There’s no shortage of professional surfers who have opened up their garages for a tour of some wild and enviable quivers. But I now think Nic von Rupp does it best. Why’s that? Look, we’ve all fawned over a massive collection of boards and pristine, top-of-the-line gear, wishing we could be as equipped for a strike mission or the daily sessions at home. But Von Froth has a way of adding some sentimentality and genuinely interesting detail to much of the equipment he has stashed away.
Let’s start with the wave runners, for example. I’ve never worked for a water safety team and I’ve never towed somebody into a wave, so just like 99 percent of the surfing population, I’ve never needed to know much about skis. And no big wave surfer has ever taken even a minute to geek out on them for me. Nic’s pair of wave runners are objectively badass.
“They are extremely powerful, 250 horsepower,” he explains. “They ride up to 130 kilometers per hour (80 mph) and their engine is 1.8 liters, supercharged,” adding that there’s no need to modify or tune these for performance. His skis come as they did off the lot with the exception of removing the mirrors, some fairings, and adding some steel bars to the carriage. And for good reason. A 1.8 liter supercharged anything is going to pack a punch. Compare the 1812CC engine to a street bike, for example, and you’re working with close to twice the displacement of a track-ready bike at the highest level of MotoGP…and then they threw a supercharger on it. It sheds some light on how high-performance the machines are that water safety and big wave teams rely on. Two of these Yamahas come with a sticker price that starts just under $40,000 USD.
The surfboards, of course, are the main attraction. Von Rupp’s big wave guns are nearly three to four times the volume of his standard shortboard, with one sentimental favorite coming in at 84.5 liters. Meanwhile, tow boards, of course, are wildly different. Nic pulls one 6’0″ off the wall and points out that it weighs about five kilos. That’s close to double the weight of the typical shortboard.
And one item von Rupp gets a bit sentimental about is a vest he calls, “The Hand of God.” Understandably, he seems pretty attached to a piece of equipment that was built to save his life. We all know the safety vest has opened as many doors for big wave progression as any other piece of equipment or new technology, and von Rupp gives due credit to one vest that’s been all over the world with him.
“This one here has been around the world, it’s a little bit old, has about five years,” he says. “You’re underwater, getting pounded, and it pulls you into all these directions you can imagine. Your stomach starts cramping. You’re running out of air. It’s panic mode down there…when you’re underwater and this thing inflates, it’s like the hand of God (pulling you up).”
Nic von Rupp doesn’t just have equipment stored away, he has some war stories packed in his garage. He shares plenty of those stories with the broken boards and skis that got him there.
