Amazing Surfing Stories

An eclectic mix of exciting stories every surfer will love This eclectic mix has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches.

Be thrilled by legendary surfers like Laird Hamilton and Shane Dorian as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines. Epic battles among pros like Rob Machado and Kelly Slater are recounted alongside stories of weird waves and secret surf spots. There are fascinating encounters with surfing s true characters, men like Dave Rastovich and big wave world record holder Garrett McNamara; appearances by deadly sharks; stories of big wave surfing by night; and an account of how Agatha Christie s famous disappearance for 11 days in December 1926 might just have been because she was on a surf trip.

Travel from giants like California s Maverick s and Maui s Jaws to tales of Dungeons, dolphins and the derring-do of a man like Colonel Mad Jack Churchill. Turn the pages to flick between the left and rights of Britain, Europe, USA, Australia and many strange places in between.

Each compelling tale has been chosen to stoke the fire of armchair surfers and hardcore wave-riders alike, and some are illustrated with colour photographs.

ALEX WADE is a former white-collar boxer, media lawyer and freelance journalist who lives and surfs in Cornwall. As well as running the Surf Nation blog, he regularly contributes to The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian and other national newspapers. He covers diverse areas as a freelance journalist and has written columns for The Independent on Sunday, timesonline.co.uk and Flush magazine on boxing, legal life and poker.

Alex has travelled the globe extensively. He has written about New York, Albania and Kazakhstan; Barbados, Ireland and Andalucia; Captain Cook country, Mexico and Francis Ford Coppola's retreats in Belize and Guatemala. Despite a restless life he thinks he's found paradise in West Penwith, Cornwall, where he lives with his wife Karen, an accomplished abstract artist, and their two sons.

This eclectic mix has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches.

Be thrilled by ledgendary surfers, as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines.

Each compelling tale has been chosen to stoke the fire of armchair surfers and hardcore wave-riders alike, and many are illustrated with colour photographs.

Auteur

Alex Wade is a writer, freelance journalist, media lawyer and lecturer. As well as running the Surf Nation blog, Alex has edited and/or contributed columns and features for many national newspapers and magazines including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent titles, the FT, The Telegraph, Huck, Wavelength, The Surfer's Path, Flush, Coast and Cornwall Today. In 2009, Alex was short-listed as Sports Feature Writer of the Year in the Sports Journalists' Association's awards and he has sat on various occasions as a judge for Coast's annual awards. He was the first UK writer to cover surfing in serious depth for a national newspaper. Alex has travelled the globe extensively in search of the biggest waves and best breaks. He has written about surf breaks from Hawaii and Costa Rica to France and Portugal. Despite a restless life he thinks he has found paradise in West Penwith, Cornwall, UK, where he surfs all year round.

Résumé
This eclectic mix of surfing stories has something for everyone, from classic tales of monster waves and epic battles to stories of when life among the breakers goes wrong. There are accounts of death and disaster, as well as bravery and triumph. The bizarre and the extreme rub shoulders with perfect breaks and beautiful beaches. Be thrilled by legendary surfers, as well as learning about local heroes who never made the headlines. Each compelling tale has been chosen to stoke the fire of armchair surfers and hardcore wave-riders alike, and many are illustrated with colour photographs.

Échantillon de lecture

SURVIVING THE ATOM BLASTER

When Australian professional surfer Mark Visser decided to try and ride Jaws by night, he had no idea quite how draining the experience would be.

It vaporized me. I felt like my body went into little particles.

Laird Hamilton's summary of what a wipeout at Jaws feels like is all the more apposite given the name first coined for Maui's legendary reef break. Before it was Jaws , says Gerry Lopez, aka Mr Pipeline , we called it Atom Blaster because it broke like an atomic bomb. It's a super freak wave.

Jaws entered the surf world's consciousness thanks to two events in 1994. First came that year's September issue of Surfer magazine, which featured the wave, although its precise location was not given, and then a few weeks later, came Endless Summer II. Bruce Brown's update of his seminal 1964 celebration of surfing showed Jaws breaking at size, and emerged as the most memorable sequence in the film. It put Peahi (its Hawaiian name, meaning beckon ) on the map, although the wave had been ridden since the late 80s and early 90s by hard-charging windsurfers such as Dave Kalama, Rush Randle and Mike Waltz. The mid-90s saw the advent of tow-in surfing; by the end of the decade Jaws which only breaks over 20 ft around six times a year was as well-known as Waimea Bay (and, when it worked, probably more crowded).

Since the early 90s to the present day, Hamilton has been the surfer who is most regularly associated with Jaws. To a degree, this is down to his exceptional media savvy: if there is one surfer who knows how to talk amiably to journalists, it is the 6 ft 3 inch, 220-pound, blond, square-jawed and muscular Hamilton, who was born at San Francisco university in an experimental salt-water sphere. Mostly though, Hamilton's dominance of the line-up at Jaws is simply because he is its best surfer. Time and again he has proved this by challenging the wave rather than merely riding it, carving turns on its vast, open faces and slipping into barrels as if Jaws was an 8 ft walk in the park rather than the terrifying 80 ft beast that it can be.

But for all that Hamilton is Peahi's virtuoso performer, there is one thing that even he has never done. It is something that only one man has done. It is something that very few people, if any, will ever do and that fewer still would even conceive of doing. Anyone for surfing a pumping, fully awoken, bone-gnawing Jaws by night?

The man who can lay claim to this feat is Australian surfer Mark Visser and his achievement began with a friend's dream.

A friend called Christo had a dream about riding big waves at night, says Visser, an ultra-fit 29-year-old dubbed the Lung Fish on account of his ability to hold his breath under water for over six minutes. His dad owned a torch company, and it got him thinking about whether it would be possible to ride big waves at night if they were lit up. He had this weird dream of me surfing while wearing a miner's light. It was one of those things that we talked about in the pub.

If the genesis was unusual, the planning was precise and again involved a close friend. My best mate, Ryan Stewart, pushed me to think of a way of realising Christo's dream. Ryan was always on at me, making me think it through, and I began working with submarine lighting engineers to develop the illumination necessary to complete the project. Initially, it failed tim…