Innehållsförteckning för # 18 från White Horses

Not that it’s particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but here’s a bit of Horsies’ History if you’re interested, dear reader! Righto, when I dreamt this mag up back in 2011, it was owned by lifelong surfer Peter Morrison. In 2014, Peter sold his stable of magazines and media brands to Pacific Star Network, a large, publicly listed company based in Melbourne. A few years later, in mid 2016, the three of us who put White Horses together: Craig Sims (founding publisher), Rob Bain (sales and marketing), and myself (founding editor and designer) put in a successful bid to acquire the ’orse back from Pacific Star. They weren’t too sad to see it go, to be honest – a public company’s first priority is to make as much…

“Skate shoes and a guitar?” I ask incredulously. “A surfboard?” he counters. Yet, united we sit, a pair of worn-out, dusty young men, taking refuge from the midday sun in the narrow shade of a craggy peppermint tree. A long way from our respective homes and further still from the differing motivation for our trips, yet oddly connected, a similar thread of vision and/or stupidity has weaved us into this path. He is travelling south and I to the north. I’ve learnt that it doesn’t matter what adventure you undertake you’ll invariably meet someone taking a wackier path than you. In this instance, I’ve been usurped by a man who thinks carrying a guitar along the longest coastal trail in Australia, in the middle of a summer heatwave, while wearing…

FINDING NIRVANA MIGHT BE ONE THING, REMAINING THERE IS ANOTHER, When I was 16 I bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii. Perfect waves were to be found on all the islands. I laboured here and there to support myself. Within a few months I knew I would never return to California. There was a dark side though, it wasn’t uncommon to be assaulted just for being haole. Around 1974, while I was hand-sanding surfboards in a shack overlooking Rockpiles, Surf legend Joey Cabell dropped by and was talking to the shaper. Joey had sailed from Tahiti to Hawaii. Although I wasn’t part of the conversation I overheard a critical snippet: “… and there was a good left on Fanning”. I didn’t know where Fanning was; just that it must have…

“Sure, what thickness do you want?” Sorry? “What thickness do you want?” Eh? Upon my return a friend says to me “It’s like a whole new sport you’ve never participated in,” and he’s nailed it right there. The above is the response I get in a surf shop in Haleiwa when I ask for an eight-foot leg rope. What fucking thickness?!? In the weeks leading up to my inaugural visit to the islands my fellow first-timers and I are exchanging daily texts with updates of the next impending monster swell to hit the North Shore. It’s incessant. Days to go and they greenlight the Eddie. The Kam is closed ’cos waves are sweeping across it. Frantic texts highlight a window of opportunity. We arrive on a Tuesday. The Thursday is…

WEGENER – 5’5” EPS So this is a Tom Wegener number. 5’5”, real narrow of course as it’s off an alaia shape. It’s an EPS, the first of his Sea Glass Project. EPS, what does that stand for? Hmmmm. Epoxy Poly Styrofoam I think … I don’t take too much notice, haha! She’s got an inch-deep concave, some rolled-out edges on the tail – which creates a lot of boost and pocket speed I suppose. I got it in Noosa, and when I first surfed it originally it wasn’t glassed, just foam. There’s a stringer that runs down about two-thirds of it and then there are stringers down the outside so it allows for flex in the back of the tail. It gave you little speed bursts, and still turns…

Editor’s note: Litmus was a watershed in surf filmmaking in the 1990s. It presented surfing as more than a glossy, three-fin shredfest. Today’s surf culture, in which surfers can ride a variety of boards and be largely respected for their choices, might owe a debt to Andrew’s efforts. Twenty years after the release of Litmus, Andrew shares the backstory of its genesis. Avalon RSL club early 1995: Desperation Days. I don’t remember what I was doing there. There’s no reasoning as to why some nights common thoughts align and people end up crossing paths in peculiar places. I couldn’t say I was a regular there, I was there in desperation like the rest of the belligerent crowd, nonetheless enjoying the banter and cheap drinks the RSL club provided. Monty Webber…

I’d see her all the time when we first moved here. Her wavy blonde hair and slight build posited her as a quintessential beaches chick. Only she wasn’t. There was a distinct rawness about her. She’d cruise around barefoot with little ostensible polish or glam, yet she had presence. She had an open smile with those she knew. But appeared somewhat aloof with those she didn’t. I was always mildly intrigued by her. She was a girl, or rather a woman in her 20s, who surfed. And as surprising as it sounds, living in Sydney, there aren’t that many regular gals in the lineup around here. The brotherhood far outweighs the sisterhood. Sometimes there’s a few of us, but often I’m the only lass out. She knew all the local…

His car was the only thing that didn’t fit. He should have had an old beater, something big enough to put boards in the boot, held together with duct tape and wax, a Keep The Country Country bumper sticker next to the faded Smirnoff Pro one. In fact, he had a mid-range Toyota sedan, beige, literally and metaphorically. Anonymous. We pulled in next to him and I said a cheery hi as I hopped out of our rental. Nothing. Not even an acknowledgment I was there. He was rushing though. The wind had been light offshore all morning, but was just starting to turn and pick up. We were already resigned to the fact we’d missed it. Not old mate though, he was determined. He chucked his towel in the…

Funny how some things stay with you. As a young grommet, I went snorkelling in the Whitsunday Islands and I can still remember it vividly. I was absolutely transfixed. Not that I could articulate it at that young age, but I was filled with a sense of wonder and privilege. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have been even more awestruck: The Great Barrier Reef is the largest, most complex and fragile ecosystem in the entire known universe. It’s also the modern-day “canary in the coal mine” for the health of our planet’s biosphere. Thus it’s been with no small alarm that I’ve witnessed The Reef and our oceans reacting to a rapidly changing planet – with ocean acidification from CO2 emissions a huge concern for all…

I don’t know how many people can say they’ve been tubed twice on one wave at Coolangatta’s famed Superbank while undergoing chemotherapy for stage four cancer. But, it is with decidedly mixed emotions that I can report I have recently joined this exclusive club. I know this may come as a shock to some, particularly those of you who have seen me surf. Two tubes? On one wave? With that stiff, tin soldier stance? Surely not? Oh, and the cancer bit? Yeah, that came as a shock to me too. I thought I was a reasonably fit and healthy 50-year-old, the lifestyle guy who’d forsaken serious career ambitions and material wealth for the carefree, if precarious, path of the freelance surf writer, following my bliss, dodging the nine-to-five grind, spending…

My parents separated when I was seven. Mum bought an old yellow VW Kombi, shoved us three kids into it and headed north for Queensland. She was determined from the outset to keep us together as a family, so whenever we weren’t living in women’s shelters, the Kombi was home for us over the next two years. We eventually finished up in Brisbane, on the shores of Moreton Bay. That’s where I found my future. I got into surfing and became pretty good at it. When I wasn’t surfing I was fishing. All day and all night, wagging school to do it, and I loved it. I wasn’t big on going to school – I’m dyslexic, so I’m not really fancy at reading and writing. When I wasn’t fishing I’d…

The Tassie mates met up as planned at Lakey Peak – a troupe of porcelain soldiers escaping a southern winter. The swell faded and the crowds condensed. Our crew took the view a sacrificial bender would hasten the arrival of the next swell. The next few days were a hazy mix of Bintang, card games and BB gun wars. The kind hotel staff politely ushered the happy horde out into the rear courtyard where our activities could carry on way into the night and the next day if required. Word spread up and down the hotel strip and crew started to drop in from Aman Gati and Fatmas and the party in the paddock quickly swelled, all the while cajoled by the surrogate Tasmanian hosts. The locals at this point…

BURLEIGH SINGLE. 6’3” x 20” x 25/8” This is a board I shaped for myself in 1978. I’d been in Queensland for a year and making boards in a horse shed in Coombabah before moving to a shed in Bundall. It’s a single-fin, obviously. Although “litres” weren’t used back then, roughly it’s about 34 litres. Classic single-fin – quite a wide nose, volume forward, tapering volume through the narrower tail. You had to ride the board up forward and then step back to turn. That was how you surfed a single in those days. This is a special board for me because I had some of my early incredible sessions at Burleigh on it. This board’s also significant for the logo. I remember doing the logo on this board –…

BEN AIPA TWINNY. 6’0” x 21” x 3” I got home from school one day – we were living in Sydney – and this board was on our deck. A friend of Mum’s had a Hawaiian guy staying with them and he’d left it behind when he bailed. It was too big for me, but I rode it a bit and it definitely had magic to it. You could tell it was an amazing board. Shaped in 1981. Six years years ago I was working in Oahu, and Ben Aipa – the shaper of this board – was working in the same factory. I told him the story of the board – I explained how it had a bee-sting tail and how it was too big for me, but how…

You might know this bloke. He’s washed up in a tropical backwater somewhere in Sumatra, or Sri Lanka, or the Philippines. At first he loved the people, the uncrowded surf. Now, all he seems to do is complain. Reckons the locals are out to rip him off, and the women are unfaithful. Says, “Sweetheart, you should’ve been here 30 years ago”. There are some pretty scary rumours flying around about him. In my first novel Troppo, which won the 2014 City of Fremantle T.A.G. Hungerford Award and has just been published by Fremantle Press, this bloke’s name is Shane. Shane runs a surf resort in southeast Sumatra, Indonesia, and the locals are pretty pissed off at him. They say he banned the local fishermen from launching their boats out the…

The bench seat of the HQ wagon was doing me no favours. Every corner of this evil road that straddled Tassie’s west and east coasts slid me into the driver or the other passenger. Being the smallest, I’d drawn the dreaded middle seat. As the clock approached 2.00am and convict ghosts emerged from the fog, our fearless driver broke the silence. “Pack us a bong ya useless little fucker. Ah fuck it, ya too hopeless, I’ll do it meself.” A mantra I would hear repeated many times. And so, as we careened along the loose gravel road, Arturs Innes reached over the seat, grabbed the bong with one hand, weed in the other, nestled the steering wheel between his legs, and proceeded to pack and smoke the bong, never dropping…

Coincidence – A remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. You might wonder what it’s been like growing up with a couple of your brothers being as good at shaping surfboards as anyone else in the game. Oldest brother John shaped and surfed his own boards in the ’70s to a high degree of excellence. Two younger brothers, Will and Ben, both shape as good a shortboard as you could hope to find anywhere in the world right now; and Will’s guns have more than held their own under the feet of big-wave riders in up to 20 feet in Hawaii. But it’s my brother Greg who was voted as one of the top 10 most influential surfers of all time a decade ago in the American…

1978. The first board that happened for me was a Rod Brooks single-fin pintail. Red with a blue deck. It was sunning itself on the Anglesea SLSC lawn. I was mesmerised by the colour and the shape (and the scent of the Strawberry Fields wax job.) It had low rails, full foil with a wide point upfront. It belonged to Hamish – cheerful king of the groms – and he dominated Ding Alley on it with a lanky throwback style. Ding repairs were the thing of voodoo and magic. Rituals performed in the SLSC garage bay. I remember standing there – like some kind of altar boy – feeling the heat of a hot mix warming my hands through a cut Coke can as I watched Chris Porter spread the…

It’s 11pm on a warm, clear, California evening and I am driving like hell down the 405 freeway toward San Clemente, and the phone starts buzzing. I take a quick look at the screen and see the caller’s name: T Curren. What the hell, I think, it can’t be Tom! He’s on a flight to New York. He must have lost his phone. For sure. I answer and Tom’s voice comes down the speaker. Oh shit, I think. “Uhhh hi, how are you?” he says — trying for some sort of formal politesse, even though just two hours ago we were drinking beer in a parking lot in West Los Angeles. “What’s up,” I say, trying to sound like a grown-up. “Uhhh…ummm, I was just wondering…if maybe my wallet is…

My favourite thing is freedom! As unfortunate as this may sound I find that financial freedom equates to the opportunity to be completely free. The ability to wake up every day and just do what you want. For me it’s trying to sync my existence with those special moments in nature and score the best of those conditions. I love to see a front coming through the mountains in winter, head down there and get the fresh powder days, then come back as the low moves off the coast and get to tow the big, stormy days and paddle the smaller days. Freedom is the thing I most treasure, the forgotten jewel of life. We live in a capitalist society where the healthy economy tends to be the priority of…

Sri Noa Noa, a 48-foot ketch with a large and lazy mainsail, cruises slowly into its scheduled mooring off tiny Dana Island. It’s another glorious morning in a cruisy surf trip from Kupang in West Timor, along Rote, past Sawu and then cruising the beautiful and almost deserted coast of Sumba. After several trips to the Mentawais we’ve been keen to try a less-travelled route in Southern Indo in an effort to score uncrowded waves. Once anchored, we can see that some local fishermen – who’ve somehow braved the crossing from Raijura in what looks like a decrepit piece of rotting timber – have stretched a net from one end of the beach to the other. They’re wrestling with something very large and are in danger of tipping their small…

Above the low rumble of distant waves, a noise in the forest stirred me awake. Something close – perhaps a frog in the leaf litter. I lay still, listening. Curiously, my hammock started to wobble. A small panic took hold – Despite being careful as always to camp out of sight of people, was I about to be attacked by some cyclist-stalking lunatic? Switching my headtorch on full, a bright-eyed and equally terrified possum looked back, swaying on my hammock line. Ah, the romance of travel. I’ve yearnt to do a big pushbike/surf trip for a few years now. So I built a rack – a Bunnings special of PVC and plentiful glue, and took to the road to cycle the coastline, pointbreak to beachy, with only a vague idea…

8’0” x 191/4” x 23/4” I love this board because when I’m thinking of riding it the swell’s pumping! It’s made for big reef grunt. It’s easy to catch waves on and it’s just one of those super-smooth riding boards you can trust when the swell is strong. I kept a flatter deck on this to hold volume out to the rail, and then dropped the rail for bite in steep places, little bit more like an ’80s rail than the super-soft “performance” rail. It’s a quad with a vee bottom through the tail, further back than most, keeping it really loose instead of making it track like some boards do that are flatter at the back. There’s a little more rocker at the front for late drops and a…

Even as a kid, growing up in mainland USA, far away from the ocean, I’ve always felt a connection to the sea. I’ve dreamt about surfing as long as I can remember. I finally got my chance to surf on a visit to Australia and was immediately hooked. Unfortunately I lived hours from the coast, so I always had to travel to surf. Eventually I decided to move to San Diego, California to make the ocean a permanent part of my life. I’d always been interested in drawing and painting as a child, but soon art took a back seat to sports and school, and I ended up studying law and began a career as an attorney. It was just a few years ago when my friends were getting married…

I hail from Gisborne in New Zealand and creativity ran deep in our family. Mum was an artist, my stepdad was a professional surfer and shaper, and my brother was artistic as well. The family flew from NZ to the Bells Comp in 1978, and then we set out for the big drive to Margaret River. We broke down in the middle of the Nullarbor, and that’s where my creative life kicked off – out there in the middle of that vast landscape with a sketch book and a lot of time on my hands. For the next three years we lived on the road between Margaret River and Perth. Mum and Dad took us to Bali when I was 12. The exotic culture and incredible architecture of the temples…

I’m camped out in the Jones house at Rocky Point . My 10’4” and 9’8” are laid out on the grass. Daniel looks them over with a critical eye. He traces the bottom contours with his fingers, makes a few comments on the volume, then sets the 10’4” down carefully. He sits quietly for a moment, then turns to me and says, “You know, I could’ve shaped you some boards. Still could”. Two years ago, Daniel Jones was newly married and based between his house in sleepy Hau’ula and his dad’s beachfront property on the North Shore. He was getting paid by RVCA to travel and surf. The dream pro freesurfer life. Then it fell apart. A year after losing his mum to illness, Daniel almost died after bashing his…

We were on our way home from a quick bolt up to Saltwater when we passed him. We were in a post-surf daze, high on endorphins and bonhomie. Riffo driving, me shotgun, both talking shit. The sight of him shut us both up. He was half an hour from Coolongolook, on the eastern side of the freeway, heading north. He was walking. Riffo pulled the van on to the verge of the highway and stopped. We got out, grabbing a 12-litre plastic jug of water. We jogged up behind him, and Riffo g’dayed. He was a small bloke, bent and shrunken beneath a heavy rucksack on to which he’d tied a number of shopping bags. His cheeks were grey stubbled, skin creased and chapped by weather and sun. His hat…