Table of contents for Winter 2016 in White Horses

PACIFIC: OCEAN OF CHAOS AND CALM OF COMMUNITY AND SOLITUDE OF NEOPRENE AND NYLON OF PROVIDENCE AND LOSS OF MOTION AND SILENCE OF FAMILIARITY AND FEAR…

Ngaru. Surfer. Resident of Avaiki, the coconutshaped underworld, back in the day. Grandson of Moko, King of All Lizards. Adept at wriggling out of sticky situations involving human ovens and scary demons. Cocky bastard. All-star juggler, and challenger of fairies. In Mangaia, the most southern of the Cook Islands, they called him Ngaru the Valiant. This is one of his stories. Ngaru was young. He was brave and strong, and he had the fairest wife in the land. But he wanted more. He wanted fame and fortune. Blokes shaking his hand when he walked into the pub. A few epic scars, ideally in highly visible places. That old chestnut. One morning, he stood on the beach and did the old rooster chest puff. He stared out across the ocean, with…

By the dark waters of the North Sea, in a wee fishing village called Lower Largo, lived John Selcraig, a cobbler and tanner, and wife Euphan. Industrious Scots Protestants and prolific breeders. In 1676 came their seventh son, Alexander. Records describe Alex as a troublesome, occasionally violent lad. As a youth he was called before the church greybeards who sat in judgement of their flock. Accused of “undecent beaiviar in ye kirk (church)”, the 17-year-old failed to appear. He’d run away to sea. Four years later, home once more, he found trouble again. In a prank, one of his brothers swapped Alex’s cup of fresh water for seawater. Alex didn’t see the funny side. He beat his brother with a wooden staff, and when their father tried to intervene, beat…

Some mainlanders sauntered into Get Shucked, the oyster bar I work at down on Bruny Island here in Tassie. I was standing behind the counter with my colleague when some mainlanders interrupted us with their orders. “Do you live here?” they small-talked. “Down here for a year and a half,” I replied. “Me? Thirty years,” my colleague told them. “Not long enough for you to be able to call yourself a local, ay?” one of them quipped. My colleague shrugged and got them their beers. There’s no bridge to Bruny Island. Instead, the Mirambeena ferry chugs between it and Kettering: a cruisy port town, its harbour a mesh of jetties and yacht masts. On Bruny, it’s the ferry that makes the local. Literally. If you have property on the island…

PROLOGUE OUT OF FRAME The North Shore doesn’t begin at Velzyland, of course. That honour is well out of shot to the left at Turtle Bay. Closer to visible is Kawela Bay, which has waves and is known for being a cool, quiet place to live; the locals fought to stop a big tourist resort being built there, and to date they’ve won. Where the image fades in below is at a surf spot called Revelations, where the coast begins to curve in and down toward Waimea Bay. For our purposes, it’s where it all kicks off. PART ONE V-LANDBAY DOWN TO SUNSET POINT Velzyland is inside that line of whitewater to the left (A). The land behind that used to be cheap apartments, but has since been re-developed into…

A HALF-TIME VISUAL INTERLUDE…

It all began when tectonic activity forced a small amount of earth to surface in the shallow seas that once separated North and South America. The Isthmus of Panama rose up, creating the skinny waist of land that connected the two Americas, until 102 years ago anyway. This slim strip has been getting people all excited since some local indigenous mob told Christopher Columbus that if he walked nine days from the Caribbean shores he’d see a whole new ocean. While he never legged it at the time, word of this cheeky short cut spread, and the Isthmus of Panama has remained a focal point ever since, for human endeavours to outsmart geography, all in the name of making a profit. As early as the year 1600 people began using…

Fiji is absolute paradise. The waves range from fun to extremely challenging and the fishing is some of the best in the world. But what strikes you the most – and what stays with you after you leave – are the people. People with the biggest, most genuine smiles you’ll ever see. I’ve been coming to Fiji for 15 years, often pitching in as volunteer lifeguard for Namotu Island Resort, and have spent over four years in total over here. The fishing and surfing is what brought me here to Fiji initially, but it’s the people that keep bringing me back. It’s the perfect place to unwind from a busy city life. My most recent visit to Fiji occurred in the aftermath of Cyclone Winston. On the approach to Nadi…

I was on a remote Pacific Atoll recently. Let’s say it lies somewhere between Fiji and Hawaii. One flight in and out a week. This place is a prime destination for hardcore fishermen, but there’s no real tourist infrastucture to speak of. There were seemingly no surfers around and I’d had this fun righthander out the front of town pretty much to myself for a few days. Someone joined me in the lineup one morning, though, and unbelievably I knew him! He was an older local from my tight-knit home town in Malibu. I grew up looking up to this guy as I learnt to surf. We couldn’t believe the coincidence. I guess that’s the Pacific for you. No matter how vast the ocean, you can still bump into your…

I went to Raglan in New Zealand this February, thinking I was going for a university conference on surfing identity. In fact, unknown or barely known to myself, I was going because of my old mate Al Byrne. Ever since Al died a couple of years back following a motorcycle accident, I’d hung on to a little nugget of grief about him. Something, some picture of my friend that I’d imagined into being, cobbled together from fragments: the waves we’d surfed, the boards he’d made, the bullshit we’d talked. Something I’d clung to partly out of sheer dumb-brute Carroll family stubbornness, and partly out of fear. Like if I did let go of that little piece of imagined Al, he would vanish somehow from my memory, and then would truly…

One of the first things anyone ever said to me about the North Shore was, “It’s a shithole, the locals are insane and there’s no women”. Somehow, on my first trip there in ’86, within a couple of days I’d managed to find the only woman on the island, got in straight away with all the Black Shorts and all of a sudden had the best waves in the world at my disposal. I stayed for two months and that was the start of it all. I come back every year and this winter was my 30th consecutive. You’d think I’d be up for a gold watch or something, but it’s been an incredible season, which is as good as a gift as anything. The El Nino delivered and The…

TIMSILVERWOOD.COM #TAKE 3 FOR THE SEA In 2011 I quit my job to sail across the North Pacific and explore the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The resulting expedition with a motley bunch of scientists and activists invoked in me a personal sense of duty to do all in my power to protect our oceans from the scourge of plastic and help set us on a path to sustainability. Two years earlier, in 2009, I co-founded Take 3 with my colleagues, Amanda Marechal and Roberta Dixon-Valk. Our message is simple: take three pieces of rubbish with you when you leave the beach, waterway or … anywhere and you’ve made a difference. We aim to reduce global plastic pollution through education and engagement programs in schools, surf clubs, communities and by…

My third night camping on the Baja Peninsula wasn’t a good one. It felt like there was a rogue firehose, turned on full blast, attacking my tent, flapping wildly, forever snapping the rainfly back and forth and sending down regular barrages of spray. Every once in a while the wind relented, prompting hope that the storm would soon pass. But then a gust would blow my feeble shelter nearly flat to the ground, pressing the rain-soaked fly to the interior wall and wetting my feather-down sleeping bag. The persistent south-east wind had started in the middle of the night and the rain arrived soon after. Sometime around 3.00 am I climbed out to re-stake one of the guy lines and had a look around at the other camps. Everyone else…

The Hokulea is a replica of a voyaging canoe. There were no blueprints, no models. It was the vision of a man named Herb Kane – one of the founders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Back in 1976, Hokulea made the first longdistance canoe voyage in over 400 years. Initially she was built for doing a single round trip – to Tahiti – to prove that you could navigate over great distances using nothing but nature. But she’s kept going! She’s sailed over 170,000 miles. In Hawaii she’s considered a living, cultural treasure. Forty years since that first voyage she’s continuing around the world, and now a third generation of navigators are being trained. With celestial navigation you use every heavenly body. Half the time you’ll be using the sun…

I’ve always been a water baby – I’m a Pisces! I was born in South Africa, but grew up in the UK. When I travelled to Australia in my 20s I really fell in love with sailing. Passion’s always driven me more than money or other motivations. When I saw an ad where a woman was looking for a team to row the Pacific, I actually thought what a ridiculous thing to do! I kept thinking about it, though, and was inexplicably drawn towards the idea. So I went to the gym and tried out a rowing machine – I’d never rowed before – and thought: I like this! It’s very meditative. I like the motion! I put an application in and here I am, almost two years later, having…

You can’t be highly strung in a place like P-Pass – on land, in the boat or in the water. It’s fickle so you gotta roll with it on the bad days, the bad weeks, remembering the rewards will come eventually. Surfing this area of the Pacific teaches some important life lessons, the main one being patience. I see guys who lose their shit over such small things, like when the boat guys aren’t ready exactly at 6.00am ... it’s not that the boat guys are being lazy, it’s just that, you know ... there’s not much difference between 6.00am and 6.15am to an islander. Sure I like to be on it early, but 15 minutes is what? Two waves you might have ridden? Don’t let two waves darken the…

Magic-fricken-Seaweed and their fricken star rating system! You know how it goes: Real time ratings of surf spot conditions everywhere. One star equals hopeless. Five stars equals all-time epic. It isn’t the first time stars have been used to navigate the Pacific of course. But I imagine Polynesian celestial navigation is a slightly more ephemeral art. Anyway, I’ll refuse the urge to bombard you with a back in my day… diatribe, but I really have to say that modern-day stargazers drive me nuts. And, shit, I can be one of them. It’s astonishing how easily one can get seduced. Aimless tropical afternoons are ripe times for an internet drift session, and the surf forecast traps always have a good show playing. When you’re travelling for surf, avoiding the stargaze syndrome…

As we’ve been researching and assembling this magazine, several mentions of nuclear testing and accidents in the Pacific have popped up along the way. We reckon it would be remiss of us not to tell a story or two about it. Just to remind us of all-toorecent follies. And deadset, the history here is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make this stuff up, basically. Righto. So to get up to speed we’ll paraphrase – after WWII, the U.S assumed control of great swathes of the Pacific Ocean. But preceding the military by 100 years were the missionaries, who swept out and did their best to convert islanders from a happy existence, – wearing clothes suitable for the climate and leading naturally harmonious lives – to covering themselves in heavy, unsuitable…

Stoked as we are with this special issue about the Pacific, we acknowledge that it’s a laughably inadequate document of its waves, its cultures, its geography, its nature – the whole thing. As we frantically scan through the soon-tobe-printed pages for typos and dumb oversights, some inclusions in the Midway photo spread (in the middle of the issue, see what we did there?) reveal themselves as just a tiny bit token. Like, Shit! Guatemala! We need a photo of Guatemala! Who’s got a photo of Guatemala? So, we’ve barely covered a fraction of the Pacific here, and let’s not even get started on El Nino. A most extraordinary northern hemisphere winter of Pacific surf (and none too shabby here in Oz, eh?) and we’ve barely mentioned the phenomenon. All of…

My name is TAKI. I was born in Monrovia, Liberia. Growing up, every day was an explosion of colors. Love kept me warm, and beauty led me further away from home. It was like chasing a butterfly, leading me everywhere. I fell in love with a girl who promised to always hold my hand, her eyes said it and her heart meant it. Little did she know that her promise would sustain me, become my breath, in what I was about to experience. War. I became a Child Soldier. I was still young when Liberia’s Civil War broke out, and it narrowed my explosion of colors down to just two. The first color was Red. I learnt to identify with it and love it. There was an abundance of it.…

The Moananui a Kiwa translates from the Maori language into English as The Great Ocean of Kiwa. It is known to many as the Pacific Ocean. Kiwa is our ancestor. The forebears of the Maori sailed that vastness of water on wooden canoes by wind, swell and heavenly entities, settling a multitude of islands between China and America. When the world was considered flat by Western scholars, our heroes and heroines braved it. This accounts for a shared foundation of culture between islands as far flung as Taiwan, Hawaii, Rapanui and an island grouping known as Aoteroa, (New Zealand), where in a time B.C. (before Cook), Maori icons like Maui, arrived and established tribes. The appearance of Captain Cook and others who followed changed the face of the Pacific immediately…

I was born and raised a Marara fisherman! (Marara is Tahitian for Flying Fish.) It’s a fish that we caught with a landing net at night. I started fishing for Marara with my father when I was 12. We used to go out in a canoe, so we had to paddle, and sometimes the wind was blowing strongly, making it dificult. Several years later, when I was in my early 20s, we used a motor, but it was still hard for us to fish. There always had to be two of us in the canoe – one to steer and one to be up the front with the landing net In the morning, when we came home after selling our fish, we had to share the money we earnt. But…

Late last year I said “See ya” to Mum and Dad, left my home town of Wollongong and flew over the Pacific to Hawaii to spend three months there as an exchange student. The idea was to experience and appreciate a different lifestyle. After three months I was to join my folks for a fortnight’s holiday in Waikiki. (The photos on the facing page were taken in that time.) Even though I tried to head over there with no preconceptions, it’s hard not to when Hawaii’s your destination! With all the surf media – all the mags and clips you’re exposed to – it’s impossible not to have a picture of perfect blue barrels and gently swaying palm trees in your head. Which is to say I never expected what…

Settle in, gentle Horsies reader, for a tale of villainy and heroism on the high seas. It’s the dawn of April 4, 1789. Our setting is the HMS Bounty, rocking on a gentle Tahitian swell. Her mission, to gather breadfruit trees from this Pacific paradise, has thus far been a success. All that remains is to transport the plants to the West Indies, to be cultivated as food for the thousands of African slaves toiling in sugar cane and tobacco plantations. The Bounty’s captain, 33 year-old Commanding Lieutenant William Bligh, has retired to his cabin in a mood of typically high self-regard. Yet all is not well on the good ship.. Bligh’s acting lieutenant, 25 year-old Fletcher Christian, is pissed off. For weeks, the skipper has been giving Fletch a…

I grew up in Holland where my parents ran a sailing/windsurfing school and so naturally I loved windsurfing! Fast forward to 2000 and my wife, Dagmar, and I moved to Hawaii, specifically Maui – windsurfing’s epicentre. In 2005 we sold all we had and sailed around the world. During the trip I bought an old stand-up paddleboard and that’s when I started paddling. It’s the perfect foil for windsurfing – if there’s no wind you can go stand-up paddling. As a kid I really admired a man named Arnaud De Rosnay, a pioneer windsurfer who did many ocean crossings. There was no GPS back in Arnaud’s day, and on one of his brave voyages – somewhere between China and Taiwan – he disappeared and was never heard of again. I…

Princess Kelea. Shredder. Heartbreaker. Smartarse. And flat-out frothmonster. She grew up in the wild turquoise and red hibiscus dreamings of Maui, way back in the long long ago. Things were even more lurid in those days. The butterflies were the size of small eagles and the jungle just exploded in your eyes. Ever since grommethood, Kelea loved the ocean. It was the only place she wanted to be, and all that she could hear was the song of the Pacific, loud in her ears. Shifting with the slow dance of the constellations. Tracing the shape of her heart. When she was 10, someone gave her a board, all dinged up and bodgily patched with the mythological equivalent of gaffer. She thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.…

Special thanks to Tim McKenna, who alerted us via his Instagram to the unique design of the Poti Marara – the distinctly Tahitian craft you always see in the lineup at Teahupo’o. Tairei Deane commented on Tim’s post, saying how proud she was of her grandfather, Leonard, who invented the boat. We got in touch with Tairei and asked her to interview her grandad. In a nice completion of the circle, Tim ended up shooting the portrait of Leonard and family for us. This is the kind of thing Horsies digs the most: threads of stories and family connections weaving together. Awesome to have writers Erin Hortle, Tom Nagle and Simon Willcox make their Horsies’ debuts in this issue. Likewise photographers Chris Jordan, David Bettencourt, Hamish Laing, Macduff Everton and…