If you want to play, you’ve got to pay. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
When it comes to big, heavy slabs, there is perhaps no one who gets as excited as Nate Florence. One might assume that he would lean more towards slabs of the warmer variety — he did grow up in Hawaii, after all — but if the waves are good enough, Nate doesn’t care about the temperature.
In the video you see here, Nate breaks down a quick strike mission to an eerie outer reef that might look familiar to you. On the first day, things were relatively calm. “Relatively” is the operative word here, because they were only calm relative to the second day.
“There was a little bit more swell, the conditions were slightly heavier, and the wind was super strong again,” Nate remembered. “It was just slightly bigger, and we were all pretty excited about that because it felt like we had a great warm up on the first day.”
He was only wearing a five-mm wetsuit without floatation — it’s a fine line to walk between mobility and floatation — and Nate chose to rely on himself.
“When you put all that gear on with the floatation,” he explained, “the stiffness it adds to your body is so much… I didn’t end up wearing floatation on day two. I went out on my 7’0″ just with the five mm. That feeling of mobility and looseness and quickness is just awesome. But on the flip side of that, the swell was getting bigger. I chose not to wear floatation and I definitely paid for it.”
With the swell rising, Nate was feeling confident. The horizon darkened and he saw an opportunity.
“This bomb comes, and it’s so crazy,” he said. “I was like, ‘maybe it’s going to hold.’ I turned just to start paddling and one of the legend local bodyboarders, Tom Gillespie, is like, ‘Go, mad lad!’ I was like, ‘okay, if Tom thinks it’s a good one, then he’s backing me up.’ I just totally committed to the wave.”
He felt a little under-gunned for that particular wave, but he was head down and going. “I almost overcommitted,” Nate explained. “I stepped to the side of my stringer on the board… I realized that all my weight was way too forward.”
That, of course, didn’t end well. He went over the proverbial handlebars, hit the water, barely penetrated, and got sucked over the heaving lip.
“As I’m going over,” he said, “I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m just in my five mm. I didn’t even wear my floatation. Why did I decide to go on this huge one without all the gear that I had?'”
As leashes tend to do on giant waves, his broke. Nate’s a fit guy, thankfully, and he’s about as prepared as one can be for wipeouts like that, but still, it was unnerving. But in typical Nate Florence fashion, he collected his surfboard, made the long paddle back around, and lived to tell the tale.
