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When Rock Jump Paddleouts Go Wrong

Squad fails, pro fails, bro fails. Warning: May cause schadenfreude

Jumping off the rocks, done right, makes so much sense.

Why walk down the end of the wave and paddle through rolls of whitewater and buffets of rip when you can casually stroll up the point, make a timely leap using skill and inherent ocean knowledge, make a dozen measured paddle strokes dry haired to the lineup?

Sounds all well and good, so far, right?

Wrong.

Even the most skilled of wave riders can come a cropper. Waves are unpredictable, rocks are slippy. Rogue waves, etc etc. Plus there’s the pressure. The peanut gallery, those evil pricks, cameras ready, just hoping with every last sinew of their being that you fuck up.

Miguel Blanco’s Valiant Almost Save

In all fairness, the lad done well. Real well. You can see from the slo-mo that Michael White tried to retreat, realised he couldn’t with a wave bearing down, then controlled what could’ve been a horrible slip, abandoned the raft in the calmest possible way, then got a timely dive in under the worst of the maw. Kinda. You or I would’ve almost certainly faired much, much worse.

North Point Bodyboard Squad Fail

 

Relatively vanilla in terms of actual punishment, this North Point mishap has merit as a squad fail, with a certain Keystone Cops vibe to it. Note the surfer making a strong argument for evolution by sitting out fail no.1 and not getting embroiled in fail no.2.

 

I Got Fucken Rinsed. Fuck off.

 

This one was unfortunate. It looked painful, both physically and emotionally, and was probably expensive. But try not to giggle as slip leads to trip leads to ass over tit to a half drown in 2ft of water omnishambles. Just try. Poor Tommo is clearly not amused. Maybe he could handle the howls of derision, the relatively long and drawn out nature of the incident, the board damage, the loss of face in turning and walking back sans paddle out. But having the camera stuck right in his grill by his cackling mate becomes too much to bear.

Just Get out of the Way

Nothing will fix your body language for you quicker than an unceremonious smearing back landward over the rocks. Note the ‘I got this’ strut down initially, which quickly turns to utter dejection.

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