Some of the burns you see in this video are incredibly blatant. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Kirra Point is a really, really good wave. It sits at the edge of Coolangatta, a place that has produced surfers like Parko, Taj, Rabbit, Jack Freestone, Michael Peterson, and Peter Townend, just to name a few. As mentioned, it’s a really, really good wave… but there are plenty of really, really good surfers that surf there. And when a wave gets crowded — especially with a ton of surfers all itching for their piece of the pie — the percentage of wipeouts, burns, and straight-up fails skyrockets.
Surf on Mars, a YouTube channel run by a fella named Craig Halstead, is a veritable treasure trove of Gold Coast surf footage.
“I have filmed most of the good swells on the Gold Coast Australia since 2003,” he wrote.
“Now I’m retired and will be uploading the best of the archive so it doesn’t just sit on a hard drive in a drawer somewhere to eventually get lost forever…. Fortunately, nearly all of the world’s best surfers have passed by my lens at some stage and still do.”
What you see here is a pile of footage from Kirra, but not the really well-surfed waves. Not the highlight reel. Instead, it’s two-and-a-half minutes of carnage. And that’s just as good (if not better) than the highlight reels.
