Nate Florence didn’t get to be as good as he is at surfing very large, very scary waves by not surfing very large, very scary waves. The thing about surfing, though, is that it’s a lot more than just surfing. It’s reading waves, paddling out to those waves, and dealing with the power those waves have within them.
The North Shore is full of waves that aren’t all that easy to surf, and although Nate certainly has a whole lot of experience there, he’s not immune to running into the occasional difficultly, but in the session you see above, that difficultly was a little more difficult than usual.
After snapping his board on a wave that, while not all that big, looked pretty damn heavy, Nate found himself in a swirling patch of current that wanted to keep him in one place. Not outside, but not on the sand. Which, as you know, is not a great place to be.
“Hammer anvil current got me good,” he said on Instagram. “Had to abandon the board. It ended up staying in the same zone for an hour before getting washed in.”
Clearly, everything turned out just fine — minus the fact that Nate snapped yet another surfboard — but it’s a nice reminder that predicaments like this happen to the best of them.
