Can a surfer be a surfer without ever getting skunked on a trip? The disappointment created by traveling any distance — even a weekend road trip down the coast — and coming up without satiating your barrel chasing hunger is unmatched in our world. Koa Rothman displayed as much in his recent trip to Tahiti.
The thing is, Rothman doesn’t get skunked by normal measures of the word. In fact, to the average human, everybody here gets so utterly barreled it’s obscene. But Koa didn’t really get what he was looking for here: “bombs.” He’s a man who travels around the world in search of the heaviest things the ocean has to offer and he genuinely enjoys doing it — something he’s turned into a massively successful series.
“This is frustrating,” he says, making a play on words from the title of his vlog This Is Livin’.
Anyway, Rothman gets barreled. Everybody gets barreled. But the bar’s risen so high for the young Hawaiian that it just didn’t quite scratch the itch that’s sent him halfway across the globe. Which begs the question: maybe we all just need to raise our definition of getting skunked? Because if this is what getting skunked looks like, he just gave entirely new meaning to the phrase.
