When Kipp Caddy was 13 years old, he surfed 20-foot Cape Solander for the first time. A year later, he tackled Shipstern Bluff. Now, at 29, Caddy has become of the most respected big wave surfers in the world.
Every surfer has a bucket list, and there were two on Caddy’s that he’d been trying to tick off for years: North Point and the Box, two of the heaviest slabs in Western Australia. In Slab Sessions, Kipp pulled out his pen and marked them completed.
“It took me a little bit of time to get a read on the waves and a couple beat downs later, I managed to get a few,” he said. “I was riding a Ghost 6.3 x 19 x 2.70 with thinned out lowered rails and wearing the new Rip Curl Elasto wetsuit which I personally think is easily the best wetsuit I have ever owned.”
Caddy is a different kind of surfer. He is a little bit desensitized to the realities of what he does, but that’s only because he started doing it so young.
“I was probably realistically a little out of my depth,” Kipp said of his younger surfing days. “You can see in the film [Desensitized], when I’m quite young, I was probably surfing above my years, but I didn’t have the weight to be able to kind of execute and keep the forward momentum on the waves. I was just too light, so the wave was sucking me up the face. But the way I was actually reading them was probably a little beyond my years.”
Now that he’s got a bit more meat on his bones and few more years under his belt, Kipp Caddy is cementing his place at the top of the big wave heap every time he paddles out.
