Where’s Steve? I don’t like it. he should be here by now!
Bali Strickland recounting the words of fellow On The Rock team member, Dave Sparkes. After two weeks of hurrying up and waiting for the Maui event to run and losing his mind in the process, Sparkesy had adopted a pet cockroach, which he named Steve. Every night Steve would turn up out on the porch, Sparkesy would pat him and talk to him about his day. On the last day though Steve never showed, and Sparkesy was freaking, thinking Steve had been on the wrong end of a can of bug spray.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to see it, did it really happen? If Dean Brady caught the wave of his life at Backdoor today and no one filmed it, similarly, did it really happen?
That’s the question the boys around at the Rip Curl team house at Off The Wall today are asking after a conspiracy of circumstance saw the big Aussie’s 10-foot Backdoor smoker somehow missed by six of the Curl’s gun video and stills guys who were all on hand.
Brady was unlucky. First up, the author had just returned from Foodland with lunch to provide adequate distraction. Secondly, Mick Fanning had gone left on the same wave. There were six sets of excuses offered.
Bali Strickland and Shorty were both head down in a plate of sushi. Ted Grambeau and Shagga both shot Mick on the left. Dave Sparkes and Jon Frank, meanwhile, were inside eating donuts and debating whether Nicole Kidman would have pink nipples or brown, and whether she’d used an ass double in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. To their credit, the boys had shot everything that moved all morning, Frank and Sparkesy even shooting water while dodging 12 foot death sets that closed out the channel at Pipe. All of them were equally gutted, however, that the moment had been missed.
“Bags not telling him,” volunteered Sparkesy, bravely, as the giant hulk that is Brady made his way back up the beach.
Brady was pissed off when he got back… but only at himself. You see, he never made the wave. The barrel was two Bradys high on takeoff, but as he flew into the last flaring section, a rogue backwash hit him and flipped him ass over apex.
RELATED CONTENT
Rip Curl's searcher Dean Brady took the new Rip Curl H-Bomb Power Heated Wetsuit on a solo mission to Shipsterns when a big swell hit the Tasmanian coastline...
Eighteen-year-old Aussie Owen
Wright first surfed Pipeline at 14. Since then he’s made quantum leaps,
and has been chalking up plenty of pits so far this winter. But Owen
knows there’s always another lesson Pipe’s ready to teach you. We
caught him between his two four-hour surfs today, the biggest day of
the Pipe season so far.
As a grom, before you’d set foot in Hawaii, what had you heard about Pipe? Owen: I thought it was all going to be skull and cross bones, but it actually turned out to be fun. I’d surfed smaller versions of this at home, and I’d been surfing barrelling waves for a while but it was the next step for me in a way. Bigger waves, bigger barrels.
What waves were you groomed on at home? Aussie Pipe is pretty much just a scaled back version of this, and I got my confidence out there first… and that was when Rip Curl sent me over here for the first time.
Remember the first time you surfed out here? I remember the first big swell I surfed out here. (Laughing) It was pretty eye opening. I was 15 then and that was Second Reef Pipe, so it was pretty big. I got a couple of fun ones, a couple of ones that swung wide and I lucked into. I ended up getting a pretty good shot run out of that one [below]. That was two years ago, and there hasn’t been a really good massive swell like that one until today.
Mick Fanning: Oh, bullshit Owen!
[Mick has just walked in from surfing Pipe. He was christening a new Tokoro 7’2”, got a few waves, but also copped a 15-wave, 12-foot set on the head] Owen: You got some bombs, hey Mick?
How good was your set on the head? Mick: Which one? I got
about 40. Did you see the one that broke on my back drove me down onto
me board? I did a full spinner. It was faaaaarked! [Mick walks away going, “Faaaarrrrk!”]
How important is it to have your eyes and ears open out there in those first couple of years surfing Pipe? Yeah, you’re taking in everything. You’re seeing where the peaks
regularly pop up, you’re seeing where the Hawaiian guys are sitting,
then you start with wider ones and start working your way in. For me
now a few years later I still do exactly the same every time I paddle
out. I’m always looking at what the best guys, the Hawaiian guys, are
doing out there. I look for the guys who are picking them off and see
what they’re doing, where they’re sitting, the guys lurking for the
good ones. You never stop learning out there. Now I’m working on
looking for those double-up nugs, and I’m more in the hunt for those,
these days.
How’s your wave count this winter? Wave count’s been really good. On the first swell this year I got
heaps of waves. I’ve been paddling out on dark of a morning and getting
in the rhythm while everyone else is still waking up. Getting on a roll
before anyone else fully does, trying to find one here and there. I got
some good ones in that first swell two weeks ago, but got a couple of
good beatings as well.
What are the main lessons you’ve learned? What’s on the “don’t do” list? Waves with backwash – don’t do them. Catch a wave just because you
can – don’t do that. Make sure the wave is worthy. And paddle for a
shit small one just before a macking set, don’t do that either.
As some crew have found out today. What are some little trade secrets you’ve learned out there? There’s all different kinds of waves out there, and they break
across a pretty big bit of reef. The secret to surfing Pipe is knowing
all those kinds of waves, what they look like, and how to surf them.
The best guys are the guys who know what each wave is likely to do. But
the best guys also know that they only ever know so much. Pipe’s always
unpredictable, the best guys are the ones who are better at predicting
what each wave will do. There’s ones that swing wide and barrel,
there’s the smaller inside ones that have a lot of water in them and
double up. And there’s the tee-pee ones that most people are scratching
into but they only have one entry point and if you’re underneath them
you can catch it while others can’t. I also use the landmark of the
green house with the pine tree in the yard. If I want a deep inside
nugget I’ll sit inside the pine tree, if I want a wide one I’ll sit the
other side of it.
Have you learned a few hard lessons out there? Definitely. I learned the getting one on the head lesson. I learned
the pulling into the closeout lesson. I learned the taking off too deep
and getting smashed lesson. I haven’t really learned the deadly
Backdoor lesson yet. I make sure I only catch the ones at Backdoor I
know I can make. I saw that guy this morning who caught the wrong one
and ended up in the death section with a 15-foot set on his head.
How does Pipe rate as a personal challenge for your surfing? Is it still the place you push yourself the hardest? It’s a challenge just to get waves out there. If the chance
presented itself and a really big one came through and I was on the
inside for it, I don’t think I’d pull back. I’d relish the chance to
take a big one and try and make it.
Have you found your limit out there yet? Ahhh… no. But if I caught that big one and ate shit badly I reckon I’d be saying yes, though.
The Blog
DECEMBER 2: ANOTHER DAY IN THE THUNDERDOME
The day starts off with Jon Frank Skyping us a surfcheck.
He spins his laptop around so its camera faces the Pipe lineup, just as a 12-foot set caps off Second Reef, and rolls through before detonating on the inside. “That’s the first real serious one ,” he adds. “It’s just starting to really show.”
It’s 7.10am, there’s 43 guys in the water and already Owen Wright has been out there for an hour, most of it in the dark, and has already been washed down past Beach Park once.
The boys knew the swell was here overnight. Every half hour a thunderous crack would shake the house’s foundations, shit would rattle, sleep broken. Owen reckoned he hardly got a wink last night.
It was still filling in as the morning went on. It was 12 and getting bigger, but far from the epic cavalcade of tuberiding everyone expected. The swell was just too strong, and was steamrolling straight over the reef. There’s no Pipe specialists out there – the afternoon is usually their domain – but it’s also a sign it’s not the greatest day of all time. It was a bit of a lottery, but they were there.
The swell would pulse strong, and at times sets were only two minutes apart. As one set would explode on the inside at First Reef, another would feather and cap out on Third Reef. “More lines than a Brazilian party,” quipped one team rider. Huge wash throughs started to become the exception, and not the norm. The usually safe channel from where water photographers ply their trade long lens suddenly became a death zone, with 10 footers imploding over dry sand. “Yeah, you can’t breathe sand,” laughed photographer Jonny Frank after surviving a couple of sneakers.
Most of the boys had a run at it. Taylor Knox, Bruno Santos, Ben Dunn, Kyle Ramey and Davey Cathels all had a dig with varying degrees of success. Owen finally comes in after four hours. Mick Fanning, who’d just surfed his heat up at Sunset and made it through to the round of 32, paddled out on a virgin 7’2” Tokoro Pipe board. Mick’s Hawaiian shaper, Wade Tokoro, knows a thing or two about Pipe and had already bagged a sick pit earlier in the morning. Still buzzing, he dropped straight around and delivered the new board to Mick.
The board was lucky to survive.
Mick got a couple of smaller ones, but then got guillotined by a lip on the first wave of a 20-wave set. He copped an absolute thrashing, and floated to the beach in defeat. It was a tough day out there, and even tougher if you decided to roll the dice and go right. The swell had a lot of west in it, which opened up the odd one at Backdoor, but, boy, you were really punting your plums on being able to kick out and paddle to safety before a set caught you. Tahitian surfer Michel Bourez punted once too often.
The Spartan, as he’s known, flicked off an inside six footer to be faced with a 15 foot set with 20 waves in it. Caught between Backdoor and Off The Wall on the shallowest, most dangerous part of the reef, he wore the first one square on the head. The left from OTW converged with the right from Backdoor, and it utterly destroyed him. People looked away it was that bad. “Bourez finally makes the tour and he’s gonna die!” says Matty Wilkinson, only half jokingly. Fortunately, The Spartan is a tough kid and he made it to the beach okay.
Another slab of aquatic evil. //Shorty
And so it played out for the rest of the day. The swell, well, she just
got angrier. Wash throughs were the order of the afternoon at Pipe, and
the shorebreak out the front of the Curl resembled one of the seven
chambers of hell. You have never seen a shorebreak more ferocious in
your life, and even on the veranda, 50m from the waterline, you still
didn’t feel safe.
But that’s the top of it, and we’re expecting the swell to mellow
overnight. We might be looking at the best day of the swell. It’s still
gonna have some juice, 10 foot easy, but it may have sorted itself out
into something remotely rideable. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, in the living room of the Curl house, Taylor Knox’s
9’6” Al Merrick, flown over in case the Eddie went, looks like it’s
going to lie there lonely for the rest of the trip.
Late in the afternoon with the Rip Curl house deserted, a
friendly head popped over the fence from next door to say g’day. Like
Wilson from Home Improvements it was just a head, and this one looked a
little worse for wear. The hair was a bit all over the place, the eyes
a little baggy from two hours sleep last night. But then the smile
spreads across the face, the trademark blinding white fangs appear, and
it could be no one else.
Steph Gilmore told a sorry tale of a night that turned into a
morning, before muttering something about going to sleep on the spongy,
manicured lawn. //SEAN DOHERTY
