You gotta know when to hold them and when to fold them. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Tim Bonython has made a career of filming the biggest waves in the world breaking on the biggest days, with the best surfers riding them. That search has taken him all over the world, from Nazare to Shipstern Bluff and just about everywhere else with a giant wave. Out of all of them, one of his favorite places to film is The Right.
Bonython has an enormous amount of footage sitting on his hard drives. Recently, as he was going through some of the older stuff, he found footage from nearly a decade ago. It is so absolutely insane that Bonython decided he had to make a short film with it. He called it, somewhat fittingly, Death Rites.
“Back in May 2016, I filmed one of the heaviest days I’ve ever seen at The Right,” Bonython said in an email. “As always, me and my camera took in the action from the Jet Ski in my usual shooting spot in the channel — the only angle where you can truly see this wave stand up, mutate, and charge straight toward you. It’s a controlled position, but when The Right is doing its thing, every set feels like a hammer coming for the ski. This day was different. Bigger. Meaner. The kind of session where the horizon goes dark, the ocean draws off the reef, and the whole wave starts moving with the force of a freight train.”
Sitting in the channel watching a big wave break is an experience. The air is filled with energy. The ocean feels as though it’s banging on your door. You can feel the power of what’s happening in front of you.
“From the channel you feel every detonation — the shockwaves, the spray blasts, the sound of each impact punching through the air seconds after the wave unloads,” Bonython continued. “Some of this footage appeared in The Big Wave Project 1, but it never told the full story of how insane this day really was. The size. The violence. The wipeouts. The commitment. This edit finally shows it all.”
When The Right is breaking like this, there are only a handful of hellmen willing to surf it. Surfers like Ryan Hipwood, Russell Bierke, Rudi Schwartz, Chris Ross, Benny Ruffus, Kerby Brown, Chris Shanahan, Mick Corbett, Jarryd Foster, Bradley Norris, and bodyboarders Brad Stone and Lewy Finnegan, all of whom can be seen in Bonython’s edit.
“What unfolds here is 22 minutes of pure craziness — some of the biggest waves I’ve ever captured out there,” Bonython wrote on YouTube. “Absolutely relentless. If you want to feel what it’s really like to sit in the channel with these slabbing walls coming straight toward the reef… this is as close as you’ll ever get without being in the water when DEATH RITES are being served.”
