Maverick’s has been a big-wave surfing proving ground for years. The story behind it is an interesting one, to say the least, and one small part of it is that Jeff Clark, the man who pioneered the place all by his lonesome, learned to surf regular stance for it. According to lore, he initially tried the left — a goofy-footer by nature, it seemed to be the right thing to do — but soon realized that if he could surf the right as a regular foot, he’d be better off. Now, all these years later, the right at Mav’s is a thing of legend. The left, though? That’s been basically untouched except for a few rare instances.
But the left is certainly rideable, and for a while now a select crew of big-wave aficionados have been focusing their attention on it. It’s not an easy wave to surf, but the people doing it are putting in the time. It’s not a wave to go into blind, and surfers like Luca Padua are opening their eyes as wide as they can.
“There’s a certain spot in the bowl that I actually need to be in order to have the speed to make it out of the wave,” Padua says in Left, the simply titled video above. “If you got panicked and you thought ‘I want to get out of this thing,’ you’d be in a worse spot than you would be if you were behind it coming through with speed. There’s a certain line that I want to take through the bowl. You factor in all these little details and do the very best that you can in the moment, and then you hope the wave wants to work with you as well.”
As proven by the back half of Left, sometimes the wave doesn’t want to work with you… and it’s then when your resolve is really tested.
