Pororoca: Surfing the Amazon

Video of the wave CLICK HERE

Riding the Pororoca requires tremendous stamina. We're talking about shortboard ripping for possibly, as in Picuruta's case, 35 minutes. After about 10 minutes, most of us--both young and old--were beat, only fueling the ever-mounting desire to ride this wave again. Compare this to a 30-second ride at Rincon and you start to get an idea of what 10 minutes would be like--let alone 35.

RCJ, Burle, Linden and crew. RedBull

One morning on our way to meet the Pororoca, I noticed some of the Amazon's famous pink freshwater dolphins travelling with us before arriving at our designated waiting spot. As that day's wave unfolded, they did 360-degree rolls while Carlos Burle and I rode on the Jet Ski close to Picuruta's lengthy ride. For me, it solved the riddle of what dolphins were doing in a river anyway. Of course they had claimed the world's longest wave long before we did.

On the last day, as Picuruta and I floated on our boards in the middle of the muddy brown river, we were no longer afraid of our surroundings and had become used to breathing the world's freshest air and surfing the world's longest wave. We felt a calmness we hadn't enjoyed until that point as the adventure was still in front of us: we had still only surfed the right on the north side of the river. On the other side in the distance, we watched perfect lefthanders with their own set of banks and barrels.

We had also lost Burle's tow board somewhere on the river and as we searched, it became more of an excuse to stay on the river. We knew Iemanja had claimed the board as her own, and it was a pleasant satisfaction, thinking she liked the way we surfed. -- Gary Linden