Chasing Seconds: Maps to Nowhere, Season 2 Episode 3
Oh my, oh my. As usual, very last minute wasn't told much at all. We had very little intel on the ground and Matt didn't know a lot. Any of these trips that we're doing these days when you're trying to get a wave that's not really being surfed, there's a reason for that.
After I did my research and kind of pinpointed this as a spot that I wanted to check out, I got in touch with a local guy that I had met a while back and he had somebody go out and shoot a little video for me just of a single wave and just to kind of gimme an idea if this was like what we were looking for or not. And it was enough to make me excited like the, the bank is shallow enough and the water's deep enough offshore and it was hollow. That was enough for me to think, okay, there's potential here. My first impression of Matt was just he knows a lot about waves and surfing <laugh>. I was a little worried though because he's the one that like finds all these waves on these trips and he said he'd never gone here before. That was also a moment where I was like, wait, then why are we here if you've never been here? Just like everywhere that I go, this is an area that doesn't get a lot of swell and I think that's probably why it hasn't been surfed. It's not easy like scoring waves with no one out. Like if it was then,
everyone would do it, you know. To forecast this spot, there's a lot of uncertainty. You know, I had to look at like what would cause a swell to get in here and you know, how big would that swell be and what would the storm have to be? So then once we see that storm and and the potential swell, then it's can we get there in time? We just got here and it's still super small, but you can tell this shore break. It's kind of like a shore break that runs, it's super shallow, i've been looking at it on Google Earth and it's like a little knuckle here and then sort of like a running sandbar and then another knuckle down there and we kind of theorize that one of these two zones is gonna have a sandbar. Well the swells started to fill in, like you can tell that there's a longer period line to it and so it's just a little bit more organized and coming down the sandbar a bit more.
But it's still quite small. No one knows, no one's surfed this one. So we don't know, like currently it's just like two foot barrels running into dry sand and we're just washing the three days of traveling off.
You want some sand for breakfast? <laugh>, it's just a like crazy shore break. I, it's, it's gnarly, like it kind of almost is scarier than surfing like a big gnarly wave 'cause you're just pulling in on like nothing and there's like pebble stones underneath and you're just getting flexed and there's like almost no way of making it at the moment. Yeah, to be honest, that night I like was pretty jet lagged and I couldn't really sleep and I was just like, oh, I was so bummed at them <laugh>. It's like, why didn't they tell me more information about this trip? Like, and I was like, I'm gonna ask him if I can get a flight home. I definitely had a lot of doubt. It looked pretty shocking.
It was like lapping on the shore. It looked really bad. It was like borderline unsurfable. There was backwash in it, it was just, it was a disaster really for the amount of hours we'd traveled. It seems like a lot of the beach has been eaten away overnight, which is what we were hoping for. Kind of theorized that that might build a little bit of a gutter in a bank for us and the small ones are still right on shore, but that last set I just saw was like 10, 15 feet off shore and just running super heavy but maybe like a little more of an entry than the crazy shore break ones last night and that's a good thing.
'cause last night was pretty crazy. So I have hope and especially the tide's high right now so if. The tide drops I'm hoping it'll push a little bit further off the bank and we could be on, I think the reality just kicked in that for the first time in my life we're at a right point that's probably gonna be firing stand up barrels with four people that's never been surfed. That's never been surfed <laugh>. What the Ah oh my god.
The wave I the saw then was mental in a, in a. Oh my god that is. This is the craziest wave I've ever surfed. I was like terrified, like shaking after my first couple. Like. I keep going like the biggest craziest ones and just getting smoked so I want to get like one of those sets and try and make it but they're almost like unmakeable. It's kinda like those medium ones are perfect. I think just consistently every set is doing the same thing, just dumping liters of water one million percent the way of my life. Like I'm fully speechless.
It honestly just was so square and I had no other like nothing I could do. I just had to, I was literally doing these ones like it just <laugh>. That was crazy. Oh my god, this is like, this is as good as right points get 100%.
Like honestly, oh it. I don't think I've ever been that happy for somebody in my life. Yeah. Hopefully they. Oh.
Because it's a break board rate continue. Well we're not surviving like for three more days all the boards will be gone at this rate. Yeah, we're gonna have to kneeboard that thing. <laugh>. I kind of like couldn't believe it because seeing it the day before how it was pretty much a straight sandbar and then seeing it the next morning, it had changed so much. I think it was probably after one of my first waves where I got like a pretty long barrel or like seeing Timo get a barrel and seeing Soli just get like a 15 second barrel <laugh>.
That's kind of when it like sunk in when I was like, yeah we're scoring. I've got experience with with sandbars like this and what I find is the first time they break during the year they're almost always shore breaks and they need a big swell to pull the sand off the beach and to create like a bit of a gutter in a sandbar and a case of a place like this where it could be years between swells, you know, you've got just so much sand buildup. I was worried but I wasn't too worried. I kept telling the crew like, don't worry, you know like there's a lot of swell coming.
Probably what was most interesting and exciting about this wave is watching the sandbar change every day. You know, it went from being a complete shore break where it was breaking onto dry sand and then each day you could tell it was changing. Like even from morning to evening, like four hours difference, the sandbar was shaping up and it was just getting better and better. It was always fast and it was always heavy and hollow and yeah it was just kind of navigating those changes. It was really interesting. And so we were on the travel, it was probably our second or third flight, I don't know which one but we were waiting for our bags to come out and everyone's bags came out but Timo's and so Timo didn't have any surfboards then he ended up like breaking two of my boards in the first day.
Like not only getting more barrel than me on my boards but then just breaking them. I couldn't just let Timo not surf out there it was, it was pumping waves. So I just solarezed my fin into my other board because the fin box broke yesterday. It's my last board. Timo's on my 5'5. Already lost two of her boards. Sorry Caity. Yeah, we ended up being pretty worried about our board count for the trip because we had all not brought that many boards.
New swell filling in tomorrow. We're hoping that it's gonna be pumping. We broke five or six boards yesterday in like three hours so it was kind of stressful. I'm down to two plus a buckled one so we got like the gnarliest resin I've ever seen. So hopefully uh, the rest survive and we get barrels for the next three days.
Tim'o boards just arrived which was a huge stoke for him and for everyone 'cause that means six more boards <laugh>. Much more. Oh my god. Oh. I got the wave of my life today. It ain't no WSL ride out. Oh my god.
I'm counting it. I don't even care. I mean I don't, did I make it out? I was like out and I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It was the wave of my life though. No, you got, I was freaking out. Caity's performance this week is gonna go down as as some of the best surfing we've ever seen and it was crazy just to watch her getting better and better as the days went by. You know,
she would ask Soli for some advice and then you'd watch her implement it on the next wave and then like five waves later she's surfing even better. I think like some of the best barrel riding I've ever seen by like someone so young and like man or women, like it was insane like watching her technique like her and Soli like mind blowing because like we were surfing the same waves and like so hard to like do what they're doing. I dunno. I mean this is why you surf. This is better. I don't surf to win contests.
I surf to get barreled and get perfect waves with my brother or with your friends. So I think this definitely tops winning a contest. It's freaking crazy. Look at this, no one even on it.
<Laugh>. This trip's been the hardest one for me to walk away from 'cause it's just that special. It's something about, you know, like a grinding sand bottom point. It mesmerizes you, you know like as a surfer as a kid or probably anyone like that has anything to do with the oceans drawing those like corduroy lines of just like consecutive waves to then like experience that with just a few of us.
I couldn't leave like none of us could. We made the most of every second. It's what surfing's completely all about. My friend Kyle Thierman said something a while back, he said As surfers we spend years chasing seconds and I think that perfectly sums up this wave and the experience here.
And also like the lifelong pursuit of, of waves like this and of new waves. This season I really wanted to focus on exploration and and finding new waves and I think we were really fortunate to get to do that. And I also think we were fortunate in that when we did go and search for waves, we found, you know, what we were looking for. Like it could have gone the other way completely. That's kind of the point of this whole project is to inspire people to be searching and to look for new things. And you might not always find what you're looking for, but you always find an adventure and you know, if you, if you try hard enough someday, you'll eventually find it.
2024-05-13 04:34
