This isn’t the time of year surfers are on the lookout for south swells to hit Tahiti. That annual window has more or less closed, and now it’s time to turn our attention to the Northern Hemi hotspots…or so we thought.
When a blip popped up on the charts, Koa Rothman assembled with a bit of an all-star lineup of surfers and photographers that would have otherwise stayed on the North Shore: Billy Kemper, Nathan Florence, Eli Olson, Zak Noyle, Daniel Russo, and the list goes on.
It seems like a gamble to leave the North Shore of Oahu for Tahiti this time of year, doesn’t it? Scratch that, it seems like choosing between those two places wouldn’t even be an option. “A south swell in the middle of October in Tahiti is super rare. It doesn’t happen often,” Rothman says.
As it turns out, the choice to fly even deeper into the Pacific wasn’t much of a gamble at all because everybody got really, really barreled. Thank the surf gods for late-season swells.
