How to catch a wave every 3 minutes

All photos by Steve Morrissette

For the past couple weeks there’s been a rabid team of groms on the North Shore. These surf doggies could be found foaming at lips and sneaking their underage bodies into pits at Pipe, Backdoor and that mutant sandbar at the beach park. On Tuesday, South Carolina’s Luke Gordon sported his Rip Curl’s GPS watch and tracked his session out at Haleiwa. “It was kind of macking,” 16 year old, Mr Gordon tells Stab. “It was six to eight with the occasional ten footer. A bunch of guys were sitting out the back, waiting for the big ones. I just hung out on the inside and picked off a bunch of the smaller waves rolling through. I was having so much fun on the inside, there was no reason to wait out the back with everyone else.”

Mr Gordon sees ramp, Mr Gordon does air. Tuesday at Haleiwa.

Luke’s session was relatively short, a casual one hour and three minutes. But during that time the young cat got busy, tallying up 22 waves; that’s roughly one wave every three minutes. Talk about head down, scraping. “I just love surfing bigger waves,” says Luke. “It’s cool to use the watch in decent surf. Back at home it’s not as fun to track my session because the waves are so small and slow.” The question we had on our minds was what does it take for a grom to surf with the big boys at Haleiwa? In order for Luke to catch a wave every three minutes he paddled a total of 3.4 miles and use the strong current to his advantage. Also within the hour, our boy sped down the line for a collective one mile. “It was cool, knowing I was keeping track of my session made me want to get as many waves as I could,” he says. “And while on the waves I just wanted to go as fast as possible. I topped out at 17.4 mph.” He also caught a 187 yard wave, just short of two football fields. If you’ve been surfing sloppy beach break, that’s enough to make any of us self-centered surfers wreak of jealously.

They say the best barrels are the one’s you don’t make it out of.

The grom camp’s just wrapped up on the rock and Luke was a standout on the trip. “It’s always a fun camp,” Luke says. “It’s just a bunch of kids running around Hawaii, it’s pretty funny. This was my fourth trip to the North Shore.” Leading up his final session Mr Gordon ran through nearly his whole quiver, which isn’t hard to do in that juice. “Earlier in the trip I broke my go-to shortboard, my step up and my biggest board,” he says. “I was stuck with my 6’2. I’m 5’8 so it’s kind of a step up, step up for me.”

The Pipe lip drops like an anvil, here’s Luke trying to slide into the good vision.

The Rip Curl groms surfed as much as they could while on the island. After arriving to maxed out surf it was a good time to see what the kids were made of. “I got a couple good barrels at Pipe,” Mr Gordon tells us. “We surfed there a bunch, although I was a little unsuccessful at Backdoor. My favourite wave on the North Shore’s Rocky Right’s though, it’s just such a rip-able wave. The best session I had was at the sandbar at Ehukai Beach Park. These super wide barrels were sucking up off the sandbar, every wave was doubling up, it was sick. I surfed it the day after those clips of John John and JOB with Mason Ho and some of the local guys. It was so much fun!”

All wrapped up in Hawaiian blue at the sandbar.