Kauli’s “Proper Tow Bomb.” Photo: Screenshot//Surfing Visions
I’ve seen a dozen highlight reels and many, many single-wave clips from a psychotic, but brief, Teahupo’o swell recently that I’m not sure we have all processed the way we would in a normal summer. And by “normal” I mean any other season where the world’s largest sporting event — the Olympic Games — wasn’t about to take over the world’s heaviest wave.
Without the much-anticipated Olympic event barreling down on us, I think there’s a case to be made that the swell that just rolled through the South Pacific and lit up Teahupo’o — “Big Thursday, as filmmaker Tim Bonython calls it — would be an even bigger deal right now. We’d be talking about Tahiti’s “swell of the year” and dissecting every frame of the Kauli Vaast bomb that stole the show.
According to Eimeo Czermak, things are only getting crazier at Teahupo’o in terms of the crowds showing up in the channel on big days. And Czermak is fully qualified to comment on what makes anything at Chopes “crazy.”
“His complete comfort in a wave frequently deemed the ‘heaviest in the world’ and named after a pile of skulls is, quite frankly, unnerving,” wrote Associate Editor Cooper Gegan. “He’s one of the few surfers in the world who can surf a legitimately lethal day at Teahupo’o and look playful, sometimes even verging on boredom.”
Coincidentally, Czermak hadn’t even considered towing the recent Big Thursday session when the day started. He arrived in time to see Vaast’s proper tow bomb and realized it wasn’t going to be a paddle session anymore.
“We’ve seen a lot of bombs this year,” he admits. And there seem to be more and more people on deck to witness them. It’s crazy, there are so many boats. You get to Teahupo’o and it’s like a show. It’s a circus. It’s crazy. It feels like a movie every time. And it’s such a small area that sometimes it causes trouble. We might have to think about that at some point.”
