Innehållsförteckning för # 22 från White Horses

These photos were all taken at Red Bluff. I was there with my family on a bit of a holiday when this huge bait ball came into the bay, followed by masses of sharks. They were everywhere - in the shorebreak, riding the waves, even swimming under some of the surfers. I was in awe at how beautiful it all looked. Scary never once entered my mind. Just seeing so many sharks, at least 300, was incredible. At the same time I was anxious to try and make sure I could capture and do justice to what I was witnessing. The boys surfing the point didn’t know that some sharks had swum under them or how many there were, but they knew the bait ball was about 100 metres away…

I grew up in a maritime family of surfers, sailors, fishermen and women, at the mouth of the Clarence River in northern NSW. My dad is a ship builder and marine engineer, my brother a boat builder and project manager, my husband a surfer and marketing manager of a global surf brand. The family business is shipbuilding, charters and repairs, and in a past life I followed a corporate law career specialising in maritime law. Safe to say we’re “people of the ocean”. Little did I know that being of the ocean would lead me behind the sea and upriver, into the adventure of a lifetime. The idea to kayak 400km solo and unsupported, surviving solely off the land and river, was the incarnation of a journal I had been…

The system was looking really good for Dungeons. A long period west swell, with the core of the storm staying far south below South Africa meant there would be very little weather coming with the waves. This had become the typical winter pattern for 2017. Something was very wrong. Cape Town winters are not supposed to be sunny with light offshores. Usually the storms rumble up from Antarctica and smash into the tip of the continent with brutal force. Think bucketing rain and gale force onshores, broken up by brief windows of opportunity between the cold fronts. They don’t call it the Cape of Storms for nothing. But a few years back, the cogs shifted and the gears in the weather system changed. Cold fronts started passing further south and…

In 1995, I was 20 years old. I played bass in a rock band, worked in a surf shop and a restaurant, and had dropped out of university in Central California. My mum lived in New Zealand and I went back to see her each year at Christmas. I met a couple of her friends there who had a boat and were looking for a first mate. Three days later, I had the job and was getting ready to head off to Phuket. SWELL OF THE CENTURY I joined the boat early in ’96 and learned how to be a first mate. For the next year we sailed all over Asia: from Thailand to the Philippines, to Borneo and Malaysia. Then the owners wanted the boat in Sulawesi, mostly to…

HOG MODEL 5’7” x 19” x 23/8” Nathan “Hog” Hedge contacted me about some boards to re-qualify on the WQS as he was having a stab at it, but was lacking confidence with equipment for small waves (his big wave act was second to none, so no worries there). We worked and surfed together for a few months and got some boards happening. Then he went to Korea I think it was for a three star event where he came second to Connor O’Leary, and came back frothing out on this squash tail model. What really made this comeback story so inspirational was the fact that Hoggy had fallen off the tour, completely gone off the rails afterwards and pretty much lost the shirt off his back. But if you…

I had been running a carpet business for 30 years, making customised carpets for renowned artists. Although my carpets were artworks themselves, it was everybody else’s art too. But I couldn’t complain, I was making a good living. Then the recession hit and work started drying up as cheap foreign imports flooded the market. This period marked a low point in my life, but it also pushed me to finally focus on my own art and sculpture, which I had long put on the backburner. I’d never formally trained as an artist and after years of doing work for other people, it was liberating to finally step out of the creative shadows. One evening I was in my workshop looking at all the shit someone had left behind – redundant,…

Talk about slow on the uptake. It took 450 million years for sharks to finally start surfing. Sure, they’d been mildly interested in watching the dolphins at play for eons, but it wasn’t until this century’s second decade, with their ocean turning into a shit soup of plastic, that they spent more time inshore and noticed numbers of these…things – part creature, part hard-skinned, finned and pointy object – slicing parallel to select headlands, reefs, rivermouths and beaches. Somewhere in the dim recesses of their ancient brains, the sharks identified with the vitality in the way humans rode the waves. It was something that the dolphins lacked. A hunger, an aggression. A need to momentarily escape an underlying, everpresent crapness. Dolphins are shithouse surfers, really. They’re too sociable about it…

They’ve dropped the clients off in Singapore after a three week diving charter in Sulawesi. Thomas the captain doesn’t want to sail the strait at night, considering the mayhem and chaos a small boat amongst cargo liners in the dark would entail, and Sandy the yacht chef agrees. Port fees are outrageously expensive in Singapore, so they cross the strait and anchor for the night in the Riau Islands on the other side of the Singapore Strait, near Pulau Bulan, Indonesia. The pair takes the dinghy in for dinner at a scruffy local warung, down a few beers and hit it back to the boat. It’s been a long, tiring few weeks with very demanding guests. Sandy typically slept up on deck. She claimed she liked the fresh air, but…

I bolted straight up in bed, heart pounding, gasping for breath. I looked around me in the dark: the wooden walls, the window between the beds, my 12-year-old son sleeping peacefully in the other one. I heard the old man in the next room, no more than three metres away, wheeze and cough. I could not understand how he had just been sitting on the edge of my mattress, leaning over me, squeezing my neck and face with his two powerful hands, imploring me, “They don’t listen to me anymore. They never listen to me.” He had whispered the words, his face held right up to mine. Confused, I decided it was a nightmare and went back to sleep. I awoke with pressure bruises on my neck and forehead. We…

I finished at uni with a marine biology degree with Honours and started working for the Office of the Supervising Scientist at the NSW State Fisheries, doing an environmental impact survey on the effects of the Ranger uranium mine in the Alligator River Basin in the Northern Territory, which eventually became part of Kakadu National Park. This was my first contact with aboriginal people. I worked for State Fisheries for two years as a research biologist, mainly with inland fisheries and then threw it away. I felt music was my thing. Life’s too short and I took a gamble, and plenty of times I’ve been on the bones of my arse. TRAVEL My dad, who’s a judge had gone over to Norfolk Island for court cases several times. He loved…

Monte is my dog, although I’m sure my dad thinks otherwise. He does do a really good job of being Monte’s grandfather, especially while I’m away for the majority of the year travelling and competing. There were three pups left in the litter but I chose Monte purely because he looked like the dopiest, most uncoordinated, adorable thing I’d ever seen. I guess some people would call it character, but he was different to the others. He’s basically human and I swear he understands everything you say to him. He also enjoys the good life. Take his spot on the couch and he will sit and stare at you until you either scoot over a little, or just move altogether. When I first got him I’m pretty sure his paws…

ANDY IRONS’ 6’6” x 181/2” x 23/8” This was Andy Irons’ personal board, it was one of three 6’6”s we made when he won his second world title. He was trailing 500 points behind Kelly coming into Hawaii after Brazil. The way the points worked back then, 500 points was basically insurmountable. There were two CT events that year in Hawaii: Sunset and Pipe. For Andy to win, everything had to go Andy’s way and everything had to go the other way for Kelly. Before the season started, Andy would always call me up and order his boards. That year he ordered two 6’6”s but with the points difference, we knew it was probably going to come down to the last event at Pipe. So I said to Andy we…

I don’t think I had Maestro long enough to say it was the best, but it was up there. It seemed to have more power, more torque, and I’m certain it had more room. If pressed, four in the back with the boards wasn’t too uncomfortable, although inevitably there was greater insistency on shotgun when this was the case. It had five gears too, which was almost unheard of in a diesel panel van back then. One of my other vans had a hammock for a back seat; essentially some fabric over a pole that fitted into two slots on either side of the body with a bit of cushioning for the bum. It could be lifted out and laid flat when you needed the whole length of the back.…

The worst wipeout of my life happened on the morning of June 3rd, 1995. I had been up until the early hours celebrating with Rob Bain, who had just beaten Kelly Slater and Tom Carroll in a late round of the inaugural G-Land Pro. We were drinking with our “Tsunami Brothers” Shane Herring, Simon Law and Richie Lovett on the one-year anniversary of the tsunami we had survived together in the very same place. At 2.00 am and after fifty million beers, I finally went to bed, but was kept awake for the rest of the night by Craig Finnis, with whom I was sharing a bungalow and who snored like a bobcat jackhammer. Occasionally I would get up and roll him over onto his side and he would stop…

I first heard about Cyclops around 2002. I believe it was Ken Bradshaw and photographer Ted Grambeau who went there on the Billabong Odyssey mission. I saw a photo of the wave but had no idea where it was taken; it was a bit of secret back then. Apparently Ken took one look and didn’t want anything to do with it. You have to be tough in the head to surf Cyclops. The consequences are pretty heavy. First time I didn’t actually get down there until 2005. I got a phone call from Alfy Cater asking me if I wanted to go on a mission with him. Alfy is just as mad as anyone else who tries to surf it, fearless, but he’s had problems with his back over the…

I first came to India in 2005. I was doing my masters degree in social work and I was looking for a place to do my internship with an NGO. That’s how I came across the Sebastian Indian Social Project or SISP, a school that works with the poorest of the poor around Kovalam in southwest India. Their mission is to improve lives through education and employment programmes. It didn’t hurt that it was close to the ocean. I’d grown up windsurfing in Belgium and competed professionally, but after years of injuries I gave it up and took up surfing. I suspected India had waves, so I could surf while completing my studies. One of the first things I noticed was all the kids who’d dropped out of school and…

We’d taken refuge in the harbour. Westerly gales and westerly swell roared east across the Pentland Firth, the notoriously dangerous stretch of water situated just north of Scotland. Even the tide was emptying from Northern Atlantic to North Sea – everything coming from the west and going to the east. Harry, my travelling companion, had suggested an afternoon reset in the relative calm of Scrabster harbour. Time to sort the van, time to dry the clothes, time to get out of the wind. Hidden beneath the glowering Caithness hills, we repurposed this place as our tranquil haven despite the abundance of poured concrete and stacked fish pallets, etched with the indecipherable names of Scandinavian ports we would never visit. We stood craning our necks at the sky and watched dizzily…

CHANNEL BOTTOM 5’11” x 181/2” x 25/16” These boards are part of my DNA as both a surfer and a shaper. As a young elite surfer, I cut my teeth on Al Byrne’s six-channel bottoms. As a novice surfboard craftsman, I slaved away under AB’s strict supervision sanding them before I was even allowed to go anywhere near a planer. Six channels mean a lot to me. I’ll always ride them and shape them – not just because they feel so incredible to surf and because they prove your mettle as the hardest of all boards to shape properly – but also to honour AB as a friend and mentor. I really value having Ian Byrne and Gill Glover as mates and colleagues who remain committed to perfecting the complexities…

In the Hawaiian winter of 1987 I got a threeboard quiver from Pat Rawson. 7’6”, 8’4” and 9’6”, all pintails, all glassed by Jack Reeves and sanded by Charlie Walker in a couple of little sheds out behind Sunset Beach. The two smaller boards were pretty much conventional, but the 9’6” was a purpose made Waimea gun, the first I’d ever owned. Twenty inches wide, yellow resin tinted, with a half-inch cedar stringer, it pulled back from the wide point like a road vanishing over some horizon. A vast white single fin dominated its slender tail. The whole thing was made more resonant by the fact that my little brother Tom had paid for it — a gift for helping him win the world title that year, or as it…

There was once a little bird who loved flying more than anything. Actually, I think most birds love to fly but this little fella’ really loved flying. Anyway, when he wasn’t doing the required bird things like pecking at the ground and decorating automobiles, he’d be up in the air orbiting, soaring and just plain flat-out going fast. Flying was his thing and boy, did he love it! Flying’s unsafe though and, apart from predators and hail and such, it takes a lot of coordination and skill. A bird’s gotta be in top shape to fly. This little bird was in top shape and when a bird’s in top shape, he rarely notices. He’s just free. Ever wonder what happens to the older birds though? Birds who die? We almost…

I bolted straight up in bed, heart pounding, gasping for breath. I looked around me in the dark: the wooden walls, the window between the beds, my 12-year-old son sleeping peacefully in the other one. I heard the old man in the next room, no more than three metres away, wheeze and cough. I could not understand how he had just been sitting on the edge of my mattress, leaning over me, squeezing my neck and face with his two powerful hands, imploring me, “They don’t listen to me anymore. They never listen to me.” He had whispered the words, his face held right up to mine. Confused, I decided it was a nightmare and went back to sleep. I awoke with pressure bruises on my neck and forehead. We…