Surf Stories
Ramón Navarro and Kohl Christensen bring Léa Brassy into the jaws of a Chilean monster.
How a nonprofit that takes San Francisco kids surfing expanded its work in 2020.
Coauthor Kim McCoy recounts discovering the mystery of what lies beneath the waves, where ocean and land meet and compete.
A look into surfing’s impact vests and the people they’ve brought back home.
Clyde Aikau on why the most culturally significant big-wave event in surfing will always matter.
Kohl Christensen discusses how BWRAG came to be and his recent near-death experience courtesy of Pipeline's reef.
Dave Rastovich and Greg Long log in and discuss the current state of surfing, its cultural and ecological impacts, and where it’s headed.
Meet Annie Reickert, the 18-year-old Maui charger Paige Alms is mentoring in the Jaws lineup and beyond.
Kimi Werner takes a journey to Jeju Island for lessons in motherhood, culture, diving and providing from South Korea’s “women of the sea” aka the haenyeo.
Captain Liz Clark’s been self-isolating aboard her sailboat Swell since 2005; here she provides her experiences and insight for navigating isolation during a pandemic.
Greg Long, Al Mackinnon and Pete Geall’s dusty search for uncrowded perfection at Location Redacted.
There’s nothing more important than having waves a few minutes away.
While Australia burns, its government is greenlighting oil drilling in the unspoiled Great Australian Bight. But surfers and coastal communities are saying no—and uniting to keep Big Oil out.
At Fletcher Chouinard Designs, the focus is on durable, high-performing equipment that lets you have fun no matter what the ocean is doing. There are never enough hours in a day for Fletcher Chouinard. As a surfer, shaper, kiteboarder and new father, he was really doing the dance. Then along came foilboarding, which has made…
The Best Times Are About Friends, Not Perfection It had been four years since Liz Clark, Léa Brassy and I first spent time together, on a sailing trip through the Tuamotus. We knew we’d found something special from the moment we met, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. We’re all very individual women and…
The Trump administration wants to open almost all of America’s coastline to the oil industry, putting our beaches and oceans at serious risk. Fifty years ago, an offshore rig spilled 100,000 barrels of crude oil into California’s Santa Barbara Channel, creating a 35-mile slick that fouled the wave-rich shoreline from Goleta to Ventura. It should…
It was November 1991. I was with two friends and we were at the beginning of a three-month surf trip around the coasts of Spain and Portugal. Mundaka was our starting point. We all agreed that we would be happy just to get something better than the cold, windblown beach breaks we had left behind…
Six years ago, when that famous wave broke on the Third Ledge at Cloudbreak—tearing down reef, tearing through time, majestically unridden, surfers scrambling for their lives—there was one question left hanging in the air like sea mist. As the last wave washed through the lagoon and slunk back into the ocean, the water still hissing,…
You know, it’s strange, you grow up as a kid in Australia and you see all these photos of the Great Barrier Reef and you hear all about it, and you feel you have some understanding or knowledge about the reef, but until you actually go up there and see it firsthand you can’t ever…
Last year I decided to truly dig in to my effort to raise awareness about epilepsy, a disease that affects 1 out of every 26 people in the United States, by using my social media and long-distance paddling skills. I worked hard to prepare for a 17-mile paddle, reached out to the Epilepsy Foundation of…
It was about an hour before dark. The spot had been a lot easier to find than I thought—five minutes from the main road and within easy viewing distance from a cliff. A few weeks earlier a friend had told me he had seen “something breaking” along this stretch of coast. This must be it,…
After an hour’s sleep, I wake to the sound of fat raindrops pelting the deck. The noise quickly escalates into a deafening torrent, and I push up off the settee and climb up the steps. Glancing at the radar screen on my way up, I see a massive squall blacking out the entire 8-mile radius…
In May 1981, I set out in a home-built Hawaiian sailing canoe from South Point on the island of Hawai‘i to my home on Kaua‘i. It was an adventure that would take me from the southern-most to the northern-most point of the Hawaiian Islands. I named my canoe Holopuni, “to sail everywhere,” and I’ve been…
Besides a lighthouse, a dirt trail and a few small structures, Isla De Todos Santos is almost completely undeveloped. The only permanent resident is the lighthouse keeper, who greeted us in Spanish as we approached after stepping ashore on a bright October morning. Those who choose to live in solitude fascinate me and I wanted…
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks—a whirlwind of events, to say the least. Seems like the world got turned over in less than a month. Natural disasters are igniting on all sides of the globe. Could it be that the planet is trying to tell us something? Is humanity in harm’s way? Nature tends…
If you were to ask me what I did on the Danube River during my 21-day solo paddle from Ingolstadt, Germany to Belgrade, Serbia, my answer is simple. I fought crime, outran bad guys in speedboats with machine guns, almost died a few times from river monsters and 20-foot waves … oh yeah, it was…
Punta de Lobos is awarded World Surfing Reserve status—an all too rare conservation success story.
About five minutes from where I live, there is a small village called Tapia de Casariego. The waves at Tapia are not world-class, but they can get very good on the right conditions. Tapia is also very significant in Spanish surfing history, being one of the birthplaces of surfing in this country. Most of the…
Robby Naish once spoke about the irony of traveling the world to compete. He spent 30 years filling passport after passport, but never really saw anything other than the beach. It’s an easy trap to fall into. With today’s high-paced society and accurate weather forecasts, traveling surfers and kite surfers often focus too much on…
It didn’t take long for Ben Wilkinson to figure out that there was freedom to be had in working for himself—and that freedom was the first requirement if he wanted to go surfing whenever the waves got huge. “I left home when I was 16,” he remembers, “which was old enough in my eyes. But…
Filmmaking. Some people follow the storyboard, some follow their gut. Keith Malloy? Ten parts gut, zero parts plan. Well, I take that back. He’s got a plan, it’s just hard to discern it behind that beard. Fortunately, he’s got some friends (and a legendary wife) who know how to organize, use cameras, record sound, scuba dive…