Real Axe, Starring Creed McTaggart: New Zealand

When the previous 12 months saw you headline two of the year’s best films (Strange Rumblings and Cluster), what does that mean for the next 12? It’s a fair question which Creed McTaggart was staring at around January. Especially when you consider the sophomore year can be a little, well, lukewarm, the worry was real. What’s next?

But Creed doesn’t fall victim to the red-eye strain of travel. He relishes it. While other travelling surfers need their time at home after a year living either side of the zips, Creed’s drawing air lines to new waves, new locations. It’s the Real Axe grind which he and best mate / house mate / filmer Toby Cregan love and document here. Firstly in New Zealand.

“We found out about Enzed’s potential through our man on the ground, Rangi Ormond,” says Creed. “You’ve always got to have the local intel if you’re going to a new place for a short amount of time.”

Creed, on his first strike, travelled with Dave Rastovich. The pair weren’t into the finer sides of travel, and New Zealand does rugged better than most.

“Rasta’s a normal dude. He drinks beer and says fuck and and all that. He’s really cruisey, he’s not a shots caller. He’s the positive guy and you need one of those guys. He even hurt his knee halfway through the trip and he just went surfing on a surf mat. Most people would’ve been, ‘fuck the world! I just spent all this money to get here. Fuck!’ He’s mellow and stoked the whole time. It sucks when you go on a trip with someone who’s eggy the whole time.”

One shot of New Zealand’s raw coastline was just a tease.

“The second trip was all camping, we were living off the land, catching all our own food. I even went off and killed a deer,” says Creed.

“I trudged around the Enzed jungle for three hours with our bud we were rolling with. You have to be real quiet because you can hear them. You can also smell them, as well, kinda like milk. It was fuck season there so they were all real horny. That’s when it’s good to butcher ‘em.”

“We’d been hunting around for ages and we got real bummed out because we hadn’t got one. Then we spotted one and shot it and it was like the scene out of Me Myself and Irene. Our pal shot the deer and it seemed dead, then it flared up again, stood up so he shot him again. He shot him three times, the fucker just wouldn’t die. We ate the whole thing in a curry, it was epic.”

But to get to such remote corners of New Zealand require a different kind of wildlife.

“None of us had been in a helicopter before, or really seen one in the flesh,” he says. “It was wild to touch it and then put all our board inside. I felt really rich. We were flying through these really pretty mountains and it was snowing. We landed on the beach in front of this fun point break, ran out for a surf with no one around. That’s what it’s about.”