If that wave looks scary, wait till you see the urchins below. Photo: Koa Smith//screenshot
I’ve had the privilege to surf all around the world. Many of the waves that I’ve visited have left me wanting to come back. However, the slabs of Northern Chile are not one of them. They are powerful, the drops are hard to make, and only a couple of feet of water separates you from a reef blanketed in urchins. I have bad memories of a wipeout that led to a knee full of spines.
But when I hear Koa Smith say that the waves scare him, too, that makes me feel slightly better.
“Slabs are the ultimate fear game,” Smith said before his first session at a Chilean slab. “You just got to be 2,000 percent committed underneath it, or else you’re not going to catch it, or you’re going straight over the falls.”
Smith opted to ride one of his smaller boards for the Chilean slabs because “you need to be able to air drop, land on your tail, and be very quick.”
He managed to get several tubes, both paddling and tow-ins, but he also felt that he wasn’t mentally committing as much as he could.
“The wave was so gnarly. I was unable to get over on the other side of that feeling of locking up,” Smith said. “Going in and watching it from the channel, I saw why. It’s obviously so gnarly, but I see that if you commit and you just trust, then you’ll make it.”
“A lot of the time, for me, I understand that my ability is higher than I allow it to be,” he added. “I create a wall or a roof of the known and then when I do break through that I do things that I didn’t even know were possible.”
