Sometimes the search pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Photo: Nathan Florence // YouTube
The latest video from Nathan Florence starts on a remote island. That situation is not exactly uncommon for the itinerant slab hunter, but the location is – because at the onset of the journey, he has no idea if there will actually be any waves there. By the end of the edit, though, he proves that it doesn’t really matter – the endless search is what counts.
“I looked at the charts and way out here in the middle of the ocean, a huge storm is going to pass over this island,” he explains. “We do not know what we’re going to find. We have no idea if there are waves here, but that is why we’re here. We’re going to look around. We’re going to check the reef. We’re going to look for setups. And hopefully, we’re going to find something surfable.”
Of course, for Florence, “surfable” means something a little bit different than for the rest of us, a fact he is all to aware of. “Those standards kind of give me a little bit anxiety,” he continues. “Because you know sometimes those waves can be very heavy and so we’ll be looking for something semi-manageable and if we find it we will surf it and if not we’ll be able to explore another beautiful island, check out some reefs and mark it off the list as far as waves go.”
It turned out his fears both were, and weren’t, borne out. The wave was, in fact, heavy – 15 to 20-foot monsters pounding on the reef. Unfortunately, they were also not exactly surfable, even for Florence.
But at the end of the day, the journey is as much a part of surfing as the actual wave. And boy was it a journey.
