SURFER's DECEMBER Issue Preview

ON SALE NOVEMBER 1 AT YOUR LOCAL SURF SHOPP!

Surfer subscribers should look for the latest issue of Surfer for the Taming Alaska DVD brought to you by Casio GzOne. Catch Andy Finch and Justin Lamoureux as they surf the frigid waves of Alaska and snowboard some amazing powder on the same day. The DVD is only available to subscribers of Surfer, so if you want to check out the action go to www.casiozonealaska.com to see some more from the Taming Alaska DVD.

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FLIGHT OF THE ENTOURAGE
by Chris Mauro

There are some universal truths to how and why boat trips either evolve or devolve. Rest assured, it’s always one of the two, and having spent a fair amount of time messing around on ocean-going craft, I’ve concluded—after suffering through a series of misadventures at sea ranging from burning engines and hull-pounding storms to food poisoning and its not-so-distant cousin, drink poisoning—that when things do take a turn for the worse the triggering events always occur somewhere between late afternoon and midnight. A quick glance at some very famous boat disasters will bolster my argument. 

Take the Titanic, for instance. On the afternoon of April 14, 1912, had the crew heeded the warnings coming from other boats in the region regarding floating ice fields late that evening wouldn’t have turned into such a downer—pardon the pun.  And let’s not forget Ernest Shackleton’s famous trip gone bad when his boat, Endurance, was trapped in ice (late one afternoon) on its way down to Antartica. Good ol’ Shackleton was a brave man and a damn great leader, but he got off easy compared to the rest. He went for help in a small dinghy, drifting 800 miles through impossible seas before landing on the wrong side of an island with a whaling station. The poor crew he left behind sat around on ice eating raw seal and making snow angels for a year and a half before finally being rescued.

DRAG-IN SLAYERS
A Band of Local Misfits Persist On Breaking New Ground Down Under

In December of ’94 SURFER posed the question “How big is big?”, a rhetorical exercise that at the time was provoked by the advent of tow-surfing, which had just begun ruffling the feathers of the ten-foot-board-carrying heavy-water establishment. Considering that Jeff Clark had only unveiled Maverick’s four years prior, the Strapt crew had just begun covertly tugging at the seams of  “the unridden realm” via Zodiac on Outer Reefs, and the fact that the nature of the hunt was being reinvented, the question rang relevant.

Cut to today’s surfing world and altitude no longer suffices as a barometer of “bigness”. Sure, Jaws has been ridden at 70 feet, Maverick’s at over 50, but rather than height, sheer mass has emerged as the paramount wave feature. Think Cory Lopez and Laird Hamilton camping out in ocean-dumping caverns at Teahupoo compared to “60 foot” slope-faced European rollers that barely register an added heartbeat. How many times overhead no longer constitutes an adequate description of a wave; rather, we now ask how thick, how hollow, how many stair steps and just how deadly.

THE 35TH ANNUAL SURFER POLL AWARDS
The Best Night In Surfing

“F--k mate! How do I get out of here?”

Jesse Pollock was hunched over, naked, his bare flesh covered only in an assortment of Aussie street tats. A framed SURFER Poll Video Award—for Best Wipe Out—was the only thing between the eyes of the audience and his junk. After scampering onto stage, nude, to accept the award for an absent Richie Vas, the Bra Boy grommet was now cartwheeling through the Grove of Anaheim’s curtains searching for an exit. Apparently, he wanted his gooseflesh out of the limelight. Fast.

 Now, most events that hinge on decades’ worth of ceremony tend to have an inherent semblance of gravity. An easy reminder of this came a week-to-the-day after the 35th Annual Surfer Poll: The 59th Annual Emmys. Deep moments on that stage. Deep moments.

ON TOP OF THE WORLD
Green Season in the North Sea
by
Yassine Ouhilal


The blizzard was violently shaking our van. Looking through the windshield, I knew there was a perfect left point somewhere ahead. We’d discovered it a few days earlier and had dubbed it “Glacier Bay,” but at the moment, we couldn’t see it through the blowing snow. Sitting in the back, with their wetsuits halfway on, were surfers Ricky Whitlock, Cheyne Cottrell and Pat Millin. We were in the Arctic Circle, 1,800-miles from the North Pole, and we were on a surf trip. Morale was as low as the barometer.

“You never know, there might be a break in the weather,” I said just to motivate myself. Paddling out in whiteout conditions with 40-knot winds is no easy feat, but after what we’d been eating so far on this mission, something was boiling inside and it was rapidly becoming clear that our choices were to be asphyxiated inside the van, or to make a go of the blizzard.

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