While you were sleeping last night, Dave and I surfed Pipeline. You should have been there, it was just me and my 80 closest mates… and some of the guys I wasn’t even tight with, guys like Bruce Irons, Josh Kerr, Wardo and Jamie O’Brian, but that didn’t stop me from having fun.
Here’s the deal with Pipe.
It’s heavy, it’s shallow and it’s crowded, very crowded. It’s also not the big setup that it looks like in the magazines. It’s an A-frame peak, and as you paddle in you choose whether you’re going right or left. Or rather, the local pro’s and ex-world champions choose if they are going right or left and you look for anything they might not have picked up on. Like the insiders, or the wide one’s, or the death-drop-I-am-so-frikken-deep-there-is-no-chance-I-am-not-getting-hurt-on-this-one wave.
Fortunately for Dave and me, Off the Wall is close and it wasn’t too crowded, and the sun went behind the clouds. That meant that Dave got some great waves at Off the Wall, and the pro’s went in so I got lucky at Backdoor.
When it’s on Pipe has the intensity of a gladiator’s arena, with the Billabong house, Oakley house and O’Niell house cheering epic tubes, and claiming the biggest wipe outs. The Volcom house leads the charge every time, with whistling and screaming accompanying every set wave and whipping the crowd into a frothing frenzy. They really come alive when someone drops in as the crew runs onto the beach to cheer on the fight, kick sand on the loser and claim the victor.
For me, it was a life-changing experience. For Jamie O’Brian it was just another day at the office. As I sat on the beach after my surf, soaking up the moment, feeling the spiritual high of riding the one wave I have dreamt about riding for my entire adult life, Jamie took off on the back quarter of his surfboard. He broke his 6’3” on the wave before, and on 3 feet of board he raced down the line, before boosting into the air off the oncoming section. Holding his outside rail, he flew into space, landed cleanly, and then banged a couple of white water re-entries for good measure. The Volcom house cheered. And he smiled up at the crew. I looked on, stoked in the glow of it all. There might even have been a rainbow out at sea, that’s how awesome the moment was.
Then the cheers turned to whistles, as the crew rushed onto the beach. Someone had just burned one of their posse…
