WA charger Ned Hart has been announced as the international wildcard for the Mozambique edition of the Capitulo Perfeito – a one day invitational tube riding contest.
The event, which translates to ‘The Perfect Chapter’, was originally born out of Carcavelos in Portugal and has been running annually in Europe for over a decade with the aim of showcasing the best surf of the European winter. However, organisers announced they would be expanding the contest this year to host events in Mozambique and Indonesia, as well as its usual offering in Portugal.
Balaram Stack, Bruno Santos, Joel Parkinson, Noah Beschen, Rob Machado, Soli Bailey, Torrey Meister, Tosh Tudor, Cam Richards and Anne Dos Santos have been confirmed as the international invitees for the European edition of the event. Meanwhile, Ned has been granted the wildcard for Mozambique which was decided by a selection of international surf media, including Tracks.
The rest of the Mozambique field will be made up of the finalists from the Carcavelos comp, two local surfers and a second international wildcard. There will be a top prize of 10,000 EUR for the winner.
The waiting period for the event, which is due to be held at Praia da Barra, runs until 30 March. In the meantime, check out our feature on Ned below, which ran in a previous edition of our mag when he was making his early ascension into the big wave game.
For the third time in as many minutes, Ned Hart is having a little trouble stringing a sentence together. “I went up north, then home, then chased a swell down south, then south again, wait…that doesn’t make sense. North, then south, then I went home…then south? Wait, what?”
It was an amusing, and it must be said, charming, slip in syntax trigged by the 17-year-old attempting to recount where’d he been over the past two months while chasing waves.
Perhaps compounding the confusion is that Ned had also not long returned home from a stint in Sumatra only to learn his presence was required the following month in Portugal for the inaugural New Big Wave Award ceremony as a finalist in Ride of the Year category.
Of course, all paths will lead to Hawaii in December and the order for Jaws specific paddle guns (9’6” and 10’0”) has just been completed with board sponsor, Pyzel.
There’s a lot going on,” surmises Ned, before reaching for a version of a phrase he’d repeat over and over throughout an illuminating two-hour conversation.
“It’s so sick, I’m pumped on all of it.”
The ascent of Ned Hart, professional big-wave surfer, would appear to have been launched when two thrilling rides at Tasmania’s Shipstern Bluff were pinged online seconds after they’d been completed in March this year.
Though Tim Bonython’s masterful ultra-high def recording of both rides would later appear, it is the grainy, filmed-on-a-phone-from-the-rocks versions that really gives them scale.
In both, the filmer and bystanders can be heard drawing a collective breath as Ned airdrops into the fabled warped bowl section before erupting into cheers when he emerges from a no-make barrel on one wave, and hoots of disbelief when he charges into a closeout end section on the other.
Amusingly, in both, the filmer obviously caught up in the revelry forgets to hit the off button on the camera and the viewer is privy to a sustained chorus of “Oh my God, that was sick, that was nuts, what the fuck was that?”
As these things do, the footage quickly gained traction and 16-year-old Ned’s Instagram account was equally as quickly bombarded with congratulatory comments from the surfing illuminati.
“It was so sick,” Ned recalls of the session and all that followed.
“It was pretty crazy to think, I had guys like Kelly, Taj and like, all the main guys looking at this wave going, ‘Woah, this kid’s gnarly!”
There is a genuine joy radiating out of Ned as he recounts the Tasmanian experience, so much so he gets up to shake it all off.
He’s not tall but certainly not short either with a stocky, almost muscular build and a crown of closely cropped blonde hair.
We sit in the kitchen area of his parents’ Dunsborough home through-out which lay a modestly sized quiver of Pyzels, wetsuits and clothing from apparel sponsor, Florence Marine X, and a small box of ‘pit viper’ style sunglasses.
Someone just hit me up on Instagram and sent them over,” Ned says before popping a set on and laughing at his appearance.
“I think I just have to put a few posts up in return.”
It would be easy to dismiss the spoils as the result of some kid who got lucky at the end of a tow rope and shot to fame as quickly as the footage went viral.
But the truth can be directly linked to the age-old proverb of luck being what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
Ironically, Ned says the preparation did begin at the end of a rope, albeit one hitched to the back of his father Paul’s 4×4.
“Dad used to tow me along on a boogie board at one of the beaches down here,” says Ned.
“I’d always be loving it, just the sensa-tion of going fast and tumbling around when I stacked it.”
Ned then toggled between a range of other hobbies, including skateboards, bikes, bombing steep hills before gravitating toward surfing.
Parents, Adele and Paul, detected a passion worth pursuing and wisely sought out a suitable mentor to help guide their still very young son along.
“I remember Ned’s parents coming to me and just handing me over this tiny seven-year-old,” recalls Claire Bevi-lacqua over the delightful coos and gurgles of her soon to be one-year-old son.
“I’d just come off tour and was getting into coaching some of the groms around here. They sort of plopped him down and said to me, ‘He’s tough as, so just do your thing with him,’ and sure enough, he was such a gutsy little thing from day one.”
After testing the waters at some of the region’s gentler breaks, Claire encouraged her young prodigy out to one of the region’s black-diamond reefs, Mufflers.
“I knew if I took him out on a small, clean day all I had to do was get him into the waves and the rest would come naturally,” recalls Claire.
“Even at that age, he had all these skills from skating half-pipes, he had strength and kind of no fear so I just boosted him into a couple, and he performed exactly how I thought he would.”
Ned acknowledges that session as the one that would solidify what was already a smouldering desire for waves of consequence and girthy barrels.
“It was pretty sick,” he says.
“She (Claire) pushed me into this one and I remember the whole thing suck- ing up and dredging around me. I’m not sure if I was even in the tube but I just remember the suck of the wave and the way it bowled up. It was so sick.”
Fuelled by their own sense of wander-lust, Ned’s parents not only encouraged their young son to follow the path he was gravitating towards but figured they may as well go along for the ride as well.
As the frequency of trips escalated, so too did the size of waves.
Uluwatu, Pipeline, Waimea all ticked off the list before Adele Hart found herself having a serious heart-in-the-mouth moment watching her then 15-year-old son from the channel at plus-sized Teahupoo.
“I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is a whole other level’ and I don’t remember if I looked away, but it was an intensity unlike anything I’d ever seen him out in at that point,” Adele recalls.
“But seeing how he handled himself at Chopes, how well he fit in out there, that for us as parents was the biggest step from A to B where we thought, oh yeah, he can do this, he belongs out here.”
Two years later, parents Paul and Adele would again feel that sense of validation as their now 17-year-old bound onto the stage at the New Big Wave Challenge awards in Nazare to accept the Young Gun award.
In front of a room filled with the sport’s heaviest hitters, young Ned is again lost for words but being the polite young chap he is, makes a point of thanking his parents, filmer Tim Bonython and organisers of the event before letting out a ‘woo’ before bounding back off the stage.
Ned had been in the running for Ride of the Year, stacked up against Kai Lenny, Billy Kemper and eventual winner, Nathan Florence.
During our conversation in October, he’d remarked on what it meant to just be in the mix with the current masters of the domain.
“I aspire to be like those guys,” he began, before bursting into a cheeky.grin for a final return serve.
“But I’d take a wave off ‘em if I could.”.
