Jamie O’Brien has spent much of his life chasing waves. That’s a wonderful way to spend your time, but as anyone who has done more than their fair share of surf travel can attest, it’s not all swaying palms and firing waves. Jamie knows that better than most, and in Away, a surf film that’s a departure from his usual vlog format, the Pipe Master shows the viewer what goes into a typical strike mission to a faraway wave.
“Everything aligned,” he said of this particular hunt for a wave O’Brien scored years ago and has been dreaming of ever since. “The perfect storm, the perfect swell, the perfect direction. But you never really know what the outcome is going to be. Going out on these missions and leaving home is not always easy. It’s a lot of travel, a lot of sleepless nights just trying to get from point A to point B. It’s what makes traveling so cool, but it’s kind of crazy not to know the outcome. But that’s what makes a trip worth it.”
A Jamie O’Brien surf trip is likely quite a bit different than an Average Joe’s surf trip. It’s his job, after all, and he needs to not only document his travels but he needs to ensure his travels are filled with things worth documenting.
“You’re spending thousands and thousands of dollars and all these things have to come together: the waves, the winds, the tides, your friends, the gear has to arrive… it’s just a lot of moving parts.”
The wave O”Brien and his crew are looking for in Away is, as mentioned, a wave he’s surfed before. For almost the last decade, he’s been keeping one eye on the forecasts from that part of the world — he’s careful not to say exactly where, but there are clues — and finally, the stars appeared to have aligned. After the tickets were purchased, the travel was done, the boards were waxed, and the waves arrived, everything was coming up roses for the O’Brien crew… for about four hours. And then it all went to shit.
First, the ski flipped. On a small wave, too. It turned upside down and the motor quit. Then the wind turned hard onshore. O’Brien, faced with a possible disasterous trip that ended far too soon, was discouraged.
“The winds were so bad that I was like, ‘maybe we should just go home,”” O’Brien said. “There’s no way it’s ever going to change. It was just pushing down the barrels. You wouldn’t think that such a thing could happen. There were only so many people in the water, but everybody that was in the water just paddled to the beach. It was like a storm hit and now it’s just storm surf.”
But Jamie O’Brien didn’t get to where he is today by going home when things don’t work out as hoped.
“I started thinking, ‘what did we really come here for? Can we still find that?’ Look at the wind direction. Maybe somewhere is offshore. So we just started driving. We were literally on a search for a perfect wave that we didn’t know if it might exist.”
Seek and ye shall find, as Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount. Of course, that wasn’t explicitly about looking for waves, but it was about being open to the gifts that are made available to you if you’re willing to see them as gifts. And no matter what the outcome of O’Brien’s search for waves, the search itself is a gift.
“So then we just started driving around to see if we could find a wave,” Jamie remembered. “… and just kind of see what the place had to offer.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best parts of a great surf trip are often not the waves. It’s the people and the places you happen to be looking for the waves. The waves, should you be lucky enough to score them, and just the icing on the cake.
Luckily for Jamie, this trip didn’t just have a great cake… it had some very thick icing. One random right turn left them stunned at what they saw.
“I don’t even know why there was a road there,” Jamie said. “But we just drove up upon a perfect wave.”
