How To Handle An Oncoming Section, With Brett Barley
The Picasso of lefthand tubes.
Mindsurfing is the best. It allows you to stomp impossible drops, survive way-too-fast of sections, and do upwards of six turns on a bona fide closeout. But sometimes, and this is rare, but sometimes there are waves that are tricky even to mindsurf.
North Carolina native Brett Barley is, as we know, a tremendous tube-rider. But being a tremendous tube-rider requires much more than your basic late-drop and highline skills. Perhaps more than anything, it requires a partly nature, partly nurtured ability to read shape-shifting swell lines. In the first few waves of this clip, we see Brett, through the eyes of GoPro, stroking into your basic forehand pits — easy peasy. But after the first barrel is successfully threaded, we can see another section looming down the line. Here’s where the skills of a tremendous tube-rider come into play.
With this soon-to-be-barreling section in your sights, do you:
- A: pump your ass off
- B: stall, motherfucker!
- C: some combination of the two
As is true in most cases, the answer was C. And while Brett seemed to have little issue reading between the lines of his homebreak, I could easily see myself outrunning or under-pumping these sections and ending up wildly ashamed.
But boy was it fun to watch.
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