This wave went quite differently. Photo: Koa Smith // YouTube
Unpredictability is equally part of the joy and suffering of surfing. For every sudden discovery and unexpected nugget, there’s just as many sudden catastrophes and hairy situations. On the other hand, that’s part of what makes it all worthwhile.
In a recent trip, North Shore barrel-hound Koa Smith happened upon all of those at once. As he recounted in his latest video, a firing Indonesian break brought with it all the agony and ecstasy of surfing in rapid succession when he found himself unexpectedly tangled with another surfer.
The moment came right at the onset of a cleanup set, where Smith took just the smallest pause to see if he could maybe catch a last-second double up – and immediately regretted it. “As I do it, there’s someone to the left of me that continues paddling to the right of me and he goes right through my leash,” he explains. “So my leash is in a loop behind me, he paddled and his nose went through my leash, under his belly and now we are tangled in a complete knot. Which is not what you want in this circumstance, especially looking at an even bigger set coming. We’re going to get cleaned up.”
Luckily, this is not a totally new experience for a North Shore vet like Smith. “We experience this at Pipeline sometimes, because there’s such a tight crowd,” he explained. “Usually the rule of thumb is someone has to take off their leash,”
Unfortunately, they were not at Pipeline, so things were a little different. “In this circumstance, we’re sitting really far out,” he continued. “To swim into the beach is pretty treacherous, so you don’t really want to be without a board.”
With both parties unable to take off the safety devices that had suddenly become quite the opposite, a surfing duo was born. “Now we’re stuck together. We’re tethered and I’m getting pulled back,” he described. “My board’s getting dragged against his board and I’m getting pulled even further back, with the thought that there’s probably another wave coming. He ended up breaking his board and it freed us. I see that I’m not going to get caught inside again, check back making sure he’s okay. And boom, right into it.”
Unfortunately, all that drama was promptly followed by Smith taking off on the very next wave and getting absolutely hammered.
Despite having several brushes with annihilation, he took the whole thing in stride. “That was just an exciting moment,” he concluded. “That’s one of the reasons why I surf, right there.”
