I grew up on Vancouver Island. It’s not Vancouver, although everyone from the US seems to have a hard time understanding that. Vancouver is a big city with no waves, and as far as I’m concerned, Vancouver Island is the best place on earth. The air thick with the scent of pine and cedar, cold, clear and fresh. Washington’s Olympic Mountain range reaches towards the sky, and on clear days Mt. Baker cuts a staggeringly pretty outline into the blue.
Waves are everywhere, but not always easy to get to. The water is cold, and the popular lineups are getting crowded. Up island is a little place called Tofino, a town at the end of the road that grew up on logging and fishing but turned into a bit of a surf mecca. On the island, there are few names that every surfer knows–Devries, Cohen, and the Bruhwilers. All of them call Tofino home.
The Bruhwilers consist of Sepp and Raph, and they were basically the first Canadian surfers to gain any kind of international attention. They grew up exploring the area, motoring up and down logging roads, searching for another empty point break. They have an interesting story, to say the least.
Keith Malloy, another famous surfing brother, directed this video from Yeti. Although Raph’s not exactly a household name in far-flung corners of the earth, it’s proof that he’s still doing exactly what got him noticed in the first place… and he’ll probably never stop doing it.
“I’ve traveled around the world but I’ve always been drawn to coming back here,” he says. “Look around… it’s hard to imagine yourself sitting in an office in the city.”
