Innehållsförteckning för # 20 från White Horses

Jack is my girlfriend Erika’s dog, but he likes me better, I think. I’ve got dogs, man. I have three Dachshunds at home. I’m like a dog hoarder in a way. It’s crazy. There’s a lot of shit-picking-up, I can tell you. And a lot of barking. Jack’s a different kettle of fish to the Dachshunds. Jack is six years old. He’s a snobby little dog. He has a serious only-child problem. We’ve probably spoilt him. Theoretically he lives at Erika’s place in Diamond Head, but in all honesty he’s kind of everywhere. He’s in my car, he’s down the beach, he’s in my bed. There’s some places we’re probably not supposed to take him, but we do anyway. We try to make him do everything we do. He’s very…

I’d been travelling alone for three years. Following swells, visiting friends, having adventures — chasing whatever you chase after losing the woman you thought you’d spend your life with. I’d visited countless countries, ridden more barrels than I could recall, camped in ancient ruins and freedived plane wrecks that no one else knew existed. It was exhilarating and cathartic and exhausting and lonely, but I hadn’t found a reason to stop, a place to call home, that elusive something that would give me an excuse to settle down. The last major south of the season was pushing up from Antarctica, promising to light up the 6000 miles of coast that stretches from Tierra Del Fuego to Central California. Chile’s Punta de Lobos was going to see the brunt of the…

My son Martin says to me one day, “Dad, I think we ought to go to Bali together.” I’m astonished. It’s 2010, I’m 80 years old and we were last there together in 1983. So I reply, “Thanks Martin, but go to Sumatra with your mates like you do every year.” But he persists with his invitation which I insensitively continue to decline. Finally he says, “Dad, you’ll never be able to do this again.” At last I get the message. He’s giving me two weeks of his annual leave. I’m hooked. I can’t help but look back on our first trip together in 1983. There was a team of hot young North Narrabeen surfers, and I tagged along. There was Steve Shearman who had won the club junior championship;…

Back to School BY ALASDAIR SHURMAN Clearing the spray from my eyes, I think, this looks like the one. A nice long tapered A-frame, sleek, dark oily and grey. This is it. I could paddle straight to the apex, where the wave is at its biggest, but I’ll be right in the lip pitching with it. I could go a little to the left, where I normally go. The shoulder hopper. The easy option. Or I can go deeper, where I really should go, where I used to go when I rode a lid. Shit, I’ve been here a few months already; I’ve just got to go deeper. I paddle deeper. Mental checklist unfolding, but kind of not at all, it just happens. My chest is rubbing wax in the…

Black Carbon Fibre Board I moved out of home in year 10 and would stay with friends at Newport Beach, often under their homes in vacant flats. I’d get lifts to Kings School, my school in north west Sydney with my super cool art teacher who lived at Avalon. I became friends with Dick Van Straalen, and his old man gave me a job working in the cake shop. He virtually adopted me. Dick and I were like brothers and that’s how I got into the surfing industry. Dick started shaping boards for Shane and later shaped one for me, and I became his first team rider. Fast forward a few decades and Dick was one of the first to do carbon boards. He sent me this one. This is…

“Surfing,” says Liam Ferney a bit ruefully. “I’ve been surfing heaps of times. But I’ve hardly ever stood up.” Liam went down the coast a lot with mates before he decided riding a surfboard was a bridge too far for him: “It takes practice, like writing,” he told us. His poetry, however, is deeply informed by his relationship with the NSW North Coast. The two poems we’re running here are both connected to the area; “You used to laugh about” is loosely set along Seven Mile Beach Road between Broken and Byron, while “Mercer” springs from Liam’s kayak paddles down the Clarence between Maclean and Yamba, a coastal environment he finds deeply affecting. Liam lives in Brisbane, works a public service day job, and has been writing poetry for 25…

A Friday afternoon in mid-November, sunny, a warm north-east wind raising minor chop on the waters. South-east swell dying its typical weary death in the background. At a quarter past four, my kids pull their cars into various spots at the south end of Newport beach carpark, and saunter around to the beach side of the surf club, carrying craft, eating after-school junk food, flirting, talking shit. Other beachgoers engage in subtle double-takes -- who are these young bronzed gods? -- and shift slightly here and there to let these kids, my kids, hefting racing skis on their hips, sway and swagger down to the low tide line. These kids, casual, powerful, longlimbed, so easily carrying the long slender spears. Competing to see who can be most casual, who can…

In 2008, I lived on the Big Island of Hawaii. On October 18 of that year, I was riding home from work on my motorcycle late at night, when a guy crossed the road divider, hit me head on at high speed, and kept driving. It took me a minute to comprehend what had happened. I tried taking my helmet off, and my arm wasn’t there. It felt like it was, so I reached up and what I grabbed was a bloody stump. I screamed for help, but nobody was there. it was pitch-black in the middle of the night, lost in the cane fields. My arm was in the lava rock field beyond the cane. I knew I didn’t have long. I considered my situation and debated if I…

Shark. One word evokes such powerful emotions. For a lone surfer off a distant shoreline when the water is murky and the light is failing, it’s the creepy feeling that maybe something isn’t quite right. For a SCUBA diver, it can mean excitement — frantic activity, making sure cameras are set and divers in prime position. For many Aussie reef fishermen, sharks are bastards, pests stealing prized catches. For an Indonesian fisherman, a shark IS the prized catch, where fins and meat mean rice, and if you’re lucky, perhaps part of your child’s school fees. For other Pacific peoples, sharks transcend monetary values. They are ancestors, messengers of the Gods. For these people, sharks are respected and revered for reasons beyond food or money. This one word means so many…

As a photographer, my job is to make people pause for a moment. You’ve all been in a dental surgery waiting room watching someone flick through a magazine. Well recently I watched a guy flicking through a surf magazine, then suddenly he stopped at a page — and he’d stopped on my photo. So I’d done my job that day. I’ve been fluffing around in the dark for a decade. It’s flukey. Up to chance whether you end up with art or action or just junk. Moonlit nights are good, but that brings its own problems; you want to move the camera with the subject but then there’s the moon and the clouds which are lit up and they’re going to blur, and maybe it’ll be art but usually it’s…

How it all started for me was with my old man. He had this Nikon set-up with a fisheye and water housing, and he said, “I’ll give you this for Christmas or you can come to Japan.” And being cocky and always wanting to do photography because my old man did it, I thought Bugger it, I’ll take the camera and I’ll earn enough money from it to go to Japan. A get your cake and eat it scenario. My old man then tried to steer me away from it. He said to look at it as a hobby, not as a work thing. The surf industry is not what it used to be. You look at guys who’ve been shooting for years and they’re turning to wedding photography. If…

Serendipity — what a word. A delightfully lyrical element of the English language. Seldom used, yet often appropriate in our surfing culture, it slides across the tongue like some five-syllabled version of the Curren cutback. The electronic thesaurus provides a raft of alternatives; chance, fate, destiny, karma and luck all make the list. However serendipity involves more than that. I recall taking a special interest in the concept while preparing a meteorology lecture in consultation with my trusty Lutgens & Tarbuck text. The two accessible weather buffs used Tor Bergeron’s discovery of cold cloud precipitation as a paradigm, emphasising the significance of accidental breakthroughs in science — the way in which it, and we, benefit from the unexpected. And isn’t that idea one key to getting a grasp on surfing?…

JIM YARBOROUGHPHOTOGRAPHED AT SUNSET BEACH BY ED SLOANE TERRY RICHARDSON PHOTOGRAPHED IN WOLLONGONG BY ROB REYNOLDS STEVE DEL ROSSO PHOTOGRAPHED ON THE GOLD COAST BY ANDREW SHIELD BRETT WARNER PHOTOGRAPHED AT NORTH NARRABEEN BY MARK ONORATI JIM The 9’6” Dooma never goT Dick Brewer and I have been working on boards together since the 1980s. It’s been a great process, coming from single fins through to thrusters — long vees with the little flat spot up front. I told Darrick Doerner I wanted to make my own boards. DD said, “Don’t waste your time, I’ll introduce you to Dick!” So I met Dick and began to work with him. I wanted to help him as much as I could — shaping is hard physical work and I knew one day…