Photo: Kai Lenny // YouTube
There can be a sort of pressure to encountering a perfect day. If you’re not lucky enough to live in a place where premium waves are common, then there’s the nagging sense that you have to make the most of something that may not return again soon. Even if you do live in such a place (or have the luxury of traveling to one), you can feel the same sense of duty when encountering an all-time swell. The ocean is fickle, and the only thing worse than missing out on perfection is the knowledge that you had the opportunity and beefed it.
Kai Lenny was recently presented with such a situation. However, being one of the most adept watermen in the world, he took it as an opportunity to experiment, rather than a burden.
The moment didn’t come without effort, though. “After 40 hours of traveling from Hawaii to get on the boat the evening before, and then a long channel crossing, day one we went to Green Bush and just scored,” he explains at the top of his latest YouTube video. “Actually, at first the waves weren’t even that good. It was actually stormy on shore and very, very crowded. Then, all of a sudden, the waves just started to turn on. The wind switched, [and I] kind of had an opportunity to score this insane Mentawai surf break pretty much by myself.”
That’s right. Kai had one of the world’s best breaks virtually to himself, on a day that could be the highlight of the average surfer’s life. So what did he do with that? Rode switch, of course.
“Because there was nobody out, it was just an opportunity to try something different,” he continues. “To be honest, the waves were just so clean and so perfect, that you just had to make the drop in and you had this long ride ahead of you. Then, when the dry section is coming up at the end you gotta doggy door it, or hopefully you’re just going too fast and fly right over it.”
