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forests, hills and pastures. Out beyond the beach, surf perfection is realised. Come to Malibu now. It’s 1957 and surfers are riding the PERFECT WAVE Malibu’s long, mechanically peeling waves in the dynamic style known as hot-dogging. Mickey Dora, Lance Carson, Dewey Weber and Mickey Muñoz are at the cutting edge of the hotdog revolution. There’s a crowd on the beach willing to be impressed by the new and the strange. The foam and Over the last century, the search for the perfect fibreglass boards the heroes ride are increasingly light and wave has shaped surf culture. Always an elusive dynamic. There’s a rock-and-roll soundtrack to the parties notion, it has been constantly re-defined. on the beach, and the rides along the ‘bu’s Picture the scene at Waikiki, Oahu, around 1912. The tourists started arriving seemingly endless, gently tapered walls are a few years ago, drawn by the hibiscus-heavy Hawaiiana propagated by just waiting to be filled with the new stylistic writers such as Jack London. The small coterie of local ‘beach boys’, heirs vernacular. Malibu is the canvas upon to the grand old indigenous Hawaiian tradition of wave-riding, are making which modern surf style was painted. a living teaching the rich haoles to swim and to surf. The sixteen-foot Smell that Patchouli oil? Yes, it’s 1973 long finless boards, hewn from heavy timber, are well suited to the angles and we find ourselves at Uluwatu in a little and trajectories of Waikiki’s waves. The boys who ride them are the first known outpost called Bali. The left-breaking, proponents of the surfing lifestyle, and Waikiki beomes the epitome of a fiercely pitching maw that’s firing with razorwave’s manifest perfection. like sharpness down the southwestern tip of Cut to Palos Verdes Cove, California, some time in the mid 1930s. the Bukit Peninsular is at the edge of surf On the beach, the members of the Palos Verdes Surf Club are doing culture’s consciousness. With short, speartheir best to replicate the Hawaiian lifestyle that had been introduced to like boards a tuned-out core of a globally the mainland by the likes of visiting Hawaiians Duke Kahanamoku and wandering surf tribe is exploring the limits of George Freeth. They’re catching lobster and abalone. speed and hollowness. Waves of undreamt They’re strumming ukuleles and drinking wine out of jugs steepness and ferocity that would have sent Duke and Blake around an open fire. Meanwhile, Tom Blake, visionary scampering back to the beach are being harnessed by the waterman, is paddling way outside of the peak on a big likes of Terry Fitzgerald, Gerry Lopez and Michael Peterson. day. His hollow ‘cigar-box’ board, fitted now with a single The surf magazines back in California and on Australia’s east fin, is more manoeuvrable than anything seen before. coast have propagated the dream of tapping into the power The relatively light board, with its stabilising skeg, enables source no matter how impossible it might have seemed only Blake to draw tight turns and acute angles down the faces a few years previously, and Uluwatu is the ideal aspiration of the Cove’s big, fast-moving walls. This is California’s for the children of the shortboard revolution. pre-war halcyon of unspoilt shorelines and rich inland 1983. Greed is good and the Thruster is unashamedly greedy on the wave. Three fins are by now ubiquitous and the Thruster’s bite has drawn tube riding deeper and deeper back into the heart of the wave. Surfers are intent See also these days on satisfying their thirst for increasingly obscure, Malibu 7 211 Tom Blake
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increasingly hollow, mind-bendingly fast waves. Professional superstars like Martin Potter and Tom Carroll are heaving their smacks harder and harder into the lip and paring their cutbacks down into audacious 180-degree roundhouses with the dynamics of an on-the-limit Lamborghini Countach. Indonesia’s gravitational pull hasn’t diminished – G-Land, Nias and Tavarua are now the spiritual homes of this new power generation. Glossy dispatches from the frontiers are populating a raft of full colour, globally distributed surf magazines whose cluttered ad pages are an explosion of Day-Glo and aggression. It's 1988 and the trajectory of the ideal line on the ideal wave is beginning to go ballistic. Inspired by skateboarding’s third boom, and the early flights of Larry Bertlemann and Martin Potter, surf performance superstars and American gothic punks Christian Slater and Matt Archibold are beginning to reach out of the liquid parameters, busting out into aerials that flow back seamlessly into the ride. Surfing’s aesthetic is beginning to merge with that of skateboarding, while up in the mountains surfers and skaters are riding steep and deep in powder snow and halfpipes. 2001. A virgin charter operation just the other side of the millennium. A pod of supergroms, sponsored by a major
surf conglomerate, have been on wave-watch for months in the upper reaches of the Indonesian archipelago known as the Mentawais. Here, waves of intense power, consistency and geometric perfection wrap and bend off the reefs that surround these remote island communities. The perfect wave can’t get better than this. Or can it? 2008. A crowded Saturday afternoon at the Côte de Basques, in Biarritz in July. An unusually powerful summer swell is pulsing in from the Bay of Biscay. Way outside, sculpted watermen are paddling into unbroken set waves riding statuesque on Standup Paddleboards. On their inside a flotilla of neo-classical longboarders make a drop and run to the nose. Snagging the scraps, a pod of Thruster-riding groms hustle to cut a bottom turn and bust an air. Further in, at the shorebreak, a hundred or so families on bodyboards launch themselves into the foam. This is wave riding’s perfect day, twenty-first century style. It’s a post-modern mishmash of wave craft and sensibilities, each individual enjoying a distinctly contemporary flavour of stoke, and each enjoying their very own perfect wave. Overleaf: Beau Brown slots into a slice of tubular perfection at Lance's Right, Mentawai Islands.