When the wave breaks here, don’t be there. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
You’re not going to make every wave. No one is. Not Kelly Slater, not John John Florence, not Gabriel Medina, not you, and certainly not me. The only person who has never not fallen on a wave is a person who has never surfed. Wipeouts are part of surfing, and that fact doesn’t change no matter how long you’ve been surfing for.
Pipeline, as you may have heard — or, if you’re lucky, experienced — has been absolutely firing in recent weeks. Swell after swell after swell has shoulders tired, lungs burning, and ribs sore. But when it’s good, as you know, you can’t sit and watch unless you’re actually too injured to do anything other than sit and watch.
That, however, tends to lend itself to a few more wipeouts than usual, especially when the conditions were like they were in the video you see here, courtesy of Nathan Florence. “Nobody could make a wave this day,” he exclaimed in the title. And while that’s a bit of hyperbole, there sure were a whole lot of non-makes. But hey, that’s surfing, right?
