Innehållsförteckning för #27 från White Horses

You may have heard of the relatively recent concept of "trigger warnings". In academia particularly, students are forewarned that upcoming content in a particular text might trigger a memory that is upsetting or damaging. The idea of a sensory trigger is nothing new of course. They range from delightful to traumatic. A certain smell out of a kitchen might transport us back to childhood, a song can evoke the memory of a lover we thought we’d forgotten, a certain texture on the water reminds us of another beach, another time. The idea of a photo triggering a strong emotional response lies at the heart of this special issue of Horsies. The premise was simple enough: we asked an eclectic bunch of surfers to nominate an image that resonated with them,…

I have a few folders full of shark photos from my work as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, but this one never ceases to transport me right back to that moment. It was a magical day on the water with 30 metres visibility – a rare occurrence in New Zealand. Reily was overboard before we could even cut the motors but I was hesitant – this was by far the biggest Mako I had free-dived with and I was scared as hell. My heart was in my throat right up until my head was fully submerged. But then, an overwhelming sense of calm flooded over me as I witnessed this beautiful, prehistoric creature make slow circles around Riley and me – so close that she brushed up on Riley to…

Going under the knife is pretty daunting. You start thinking crazy shit: am I going to wake up? Will I be able to function the same? I hope the doc’s not going to slip and cut something he’s not supposed to… These thoughts were hard to shake as I prepared for round two of shoulder surgery from a heavy mountain bike stack. During the first op a few months prior, they didn’t give me enough meds and I felt like a truck had hit me after I came too. With this fresh in mind, the last thing I said to the surgeon as he stood over me was that I didn’t want to feel my shoulder when I woke up. He just cackled and said, “You’re not going to feel…

This image represents the circular nature of my surfing life. Several years ago I moved away from Sumatra’s white sand, palm trees and almost pornographic surf indulgence to Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido. I’d hoped to give the world of surfing the slip for a while. (Too much of a good thing, a golden era that would never be repeated, etc.) But after a couple of years riding perfect powder snow, the sleeping surfer in me woke back up. I’d known there was probably surf to be had here, though part of me hoped there wasn’t. But as it turns out, Hokkaido is a bit of a time-machine, a throwback to an era where a strong, underground, almost clandestine surf culture thrives. I knew some guys who knew some guys and…

I still get a bit of a shiver when I look at this image. It was taken on a charter expedition in Papua New Guinea, where I have the good fortune of working for PNG Surfaris as their resident photographer. We were in a remote area with an odd swell direction running when our skipper, Andrew Rigby, hopped on his jet ski and went to scout for new waves that might be lighting up in the unusual swell. Before we could see what he’d come across, we could hear him, hooting wildly in the distance as he buzzed back to the boat. I instantly knew he’d found a wave, and a bloody good one at that. But that’s not the point of this story. We motored out to the wave…

This was at Belharra during the Hercules storm of 2014, when Jamie Mitchell caught this gigantic wave. It’s still the biggest storm I think Europe has seen in a hundred years or so. Luckily for us, the swell actually peaked the night before. I’m pretty sure there were 100 foot waves breaking out there in the dark. There were only five or six of us paddling and a few guys trying to tow, but the lineup out there is huge. It’s so big it can break a kilometre out from where you’re sitting. We were stretched across the lineup when this wave came through and I just managed to scratch over the lip as Jamie took off. It would easily have been the biggest paddle wave ever if he had…

This photo was taken back in the winter of 2011. A bunch of us had been surfing the beachbreak in the background. Afterwards, we lit a fire at the high tide mark – I was sure the tide was going out – and I wanted to get a long exposure of the beautiful, clear night that was falling upon us. I had my Nikon SLR camera, a remote shutter release cable and my Greenough-inspired makeshift tripod. The tripod was a length of timber about four feet long and 200mm wide, and I had banged a few nails into the wood where the camera would sit. The rig worked well. I would usually set the tripod up at a 45-degree angle to the horizon, then lean the camera back at the…

Corey Wilson took this after I won at J-Bay in 2016. The photo represents a lot for me on a personal level. Of course, everyone always talks about the shark incident the year before and what could have been, and yes, it definitely kept me up at night! But there was a lot more to going back and winning the event than that. The year before had been challenging on both a personal and professional level. So many people had built up their own stories of me. I wanted to silence that and write my own story through the best way I knew how. Surfing. I had amazing support leading up to the event from the people close to me, friends like Corey. That’s what made the win so special…

I grew up at a heavily localised wave, a little piece of reef beneath a sea cliff that hosted a slab style wave with a tiny, hotly contested takeoff spot. If you weren't from there, you weren't welcome. It was all about black wetsuits, clear boards, death stares and macho insecurity, mixed with a general undercurrent of violence. I watched people get hit in the lineup. Not slaps but proper beat downs. I remember seeing them doubled over with shame, retreating back to shore with bruised and bleeding faces and heavy hearts. The surfers I looked up to, the generation ahead of me, would paddle out off the rocks still smoking ciggies, calling out any newcomers to go in, and regulating young groms like me to the end of the…

Kakuni means crab in Maldivian. We named this wave after the infestation of crabs on the island off which it breaks. The whole island floor seemed to undulate with the critters, to the point that they’d climb up your legs if you stood still for too long. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First there’s the bizarre story of what happened when we found this wave. It was the early 2000s and my mentor John Callahn had organised a trip to the northernmost atolls of the Maldivian archipelago in search of new waves. John is the consummate professional and wrote the book on producing global surf trips during the pre-digital age, when print was everything. As was his formula, he invited surfers from almost every major surf nation at the…

I was 18 years old the first time I saw this photo. We were down the south coast of NSW filming for the Epokhe movie Beauty Pockets. I had only just met the Epokhe lads and was probably a bit quiet and shy and definitely nervous to be filming with Kai Neville alongside Dion Agius and Mitch Coleborn. John Respondek was taking photos for the trip and showing us around. It was the first time I had met Spon and knew very little of him or what a legendary photographer he was. You see, when I was younger I never really bought that many surfing magazines. I would just buy surfing DVDs and VHS cassettes, before they went extinct. As a result I had a huge collection of late 90s…

Cori Schumacher was the first interview I’d ever done and I was shitting myself. I clearly recall the sudden case of dry throat I couldn’t swallow away as the Skype dial tone beeped through my earphones, and I waited for Cori to answer. I’d been pestering the editor of an Aussie surf mag with emails and phone calls to do work experience and he proved unsurprisingly evasive. One day I caught him unawares when I phoned from a private number and he charitably conceded to my visiting the office. They were doing a Misfit issue and I was keen to write up a woman surfer. He asked me if I’d heard of Cori and whether I wanted to interview her. Funnily enough, I’d just read a New York Times feature…

I took this photo using my iPhone and an Axis Go housing. The waves weren’t great this day and I wasn’t even really planning on shooting, but I always make sure to have some kind of a camera on me – you never know when an oppurtunity for a good photo will present itself. When I saw Mikey paddling out at Off The Wall, I decided to swim out and give it a go. He did this huge frontside air as he went past me and this was the end result. I think it’s probably the best air shot I’ve ever taken. You can’t plan or recreate that light and positioning. My dad always told me, “The best camera you can have is the one you have with you.” This…

What shot means the most to me? Such a huge question when I start thinking of all the effort over the years: the long, cold walks before sunrise, and the sketchy dawn and dusk swims in very sharky places. And that’s not to mention things like swimming out at Pipeline in Hawaii each year. I get butterflies just thinking about that. The effort involved is precisely what makes some images more rewarding and special than others, and as far as effort goes, water shots take the cake – that’s just a no brainer, as far as I'm concerned. After arguing with myself for longer than is healthy, I’ve decided this fisheye shot of Michael ‘Munga’ Barry has the most meaning for me. I shot it at an isolated beachbreak in…

The Philippines has 7 107 islands in total and is second only to Indonesia in potential dream setups. But unlike Indonesia with its constant exposure to southern hemisphere swells, the Philippines relies on erratic typhoons to light up any surf along its 36 289 kilometres of coastline. When there are no typhoons, the ocean lies dormant for weeks on end. In 1992 I launched a small expedition to the island of Siargao with American pros Taylor Knox and Evan Slater. Cloud 9 had possibly been surfed before that, but we didn’t know there was a wave in the area and found it by chance. Back then, admiralty charts were as good as it got for information about coastal areas. These charts were quite detailed if you were looking at heavily…

This photo of a perfect Skeleton Bay lineup was taken from the bottom of the bay where you get the best perspective of the wave. In the distance, in amongst all that sand and water, you can see a slightly hunched figure wrapped in four millimetres of rubber, board underarm, taking a moment's rest during the long walk back up the point. That’s me – buckled from a day of relentlessly pushing against the elements (futile!), but determined to try get just one more. The photo was taken in 2010, during the first of two trips I have made to the edge of the Namib Desert. It’s the kind of image that evokes an immediate yearning to be there on first sight, a conjuring of all the endless possibilities the…

Steve Wall, Russ Bierke and Brett Burcher were all going down for this swell to film for a big wave project we’re doing. Steve told me to at least come check it out – no expectations, just come see it and get a feel for it. And I was like, “Yeah, sounds awesome!” The walk is two hours in and two hours out, with all of your gear – downhill on the way in, uphill on the way back. We arrived at dawn and, standing on the cliff looking at it, my mind was blown. It was huge in the morning, tow only, and I was up there thinking there’s no way I’m going out there. I sat watching for hours until a few of the guys started getting ready to…

The Summer of Love was long dead by the time 1970 rolled around, nailing the coffin shut with the Kent State massacre and the death of Jimi Hendrix. The war in Vietnam was still raging and the death count of young American and Australian troops kept climbing, along with over a million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. By the following year I had won the conscription lottery, with the offer of a free trip to Southeast Asia to shoot people I had no quarrel with. At that time, a 19-year-old was judged too immature to drink or vote, but considered old enough to kill. That little marble plucked randomly from a barrel would change the course of my life. As a conscientious objector my solution to avoid conscription was to hitch…

One of the biggest attractions for me as a photographer who shoots empties is the simple fact that every single wave is different. You can watch a thousand waves roll in over the same reef ledge and never see one that’s exactly the same. Like people, each has its own unique characteristics and attributes. This is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing being that you can never tire of watching and photographing these miracles. The curse, however, is that if you miss an opportunity to capture something special, it’s lost forever. Over years of shooting I’ve also noticed that during any given session there is always that one wave that comes through. It’s a little bigger, a little heavier, and a little more spectacular than all the others.…

I met Luke Egan on my first trip to Oz in 1986, which was my first big trip abroad, and my rookie year on tour. Watched him tear apart a reform sandbar at the bottom of Burleigh Heads. He wore rainbow Billabong boardshorts and zinged back and forth, light-footed and delicate one second, stomping and gouging the next. I knew him from the Road Song issue of Surfing World (he and John Shortis on a hitchhiking trip). Later that afternoon I found myself sitting in a jacuzzi with all my surf heroes, Luke among them. Hoyo arrived on the ASP tour a couple years later. He was raw and brash and funny and loads of fun. His cackle lit up bars around the world. Luke and Hoyo were best mates…

This photo was taken during the first heat of the morning at the Teahupoo event in 2014, the year it got really big. I had never caught a wave like that at Teahupoo before, one of those super thick ones. I had seen other people do it but up until that point I hadn’t ridden one like it myself. As I took off I was thinking, “I’m not going to make it.” But I was also thinking that all these other people do it, so I had to give it a go. Visually you can’t get your head around what the wave is doing when it’s like that – the way it hits the reef, the way the water is both pushing you back and pulling you forward. The wave…

The camera I took this photo with came everywhere with me and lived its best life, before the salt eventually corroded all its working parts. It wasn't waterproof but spent many days in the sea. It was so rugged and reliable and I took some of my favourite photos with it, this being among them. It was a balmy afternoon on the coast and I had asked my friend Chris to climb up and jump into this shallow area of water between two sizeable boulders. He had little room for error – at best, it was about two metres deep – but Chris was down for it. I yelled at him to jump and as he did, a seagull flew into frame. I pressed the shutter and wondered if I'd…

As a photographer my life is defined by significant moments. Although it didn’t feel particularly impactful at the time, this image from the early 90s has matured in significance. The subjects have since become powerful industry leaders, like Doug ‘Claw’ Warbrick and Brian Singer, founders of Rip Curl, or just outright legends in the case of Tom Curren and Sonny Miller. Rip Curl had launched its Search campaign a few years prior, which was really more a philosophy than anything else: free yourself from the grind of everyday life and go search out the unexplored corners of the earth on a surf trip with your mates. Discretion was a code of honour and camaraderie was key. This image captures the simple essence of that philosophy for me. Claw is at…

Up until this trip I would consider the majority of my surfing experience as comfortable. Growing up on the Sunshine Coast, the seasons never really change and you are spoilt with the option of boardies all year round. The surf trips I’d done weren’t too different – cold beer, warm water – your typical Indonesia / Central America milk run. You might run into some sketchy characters or some manic traffic, but other than that, you're on easy street. New Zealand could not have been further from this tropic idyll. The trip came about after my friend Ziggy Alberts did a music tour around the country and was shown this wave. He showed me a photo of himself soul arching in a standup barrel with the incredible cliffs in the…

I was witness to the early days of the women’s surfing movement in the 70s and 80s. These were days of heats held when the surf had finally blown out, an occasional coin toss to determine a winner, and sponsors that bailed at the last minute after promises were not fulfilled. Chauvinism held women’s surfing back for decades. To make matters worse, the financials didn’t add up: there was very little return at the time for marketing the women. It wasn’t until 1990 when the Roxy brand was launched and others followed suit, that the development of women’s surfing was kick-started in earnest. Almost 30 years later, the WSL has finally made women’s contest winnings equal to men’s. But in the late 70s and early 80s, no one could deny…

Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint a time when the darkness took over. Growing up, whatever was going on in my head, I figured that was just the way everyone else felt or viewed things. Inevitably it caught up with me. I went from thinking that nothing was wrong to thinking everything was wrong; and ultimately that it would never be right again. I tried to end my life and ended up in hospital. Ironically, that terrible decision probably saved me in the end. I was sick and needed help but up until then I didn’t know it – no one did. The incident forced me to start talking about what I was thinking and feeling. Slowly, I started to open up to my family, still confused myself as to…

Eight or so years ago I picked up a photography magazine while waiting for my ritual morning coffee. "Top twenty wildlife images of the year”, said the main callout on the cover. Each photographer was interviewed on the backstory behind their image and how they went about capturing their award-winning photos. What a read – hiding in trees for days, avoiding grizzly bears, hypothermia, heat exhaustion, equipment loss, three years in the making, etcetera, etcetera. The number one image, the numero uno according to the judges, was a photo of a Bengal tiger coming out of the water shaking its head, dispersing water as it majestically left the pond. The photographer had shot it with a speed blur, creating a perfect ring of water around the tiger while keeping the…

I met a guy in Bali in the early 70s and we became friends. He really had his shit together with his own house, staff, car and an air-conditioned music room where we’d go and get stoned and listen to the latest tunes in the late afternoon with the heat blazing outside. An entrepreneur at heart, he ended up leaving Bali and set up discos in Kenya. From there he met his future wife and moved to Seattle so he could ski. Soon they were married and decided to return to Bali to start their own surf resort, a novelty at the time. Instead of going west of Bali they went east to Sumba. They began in the middle of the island and started looking west. They were set to…

In the mid 70s I created a fictitious utopian surf spot to use as a vehicle to publish stories and photos in Australian, and then American magazines. New Zealand as a surf destination was unknown to international surf media at the time. The Americans, as they explained to me decades later, had known that there were good waves there, but had been unable to get their hands on quality photos to publish. Then I came along. I used the beachbreaks on Matakana Island for the surf shots and called it Puni’s Farm. The photos often featured local surfer Kevin Jarrett in the close-up action shots, as he was a world-class surfer whose style and barrel riding was very photogenic. Jarrett had the use of his family’s inshore commercial fishing boat…

Most of my life consists of competitions, due dates, scores, when you surf, where you surf, who you surf against, even how long you surf for. So when I went on this spur of the moment trip to Mozambique with my best mate Chad and we scored this wave, it was really special. I’ve been to the same spot a number of times but I’ve also been skunked there a number of times. It takes a rare combination of swell and tide to work–the swell’s basically got to come in from opposite to what the normal swell direction is, and it only works for a few hours before and after the low tide. This was the best we’ve ever had it for sure.…

Peak happiness was happening the moment this image was taken. We were volunteering at the Balinese Street-kids Orphanage as part of a surf trip with some of my (now lifelong) friends on a bodyboarding team trip. It was so good to connect with these kids, take them to the beach and experience the stoke of an energy line propelling them forward. During this time of playful engagement, there were no barriers. Neglect, isolation, disadvantage – all left behind in the moment. We all shared the same abundance of joy in those moments of flow. I learned a lot over that portion of the trip. It made me see the world is bigger than my normal reality, and the sheer enormity of the love that resides in us, and connects us…

It was the Hawaii season of 2003 and I was at the Off the Wall house having coffee with Andy and the boys. I had my camera on me with 3200 ISO high-speed black and white film – it was really dark inside – when all of a sudden Kelly walked in the door with his golf gear on, saying “Where’s Damien? Is Damien here?” Everyone in the house went dead quiet. It was the height of the Kelly and Andy rivalry and they’d been going one for one the entire year. Andy was defending his second world title, Kelly had come out of semi-retirement, and now the title race between them was going to be decided at Pipe. Andy would win in dramatic fashion against Kelly in the final,…

Late 2011, Indian Ocean, around 400 nautical miles northwest of Broome. It was cyclone season and I never knew it could get so hot. I was part of the mech crew on the Crest Odyssea II, or CO2 for short. My jobs ranged from welding broken aluminium parts to unpacking stores in the mess and anything in-between. The CO2 was an 85-metre saturation dive vessel, with a hole in the hull called a “moon pool” where submersibles were launched and retrieved. Burnt orange, a heli-pad fitted to the forecastle, white tower-crane hanging off the aft. Being on board was the culmination of a long sequence of small, indiscriminate events beginning with a labouring job in a boatbuilding shed. When ships came into port for repairs, my boss would let me…

This photo was taken on my first trip to the Telo islands. I’d sailed overnight from Padang aboard the Nomad, one of Matt Cruden’s surf charter boats, laden with building materials bound for a tiny island in the archipelago north of the Mentawais. Officially I was supposed to be photographing the construction of Matt’s new resort, but ended up helping set up the infrastructure, water systems, building and everything in-between. While shooting the island from the calm surrounding waters one afternoon, a fisherman paddled past and I said hello. He stopped, said hello back and jumped out of his canoe and presented me with his catch. Like any fisherman that’s just landed a decent catch, he was proud and wanted to show me. It was an organic moment and led…

In December 1982, with a flawless west swell inflating the Offshore Pipeline Masters, Martin Potter, just 17, rode the wave of the season, of the decade, of his life, in a surf-off with Michael Ho after they’d tied for second place in their semi-final. It engraved his name on the North Shore, something that looked miserably distant the year before when he’d snuck off the island after qualifying for an event that was going to be held in 20-foot waves. In contrast, Shaun Tomson felt compelled to paddle up to his teenage compatriot and say, “Take it easy, Martin. Pull back.” Mark Richards remembers the wave as “absolutely fucking massive. It was one of those massive Second Reef bombs. Martin dropped in on a board that was way too small…

After 25 years of trips through Indonesia, I thought I had the place pretty well worked out and had become a bit jaded. Then I was commissioned for a shoot in 2017 for a resort company that had acquired land at a wave, and wanted some pictures to gauge interest. The flight itinerary suggested the spot was located in an area I knew well, but I was surprised to find the driver taking a different route to what I expected. The last part of the journey was over really bad terrain and we had to stop constantly to test the depth of puddles and make sure the car wasn’t going to bottom out. Every now and then I would catch a glimpse of the ocean as the road snaked its…

Ever since Skeleton Bay first popped up on the radar, I – like ever other goofy-footer in the world – wanted to surf it so bad, but it took years for me to finally get there. Eventually all the elements aligned while I was in South Africa shooting a profile film with Quiksilver. I was due to fly home but then we saw a swell headed for Namibia and decided to hit it with some mates from South Africa. I only caught a handful of waves that day, but each one was special. This was before drones became a thing, so we had to arrange a chopper to film and shoot out of. It had to be brought in from neighbouring Botswana and was on standby all morning because of…

It was the late 80s and I was going through my first phase in flash photography. I’d attached an old Toshiba diving strobe to the outside of my Nikonos II camera and was able to get usable pictures, as long as I didn’t shoot in full sunlight because the camera would only synchronise with the flash at a 60th of a second. This took great dedication. I would get up in the dark and swim out, looking for usable moments to shoot before it got too light. One of my favourite things to do back then was to prowl surf contest sites in the early morning because, inevitably, there’d be some dedicated name surfers out, practicing before the first heat of the day started. This particular contest was the Gorilla…

This was 2016. It was the first time I had camped out in the snow. Just a couple of mates in the Kosciuszko National Park, feeling like we were on the top of Australia. This afternoon was something else: the wind breathless as the October sun faded to purple hues out west, with nothing but us and a vast expanse of whiteness. This image is special to me because it brings back that incredible day, but I also love it because it speaks so clearly about the cross-over between surfing and snowboarding. My mates and I are dedicated surfers but to then take this surfing approach out into the mountains and onto a blank white canvas… I feel this image really captures that. I didn’t have to work too hard…

The rugged southwest coast of Tasmania. A place of ancient quartzite mountain ranges and heaving cobalt seas. A place that punches giant, ragged holes through the limits of our language. Where time warps and shifts, becomes geological. Where you can feel the mountains breathe. We’d been picking rubbish off the sand for hours. It washed ashore in a great toxic wave. Millions of people’s rubbish, from right across the world, landing on this remote coastline and getting nasty. Killing sea birds, choking up delicate marine ecosystems. That kinda stuff. Which is why we were there in the first place: Team Clean. A ragtag collection of some of the finest and saltiest humans I know. Largely indefatigable. Traversing the edges of ancient middens, traipsing along the high tide line. Scaling dunes…

I made this photograph whilst working on a portrait series, which documents the flourishing crusade of female surfers in my hometown of Lennox Head. I am drawn to the strength of the young girls in this photograph, united by late summer afternoons of chasing waves and adventure. My experience of growing up in a surfing town was completely different to the lifestyle these young girls enjoy today. I grew up on the Central Coast of NSW and only knew one other girl who surfed in my youth. Back then it was a male dominated sport and joining them in the water, you felt unwelcome and intimidated. However, the tides are changing – females account for more than one third of the Australian surfing population nowadays, which is powerfully evident in…

When I met Otis he had nine cents in his bank account, and myself, not much more. We use to do a surf shoot and joke about how the money I would make from it would be enough to buy a bag of chips for us to both eat for lunch and maybe a pack of smokes. This portrait was commissioned to be the cover of the "Otis" issue for one of the surf mags after he started making a name for himself. I followed the brief to the letter: Post surf – check. Wet hair including droplets – check. Nice and tight – check. I built my own reflector so I could shoot it unassisted and achieve a natural look for a shot that sums up who Otis is…

Indonesian outer island 1991, shot on a disposable film camera. A flashback to when all I did was chase waves. Well, actually, I was on my honeymoon when I took this. We’d been married a coupla days and me and the Missus decided to go on a trip. No reason to change a good thing. Upon coming in from this spot that had apparently never been surfed before, one of the local fishermen said to me, “Furry pig on the rip today”. “Uhm, what?” I said. And he repeated, very slowly, “Furry-pig-on-the-rip-today…” I stood there and thought about it for a moment, and then it clicked. “Very big on the reef today", I said back to him, and he nodded as he walked off chuckling. 27 years later, I still…

This was taken in the final weeks of a three-month trip Ishka and I spent zig-zagging around New Zealand. We’d rolled over 10 000 kays by this point and were at the bottom of the South Island, around Jackson Bay. Along with the versatility two wheels offered, the idea of travelling by bike was born out of the desire to strip back the clutter and carry just the essentials. Being New Zealand, the weather frequently dictated our movements. When we had one plan, it often had another and we’d have to adapt accordingly, but that was the beauty of the trip and the ever-changing landscape we found ourselves moving through. On the morning this was taken, we’d left early in the dark with some ground to cover in the hope…

In the late 70s, I moved three sandstone headlands and seven kilometres up Barrenjoey Road from Mona Vale to North Avalon. I arrived with a Rodney Hocker seven foot single-fin and my vintage nine foot Hayden, and we all quickly got acquainted with Off Rocks; my favourite left hand reef break for the next 25 years. Outside of the insular northern Sydney peninsula, cult leader Jim Jones told 900 members of his church to commit suicide in Guyana, and Sweden became the first country in the world to recognise the effect of aerosol sprays on the ozone layer and banned their sale. Back on the peninsula, Tracks Editor Phil Jarratt and wife Jackie bought a cute cottage in Edwin Avenue with an outside pan dunny. Chris Lorraway, AKA Shaker, was…

Days like this get counted down like the numbers before an old black and white movie. 10, 9, 8… Ten days out the storm first formed. A low pressure system near Fiji that was projected to intensify and move south, and at its height flush the entire East Coast with 15 feet of northeast swell. But in winter those storms are rare, I was sure the forecast would fall apart. 7, 6, 5… Each night I checked the models before I slept. Each morning I checked them when I awoke. 4, 3, 2… Four days out the predictions were holding true. I wanted to believe, yet I’d been let down by fantasy forecasts so many times before. I sandbagged my hopes against reality. 1. At 5.00am I left home with…

This was taken during my Round 5 heat against Dion Atkinson in Tahiti, 2014. It was the hugest, most perfect Chopes I had ever surfed. So blue, so clean! I had already had two of the heaviest hold-downs of my life during this heat. My energy was spent. I remember thinking, I can’t wipeout again, I’ll drown. Then I saw this crazy set coming. I had priority and Dion swung on the first one, an eight foot insider. He was mad to go on that thing and it all felt like a weird repeat of my first round heat against John John Florence and Jordy Smith, where a similar thing happened. Jordy went on the first wave – at the time, the biggest set I had ever seen whilst in…

A few days before I took this shot, I was halfway down the coast working at a bodyboarding event. I try not to look at the charts when I'm busy on a job but there were plenty of whispers around the comp site of a crazy swell due to hit the day after the event finished, which only intensified as the week wore on. As soon as the final wrapped up on the Sunday, I jumped into my car and headed south to a slab I was told would be all-time. I had barely been on the highway two minutes when all the lanes of traffic ground to a halt, like a scene out of an apocalypse movie. Two hours later, the opposite northbound lanes were completely empty – the…

This was 1977 – I had just won the world title and MR had just unveiled his new twin-fin design in Hawaii. Mark and I were very competitive. We both wanted to be considered the best guy in the world, be it free surfing or in contests, and Off the Wall was the hottest spot for performance surfing at the time. Of course, there was great surfing happening at Sunset and Pipeline, but in terms of sheer, raw performance, Off The Wall is where it all went down. Mark and I both loved that wave and we both pushed ourselves to the limit out there. This particular day was probably the best day of the year – six to eight feet, with a lot of intensity in the lineup. Somewhere…

I was in Bali in 1974 when I overheard a conversation about a beach full of Puka shells. Puka is a Hawaiian word meaning “hole”, and refers to the naturally occurring hole in the middle of these bead-like shells. Threaded together they created a necklace that surfers hung around their neck and were in demand the world over. Armed with a couple of plastic bags to carry the shells back and my trusty 8’3” gun (should I have to paddle any long sections), I set off to see if the rumour was true. The plan was to head back towards Kuta from Uluwatu by finding my way down the limestone cliffs to the low-tide reef a hundred metres below, and then take it from there. Pushing through some thorny undergrowth…

We had a decrepit bungalow in the backyard of our Anglesea house when I was growing up. My big sister Kath had plastered one the of bungalow walls with pics cut out of surf mags and that wall mesmerised me. One shot in particular was an empty, crystalline, thin-lipped NZ left-hander captioned as “Puni's Farm” shot by Logan Murray. It was emerald green and the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. You can only imagine what a thrill it was, 35 years later, as editor of Horsies, to connect with Logan and run his shots in the mag and hear his stories. That photo wall – and that Punis Farm shot in particular – helped set my course. Logan, you’re a legend mate. But for this exercise, I’m going to…

This issue’s cover shot was somewhat inevitable, with the sheer volume of sublime images Phil Thurston produces from this piece of NSW reef. Phil’s account upfront in the mag explains why he calls waves like this “The One”, and we reckon the photo is a fitting tribute to the spirit of the issue. As usual there is a long list of people to thank for giving their time, effort and energy to this edition of the Hoss, and supporting the theme with much enthusiasm: Sean Davey, Marcus Paladino, Scott Bauer, Andrew Shield, Al Mackinnon, Russell Quinn, Amber Jones, Jamie Brisick, Chris Peel, Joseph Bean, Ted Grambeau, Alicia King, Timo Jarvinen, Jack Dekort, Natalie Grono, Shane Peel, Mark Onorati, Nick Green, Nathan Oldfield, Andrew Crockett, Lance Morgan, Craig Anderson, Mick Curley, Torren…