foot guns whenever a dirty low pressure system drops its guts. Dan Johnson is shaping his own boards under his mum’s house and doing 360s out the point with a smile as wide as a split watermelon.
Pieced together with Vaughan Blakey at the helm and captured by filmmakers Shane Fletcher, Darcy Ward, Max Zappas and Josh Simpson, each is wonderfully shot and really captures a genuine sense of their personality and what surfing means to them.
There’s no fluff, no hyperbole, just surfers talking about surfing.
The first episode drops next week. Get on it!