Photo: Brent Weldon
The Wedge, a Newport Beach, California staple, is one of the surf world’s reigning content machines for obvious reasons. Tag carnage on any YouTube clip and no one will accuse you of posting clickbait. And we all watch the board-breaking wipeouts, the guys who get shut down in a closeout barrel or get sucked over the falls, and yes, we wince a little. But there’s no denying the major disconnect from watching wipeouts at one of the world’s craziest waves on a screen compared to standing on the beach and feeling the ground shake next to the Newport jetty.
And then there’s actually living through the receiving end of those beatdowns. It’s one of the few places in the world where a “standard” wipeout isn’t something you can simply take a breather after, shake it off, and paddle back out for the next one. If you’re lucky, like water photographer Jason Yokobosky, you leave a session by choice and it ends up saving your life.
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That was how Yokobosky ended a session in 2019, after a wave crumbled, then tumbled him as he swam underneath the whitewash. Something every surfer and every water photographer has innocently done a hundred times.
“It just threw me to the ground harder than I’d ever been thrown before,” he told local Wedge videographer and filmmaker Brent Weldon. “And instead of landing on my body, I landed on my head.”
A familiar face told him to get out of the water when Yokobosky couldn’t shake off the pain in his shoulder. The advice turned out to be lifesaving, because the shoulder pain wasn’t a shoulder injury at all, it was nerve damage from two breaks in his spine. The doctor said the breaks were so sharp that another tumble, another wave, anything violent would have severed his spinal cord and killed him.
Plenty of people don’t leave the Wedge under their own power like Yokobosky, though. And Weldon is one constant presence in the lineup who’s seen those terrifying moments firsthand. Over several years, Weldon has documented the action in the water and had conversations with people like Mike Harris, another Wedge photographer and surfer who endured a life-changing injury. The same as Dirty Old Wedge filmmaker Tim Burnham, and others with intense, and heavy, stories. Brent told me he’d originally planned to turn those interviews and conversations into a short film about his home wave, but there was so much to share that it turned into a much larger project. The Wedge: A Story of Risk, Sacrifice, and Community, details those stories.
Yes, the Wedge is heavy — a wave of consequence in every sense of the word. But Weldon’s film addresses something much deeper than that: the people we recognize in our lineup every morning, the familiar faces we trade waves and conversation with, are exactly what we should be most grateful for.
