Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 558 i Tracks

The closest I’ve come to meeting Laird Hamilton was on the island of Kauai a couple of years ago. There was a 30ft swell running so I did the honourable thing and went for a chopper ride over the island with my girlfriend. As we rounded the wondrous, cliff-lined Napali coast, I looked down and saw Laird knifing across a giant ocean lump on his foil board. With the keel thrusting well out of the water and Laird’s arms flung wide for balance it was like watching a giant bird flying low over the ocean. There was nobody but Laird and a couple of his buddies around, whipping into 30ft swells on a velvet clean stretch of open ocean. At that moment I could see the appeal of the foil…

FROM THE VAULT - MICK FANNING: GET OUTTA MY DREAMS... The original caption: "The Aussie surfer hasn't evolved much over 35 years. He may drive a better car, but he is still willing to take the piss out of himself no matter what his tour ranking is." FOLLOW. @johnwitzig - classic surf & Australiana LISTEN - DUNE RATS - THE KIDS WILL KNOW IT'S BULLSHIT Snotty, grotty and stoned grunge-punk anthems from Brisbane's Dune Rats... now, has anybody seen Scott Green? BEHIND PAGE ONE - DUNCAN MACFARLANE We were shooting on Nusa Lembongan to get some board short photos but the surf was almost flat. We surfed the normal waves all day, but it was pretty poor so at the end of the day we started drinking beer and just…

Dear Syd, I’m being cyber bullied at school. I don’t really want to tell my principle or parents, as I’m certain that will only make it worse. Charlie, Avalon, aged 15 In the old days the bullying at my beach came as tying young groms to a pole, naked, and leaving them in the sun for hours. If that sounds sadistic, and humiliating, it was, but I fear it is nothing on the ongoing stress you feel in the modern world. I’m afraid my first advice is that you need to tell an adult you trust. That takes bravery and courage, but in these situations you need people with power to have your back. If you are not ready for that just yet, simply disengage. Up your privacy settings, block…

If you’ve ever taken part in a club round of your local boardriders, you’ll know that the admin side of things – the heat draw, judging, getting results sorted – can be a pretty ramshackle affair. Surfers aren’t renowned for their organisational skills at the best of times, but add waves, fellow waxheads, and a never-ending stream of banter, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a few hiccups. Sure, things usually work out in the end, and there is an element of comedy in watching a group of people who couldn’t organise a proverbial root in a proverbial brothel try to run a surf contest, but if you’re dealing with a large number of participants, having an efficient system in place can save a lot of headaches. Ex-pro surfer,…

It’s early 2017 on the NSW north coast and Stu Kennedy, that rock-jawed fireball who ignited last year’s Quiksilver Pro on transcendent craft, has every reason to be feeling upbeat. In a couple of months he will debut on the WCT as an official qualifier, buoyed by the knowledge that world champs Slater, Fanning, Medina and Florence were all amongst his scalps when jousting as a wildcard in 2016. Then, there’s the new model he’s got coming out with Dan Tomson and Firewire Slater Designs in April – the SKX will be slightly longer and more conventional in shape than the Sci-Phi, but still feature those seductive bottom contours that regularly allowed Stu to make the jump to light speed while competing in 2016. As he prepares for the 2017…

“Your first impression of Laird Hamilton?” Truth be told, when I cast the above question out into the world from the anonymity of my six seater dining table in Margaret River, I expected little in the way of response, especially so given the calibre of surfer I aimed for. Albee Layer, Mark Healey, Kai Lenny, Shane Dorian and Kelly Slater; I mean, come on … what are the chances? But if anything’s going to prompt four of the world’s best big wave surfers and an 11-time world champ to put pen to paper it’s the topic of Laird. “He came off as a complete asshole,” cackled Healey down the line from Oahu not 30 minutes after I fired off the email. Albee Layer was a little more forthright, “It really…

Most surfers have a wave which puts them under a kind of rapture. A set-up they find so seductive that they can never say no. If this favoured break is turning on then girlfriends are abandoned, work neglected and children made to sit on the beach and watch. The wave takes a hold and they’ll duck and weave just about any responsibility to make time for a few rides. As the object of their fancy some surfers choose the obvious spots – the ones we’ve all read about and ogled at for decades, but there’s plenty of salt-water disciples who are devotees of waves less frequently discussed in hallowed voices. My particular predilection is reserved for a small cove wedged between Bondi and Tamarama in Sydney’s densely populated eastern suburbs.…

In an interview with Nat Young (the original one) that I did just a few months before the tragic passing of his nemesis Midget Farrelly, the 1966 world champion recalled his first years of surfing on Sydney’s northern beaches. He said: “Midget was my hero. I wanted to do everything exactly like him. I wanted to surf like him, I even wanted to walk and talk like him.” Of course in Sydney in 1961 Nat wasn’t alone in that, but his success in emulating his early surfing mentor and then surpassing him was as public then as it was rancorous later. More than half a century on, it is the feud that we remember, rather than the fact that this was the first real case of lineage in modern Australian…