Table of contents for #25 in White Horses

IT’S HARD TO IGNORE A 30-FOOT LONG TIGER SHARK, SWIMMING DOWN THE STREET TO WARDS YOU The city was awash in paint. Everywhere you looked, huge swathes of colour were being thrown down – on buildings, across walls, even up 28 metre-high towers. No surface was safe. Fifteen national and international artists had converged on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef for a week as part of the inaugural Sea Walls Australia festival earlier this year. Their mission: to highlight the plight of our oceans by taking over Cairns with brushes and spray cans. Sea Walls was first launched in 2014 by the PangeaSeed Foundation and has since created over 300 murals in 13 countries across the world. The foundation’s goal is to empower people and communities through art,…

IT PROBABLY ISN’T THE BEST MOVE IN TERMS OF ETIQUETTE TO PULL UP TO A SPOT IN A GIANT, DECOMMISSIONED MILITARY VESSEL FULL OF SURFERS As I scrambled to keep up with Peter hopping over the minefield of slippery rocks en route to the beach, I glanced towards the horizon just in time to catch the remnants of a whale’s breath hanging in the autumn air. A moment later, an eagle soared overhead and took roost on the limb of an ancient cedar; its branches slouched over the high-tide line as if intending to break free from its terra firma home in favour of the sea. The low and steady murmur of cobblestones tumbling in the shallows with each passing swell laid rhythm to our amble as we made our…

THE ANCIENT SHAPER HAD SOMEHOW MADE PERFECT CURVES RIGHT THROUGH THESE VERY HARD KNOTS. IT WAS LIKE DISCOVERING ALIEN TECHNOLOGY. The sound of wood being shaped is like a symphony. When you peel the wood off with your hand tools, you can hear a good cut, you can feel its character. As you slowly peel down the board, each millimetre changes and with it, the board changes a little bit, taking shape to the music. This symphony has guided my journey as a board builder for the past 20 years. I was born in Redondo Beach, where George Freeth brought Hawaiian surfing to California around 1912. While still a toddler, my parents made the short move to Palos Verdes Estates where Paddle Board Cove was the Californian version of Waikiki.…

“THESE KIDS NEEDED HELP AND AN EDUCATION, AND I OWE THAT TO MY PEOPLE” Joli Dachi is the founder of Villa Warna Warni, a non-profit orphanage serving destitute and abandoned children on his island of Nias, Sumatra Utara, Indonesia. Joli’s brother, Anton, is operational manager and undisputedly one of the world’s best backside tube-riders. The Dachi family owned a losmen on the beachfront at Sorake Point for decades, and the boys grew up surfing the perfect waves in front of their home. Growing up surrounded by foreigners also led to the boys being inundated with novel ideas and remarkable language skills, while providing a unique manner of seeing the world and an understanding that change can happen. The story of Villa Warna Warni is one such change. “I first worked…

THE HARDER YOU PUSH ON IT, THE DEEPER THE CONCAVE GETS… IT’S MORE LIKE A BOAT THAN A SURFBOARD “The dream is to have a buoyant surfboard flexing like a Greenough spoon. For Greenoughphiles, that’s the Holy Grail. That’s what we want.” It’s a late Sunday night and I’ve got Ryan Lovelace on a crackly Skype line, trying to grasp his words about the 7’10” quad, a freak he birthed at the suggestion of George Greenough. “It came from a fucking spaceship, man,” Lovelace says, referring to Greenough’s Edge concept, where a hard edge is shaped into the board between the bottom deck and the rail. “So out there. So many curves morphing and twisting into each other.” Huh? How? Why? Let’s rewind. In 2014 Dave Rastovich surfed Cloudbreak on…

I’VE ACTUALLY BEEN TO EVERY BEACH IN AUSTRALIA…ALL 11 761 OF THEM I’ve always been fascinated by the forces that shape waves. I grew up in Sydney and started surfing on the Northern Beaches when I was 14. I joined North Narrabeen Boardriders club in 1966, the year after it was founded. Being a surfer before I went to university, I had to find a career that satisfied my surfing interests. I studied coastal geomorphology at the University of Sydney, then did a masters and a Ph.D. in marine science. In the process, I’ve seen a lot of coastline around the world. I’ve actually been to every beach in Australia. Half of the Australian coast consists of sandy beaches and yet there we were in the year 2000, not having…

The latter months of 2017 hadn’t been kind to the Cornish surfer. A cyclical purgatory of rampant onshore northwest winds and indifferent weather was interspersed by frequent updates via social media of pumping waves in every other corner of the UK but our own. Yet, one of the many lessons that can be learnt on this coast is you can’t keep a good dog down forever. Eventually the tides of fortune will turn. So it was in the hangover of the festive season that we were finally dealt a script-worthy forecast. The sites were predicting 12 foot at first light with all the right variables, which was enough to persuade the rational part of my mind that some crew would be put off. As it happens, I struggle to find…

We see many photos of waves like The Right nowadays, to the point that we’ve almost become blasé about what’s going on out there (if you can believe that), but this issue’s cover is a rare gem. Perhaps it’s the girth of the lip, or the light breaking though the trough, or just the sheer, casual audacity of WA lad, Jake Osman. Regardless, we’re sure you’ll agree it makes for a worthy page one. As an aside, Jake used to be one of WA’s premier junior competitors but disappeared off the scene some years back, spending time traversing the West and working with indigenous youth in the West Oz Kimberly region, connecting to country and the ocean. Teaming up with him to get this shot was Connor Jackson. Well done,…

SEAWATER IS 800 TIMES AS DENSE AS AIR, SO YOU END UP WITH A FIVE-KNOT OCEAN CURRENT HAVING MORE KINETIC ENERGY THAN A 350KM/H WIND Years ago, while on a surf trip in the Maldives, I found myself getting swept backwards at a proverbial rate of knots while trying to fight against the current and paddle back to the top of the reef. I eventually gave up and resigned myself to the liquid conveyor belt running into the atoll, but it got me thinking… The Maldives had already struck me as a dichotomy. Here was a fossil fuel-burning nation that was going to be one of the first to disappear as a consequence of climate change-related sea level rise, yet it was surrounded by this tremendous energy source. Surely there…

IN THE PROCESS, SURFING’S PEAK MOMENT HAS BECOME JUST ONE MORE THING TO YAWN AND BE BORED BY Once, the only way you could experience the view from inside the barrel was to actually get barrelled. It was surfing’s mystical, transcendent, peak moment. A bit like losing one’s virginity, it was a club you joined after much fumbling and clumsy foreplay, when some of kind of existential truth was finally revealed in a fleeting, ecstatic exchange. When surfing’s greatest creative genius, George Greenough, first captured the view from inside the tube with a bulky, custom-built water housing made for his 16mm camera that he strapped to his back while riding an inflatable surf mat at Lennox Head, the surfing world was spellbound. For the first time, those precious seconds inside…

WITH THESE VEHICLES I’M ABLE TO ACCESS AND EXPLORE OUR TRIBAL COASTAL LAND AND SOME AMAZING BREAKS I grew up on my father’s tribal lands, south of Gisborne on the coast. Our village consists of only 50 houses with our tribal Marae (the sacred meeting house and grounds). The beach is a 10-minute walk from home and is sheltered from onshore winds by a headland with 500-foot-high cliff faces. There are good banks along the five-kilometre beach. The gem is a super long and fast left barrel that only shows itself in the right conditions. To the south of my home, our tribal land extends along the coastline for about 25km. All access is by 4WD or walking and is under lock and key due to forestry or farming. I’ve…

Anja Light, Mum, 50 I went to Ecuador in the ’90s to work on projects for the Rainforest Information Centre. It blew my mind. It was so alive and vibrant, so full of life. The cloud forest that we were most involved in protecting was one of the ten hotspots of biodiversity on the planet. I ended up buying a piece of that cloud forest in order to protect it. First we lived in a tent, then we built a mud house with a straw roof, and then we built a house with stones from the river with a whole lot of helpers. That was where Pacha and Yani began their lives. In terms of the baseline of simple living, that was it. We had no electricity and we were an…

I WANTED TO TAKE OFF HALFWAY DOWN, PULL INTO THE TUBE, HIT THE LIP. I WANTED THE PERFORMANCE My five brothers and I grew up on the beach bodysurfing with our cousins in the shorebreak, playing in tin canoes and watching our uncles surf for hours. When they came in we would jump on their boards and try catch waves. There was no real introduction to surfing, it just happened. One of our uncles was John Whitmore, a South African surfing pioneer and the first real surfer in the Cape. The older guys in Cape Town always rode bigger waves and I wasn’t going to sit on the beach, so I’d paddle out with them. When it started maxing out at the beachbreaks around Cape Town we’d go to the…

I started building a house at Angourie in northern New South Wales in late 1972. That was the year between my two degrees in architecture – a year when, in theory, we were meant to gain ‘professional practice’ by doing the filing and making coffee in an architectural firm. I chose to find some land and build a house. The slight problem was that by the end of the year I didn’t have much of a building standing. I had to submit a report to substantiate the value of what I’d been doing and I used an exercise book from the local primary school. It’s fair to say that it wasn’t well received, and that I was fortunate to have some supporters in the faculty. I made light of the…

I moved to New York to get away from surfing. I’d grown up in Southern California, surfed on the pro tour for five years, worked as Executive Editor of Surfing magazine. I was saltwaterlogged to the point of disgust. I wanted new experiences. If there was a lesson learned from a life in waves, it was to think fast, stay loose, bend your knees. I hit the city with big dreams. I vowed to play my surfing background down. I was certain that it would mark me as the dumbest guy in the room. Among my Yale and NYU and Columbia-uni friends I felt deeply inadequate. Though I’d surfed hard, I knew no serious rigour, certainly not on the intellectual front. But the surfing life, I discovered against the backdrop…

Allow me to introduce Elliot. He’s been very busy and keeping to himself for quite a while now, but I thought it time for him to say G’day. Old mate doesn’t give much away to strangers but, in an instant of meeting him, you can tell that he’s lived most of his life around the tide. He can’t tell you what Pi squared is or offer a critique on James Joyce’s Ulysses. A poster-boy for dyslexia, he’d rather listen than talk, but when he does have something to say, weaved throughout witty narratives, disguised within colourful anecdotes, there are glimmers of his prior incarnations meshed with threads of wisdom. A shy child of the ’50s, he was educated by the ’60s, prefers to keep the ’70s to himself, dropped out…

THE PROCESS REQUIRES COLLECTING, DRYING, UNRAVELLING AND REWORKING THE NYLON THREADS INTO NEW FORMS Jess is obsessed with rope washed up by the sea. She collects huge, heavy piles of it from remote coastlines around Australia and Tasmania. Each one is a sinewy treasure that lies in long lines on the beach or twists into piles like a coiled snake. Each one requires heavy lifting to get off the sand. To Jess, these ropes are far more than rubbish. They are artefacts of our consumption, the raw material she weaves together in her latest body of work, ‘Excavations of the Deep’. Made entirely from discarded, beachcombed rope, the series explores the complexity of ocean pollution and plays with how this debris is not only a blight, but can also be…

It all began when I left my fins at home one day. I’d planned to ride my single-fin log at Mullaz, but when I got to the carpark, I reaslied I hadn’t packed the skeg. I live quite far from the beach and the waves were too good to go back, so I just rode the board finless. I caught a few without spinning out and ended up surfing the whole day. After that, I didn’t put the fin back in, I just kept going. I was doing all the local comps around WA back them but I never really found my groove. The competition was intense with the likes of Jack Robinson, Creed McTaggart and Jacob Wilcox. Whenever I got knocked out, I would grab a twinny or a…

IF HUMANS HAD INDEED MADE A WAVE THAT OUTDID NATURE, MIGHT IT NOT BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END? You’ll recall back in September 2017, the World Surf League put on a trial event at Kelly’s Pool in Lemoore, California. It was called the Future Classic, and it remains to my knowledge the only professional surfing event in history to which the media was specifically un-invited. Actually told: don’t show up. I had long since ceased to be baffled by the WSL’s often puzzling actions, especially its awesome control-freak secrecy. After all, this is an organisation that after four years in charge of the world tour is yet to allow its actual owner to be interviewed. But having a pro contest in Kelly’s pool and nobody’s allowed to watch? You’re…

THE SEED WAS PLANTED TO MAKE A FILM THAT WAS A TRUER REPRESENTATION OF OUR WAHINE CULTURE When I first started surfing there was one message in the surf media to women and one message only: if you weren’t a size 8 girl in a high-cut bikini paddling through tropical water and shredding on a tiny thruster, then you weren’t doing it right. I almost gave up because this interpretation of what surfing was supposed to be didn’t stack up to my everyday reality – clambering around in three or four millimetres of rubber, surfing freezing two-foot waves on a regular basis. Luckily my best mate Zoe and I would motivate one another through frozen fingers and soggy wetsuits when it was 12 degrees outside and raining. Over time my…

THE PROSPECT OF GETTING CAUGHT INSIDE, WHICH WAS ALREADY DAUNTING, WAS NOW ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING “Misheeeeeeee!” boomed Cecilia, almost crushing Michi’s large frame with a huge hug as we both walked in the door. It was 2016 and the 28th time Michi (pronounced Mickey) Mohr had come to Madeira Island. Even though he was based in Munich, he knew the waves of Madeira as well as anyone, and could more than hold his own in 15-foot surf. Cecilia looked over to me and her face lit up. “Ehhhh tuuuuu!” she roared, and rushed into a back room. She came out with a photo from 16 years before, in the Spanish magazine Surfer Rule, showing myself standing next to a group of legendary big-wave riders. I couldn’t believe she remembered me. Cecilia…

THERE WERE SOME REALLY, REALLY HEAVY BITS OF TIMBER. THE BIGGEST PIECE TOOK 40 MEN TO CARRY I originally came out to the Telos to be a surf guide at Telo Island Lodge. I’d worked on the tools since I’d left school and needed a break from it. I guided for about a year, and then the idea to build a new lodge over at Pinnacles came up. The owner, Ryder, knew I was a carpenter and already had me doing bits and pieces around the lodge. He asked if I’d be keen to build ‘Pinnacles on Telo’ and I thought I’d have a crack. We got the ball rolling in 2015. We started by first chopping down the coconut palms and getting the land ready for construction. I had…