Kipp Caddy showing his characteristic comfort in a death-defying tube. Photo: Kipp Caddy // YouTube
Kipp Caddy knows a thing or two about rough surf. The Australian big-wave charger first rode Shipstern Bluff when he was only 14 years old, and he’s only gone up from there. In one particularly gnarly moment in his film Desensitized, he had a wipeout so bad that the pain from a 30-centimeter hamstring tear was the only thing that could bring him back to consciousness. So when he describes a day at Cape Solander as “pretty gnarly,” that means something.
“We pulled up and I guess the tide was dead low, so I didn’t think it was too big to start with,” he describes in an edit recently posted to his YouTube channel. “Then, as the tide started to push, for a while there it really turned on. The day before the waves were so big, it was barely handling the reef. Then there was a couple of good ones in between, but it was pretty gnarly.”
For a bit of perspective, the proceedings also got the seal of approval from itinerant slab hunter Nathan Florence, who opens the edit by describing an outsider’s view of the scene. “I knew Kipp and all the guys were gonna be out there in the morning, so I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll just go look at it,'” he narrates. “Right when I rolled up, just the full scene Cape provides: crowd right on the rocks, huge offshore lines rolling in and a full gladiator pit scene.”
