Supergroms

Kya Jo Heuer, 14yrs

Aggressive, Confident, Mentawai trained Homegrounds: Kandui Lefts

Surftime Call: “Surfing in the Mentawai teaches you how to ride gnarly reef waves. You learn to trust yourself and the lines you choose. Perfect danger waves train you to trust yourself. Kya does just that.”. Photography by Photography by Ega Dora

Where else are you going to see a mother join her Champion son Mega Semadhi on the winners podium to sing the Indonesian National anthem. Or see Clay Marzo win by surfing like he dropped in from another planet. Or see Chris Ward take a knee and propose to his lady at the awards ceremony. Or see the nobility of Made Winada Adi Putra stand tall in the spinning barrel. Or witness a 14 year old Erin Brooks fight her way into the finals. Or heard of a contest with a waiting period that lasts a month. The Rip Curl Cup is Indonesian surfing at it’s best. And it always has been. And it is ours. August. Get Ready.

Meanwhile, over on Nusa Lembongan on easier days, Agus Frimanto is still exploring the limits of small wave performance under the shadow of the crane that still remains in the line-up. Let us never underestimate the abilities of our neighbor island brothers.

ALONE: IS IT REALLY THE DREAM?

Accra, Ghana, West Africa

Outside it’s Africa, and I’m afraid. Sitting on the corner of a hotel bed at four o’clock in the morning with my head in my hands afraid. Scared to look out of the small square window that beams in blue moonlight from a broad, whitewashed courtyard. Dreading the sun that will come rolling up over the Central African plains to the east, setting fire to columns of clouds behind the city. Knowing that eventually the night will end, and that I’ll have to pick up my board and be on my way. Remembering Distillideros, on Baja’s Eastern Cape. Sitting in the shade thrown by the fishing panga pulled up on the beach. Blazing sun, gold as a doubloon. The boat’s hull was white with yellow trim and a thick blue nylon hawser tacked down around the gunwales. The sand was whiter still, the ocean silted turquoise. My board was blue, with three white fins and a yellow logo. Above, like a piece of the precious shade ripped up and blown into the sky, a black frigate bird wheeling overhead. More than the mountains or sea or anything between, the desert brings the gift of color.

My good friend Dave Parmenter said it best, when he got back from surfing along the coast of the Namib Desert, 2500 miles south of where I sit right now. He rode alone at a perfect left point called Cape Cross, near Swakopmund. There was a colony of 25,000 sea lions, each one barking themselves hoarse, laughing at Dave’s clumsiness. He would ride alongside the sea lions all day, then in the evening climb up a high dune and listen to the crashing sand. He told me that surfers love the desert because it’s really a slow moving sea. Watched over the centuries towering dunes would be blown by the wind just like waves, their crests steepening and tumbling, then building again in turn, rolling inexorably across an ocean of sand. You can even hear the sand-waves breaking when a crest is blown steep enough, the friction of grain against grain causing tons of toppling sand to roar like the surf.

But outside it’s Africa, and I’m afraid. The first thing I did when I checked into my room at here in Accra was to unpack my surfboard, sliding it gently from its padded bag and laying it on the narrow single bed. A new board, made especially for this trip, so I didn’t know anything about it. Trusted older boards have scars, stories. Memories. This one is shiny and unblemished, and in it I could see my face. My whole life has been reflected back at me from a succession of new surfboards. For other men traditional epochs mark the passing years: high school, college, grad school, weddings, jobs, vacations, retirement. For me, it’s been surfboards. 1967 was the Summer of Love but I remember it as the beginning of the Shortboard Revolution. In 1974 I had the B.K. Lightning Bolt and graduated from Encinal High. 1978, the year I started riding McCoys, I got married for the first time. 1981 was the year of three-fin Thrusters and the beginning of modern history. My life, mapped out on pieces of foam and plastic. But who I am seems far away from this place. All I am is here. From the moment I stumbled out of Kotoka’s terminal with my board and my bike. Stepping into a sweaty, fetid, living Africa, I pressed into a viscous wall of smell: wood smoke, exhaust fumes, open sewers, fresh fruit, burning tires, old trees, the sea, tilled fields, dead birds, live lizards, dried fish and wet babies. People. Mostly the smell of people, carrying chickens in small woven baskets, riding black Chinese bikes, balancing pails of dirty dishwater on their heads. Smelling of stale cologne, like a dead bouquet, and of fresh coconut soap. Smelling Andrew, my taxi driver, who let me load my bike box into the trunk and tie my board to the roof, then tried to charge me three times what a ride into Accra was worth.

“You must understand, Sam,” he said, in surprisingly good English and with much solemnity. “I am a professional. You must ‘tink of me like a doctor. Now you bargain with a doctor? You look up from the operating table and ‘den say he is charging too much? I am like a doctor, Sam. I hold your life in my hands.”

For emphasis, he took his hands off the pink, fuzzy steering wheel and held them up like a surgeon waiting to be gloved.

“’Dese hands hold in ‘dem your life. Is ‘dat not worth the small amount I have asked.” I assured him that it was, if only he’d put those hands back on the wheel and look where he was going. I told Andrew that I would pay the 15 U.S. dollars he requested: five for the taxi ride and ten for the snow job.

“It is a good ‘ting you met me, Sam,” said Andrew. “All taxi drivers are ‘teefs around here.”

Traffic was chaotic, with three or four lines of cars squeezed into two lanes along Ring Road, the pulsing asphalt artery that skirts around the heart of downtown Accra. As the sun set, the gray sky got even grubbier and everything—from the broad-topped acacia trees to the featureless, square concrete buildings to the lanky kids selling rolls of toilet paper on the side of the road—looked dusty and worn. Horns blared and policemen’s whistles shrilled, but hunkered down in the front seat of the taxi, I couldn’t see much else but billboards. AfriCola, with its pretty palm tree logo. Ubiquitous Sony, Panasonic and Coke signs. Gulder, a local beer, featuring an African vamp with braided hair and a look as predatory as a leopard, a public service AIDS message, showing a neat young couple running hand in hand on the beach, as if desperate to find a condom. I wondered if the girl on the Gulder poster ever made love on the beach. Then I wondered about the beach—for a few moments, I’d forgotten what I was doing here.

At first thought it seemed so simple: ride my bicycle along the coast of Ghana, tow my board and gear behind on a trailer, look for waves that nobody has ever surfed before. Simplicity, or is it vanity? At home in Southern California, it felt so good to describe my plan. I was already basking, thinking that I just loved watching me do stuff like this. But now I’m sitting in a funky hotel room on the other side of the world, not much more than a day away from home and already lonely. Single hanging light-bulb kind of lonely, because we always see ourselves so clearly in those shadows. And I know what it is that makes me feel loneliest. At four o’clock this morning, when I’d finally given up trying to sleep, I picked up my board and laid back down in bed with it. It rested on me, light as a feather, touching my forehead, chest, knees and toes. For the hundredth time thinking about taking off my wedding ring so it wouldn’t tick-tick-tick as I ran my hands down its rails. Eyes shut; the smell of resin and fiberglass.

So outside it’s Africa, and I’m afraid. The way I used to be afraid at 17, sitting on my bed in Alameda, California, up before the dawn, stomach in knots, knowing that if I wanted to be anything like the man I pictured myself to be, I had to pick up my surfboard and get moving. It’s the same feeling all these years later. Hell, I could ride off on my bike right now and people might just glance my way. I could walk right out of here and back to the airport and nobody would notice. It’s this board that makes me different. This surfboard is why I’m sitting here, all alone in a little hotel in Accra, Ghana. I don’t know where I’m headed once the sun comes up, once I’ve assembled my bike and trailer and packed my gear. I don’t even know how to get to the coast, or where I’ll go once I get there. I have no idea what I’ll find, or worse, if I’m even capable of finding it. All I know is that this board is going with me. I may be lonely, but without it I’d be lost.

For the complete story and more from Sam George’s upcoming book, please visit samgeorgeworld.substack.com/

By Kainoa Kester

Surfing is inconvenient. It takes hours of work, money and planning in order to score the short precious moments of elation we feel while riding a wave. On paper, it’s about as unequal of an exchange as you could come up with. Selling something that takes all this work with such short time reward is tough. But Surfers could care less about how it shakes out on paper. Surfing is worth every inconvenience and we all know it.

COVID-19, clearly our generation’s World War Three, created the most trying inconveniences standing between surfers and surfing in history. Dodging quarantines, board shortages and more weren’t just a headache, they were head splitting. COVID-19 was more an adversary than an inconvenience, a bigger threat to us than throwing yourself over the ledge at your local slab. Reef cuts heal, COVID-19 kills. But did we sacrifice surfing? No, the world surfed more than ever.

Our world is wildly over populated and we are destroying our island planet and there will be more culling events in our future. That is how nature works. Put two goldfish in a bowl and they are happy as larks. Put ten in there and they all go belly up. But remember, the water will survive. If mother nature can start a war against humans with an invisible disease as her soldier, then we should prepare for whatever comes with her next offensive. Not with weaponry, but with care. Care for our land, sea and air. It’s gonna happen again in some form, and it’s gonna suck, but we’re still gonna surf. Inconvenience, even during a war like COVID-19, is an afterthought when the waves are firing. It would take an army to stop surfers from surfing, we have proven that. We lived and breathed surfing in the face of a disease that steals that very breath. But all who read this survived. With determination like that, our community might just make it. We’ve have a beautiful world as surfers. If we channel some of our passion towards taking care of our land, seas and air, instead of ignoring them or worse, then the time and work put into surfing won’t look so unequal on paper. And that will make our waves worth any inconvenience, any war, that our tenuous futures can throw at us. Think about what you can do. And then go do it. When you think about it, it’s the only chance we’ve got.

Herbert Dell”Monica and the beauty of having a private eye

It’s intimate. That relationship between a surfer and a photographer when they are working together alone. This is what went down when photographer Thiago Okasuka and Herbert Dell”Monica found themselves on this shallow Java reef with no one else around. The surfer and the private eye. The mastery of two unique skills, both physical, both based on positioning, both about seeing, yet directly opposed when it comes to vision. And then the shutter trips and the two principals meet at the precise crossroads of two arts. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. Photography by

Would you drive down the line and pump as fast as you could and try to achieve the highest air possible if no one was watching but the jungle? Herbert

Monica, with another two eyes anticipating his every move, need not consider. He need only fly.