Watch: Albee Layer Believes He’s Got One More Double Spin

“Maui and the Big Island are both really hard places to get good waves,” Albee Layer says. “But I wonder which one’s harder.”

Albee is arguably one of the surfers on the planet with the most airtime, first through a career as an unapologetic aerialist, then via his elevator-drops at Jaws and other Maui mysto waves, and most recently through his new pilot’s license.

When it came time to explain the atmospheric oddity that produced the combination of swell and air wind depicted in Weird Wind Week, he leaned less on charts and gauges and more on lived, observational knowledge accrued through a life of surfing.

Albee does his best to explain the rarity of the conditions: “When the storms that create a swell pass by at a certain distance, they whip around the island and bring the wind back up from the south. Normally it’s just that northeast wind that everyone knows: beautiful for Oahu, good ‘air wind’ for the lefts on Maui.”

“The distance and size of certain storms are enough to interrupt that pattern,” he continues. “That’s why a lot of Jaws swells actually have better wind than a normal swell.”

It feels like if you ever bumped into Albee, you wouldn’t need to turn your head far to spot Matt Meola, and sure enough, he’s in this clip. The surprise cameo, though, comes via Ryan Huckabee of Flagler Beach.

“It’s a meet-cute story at Stab High,” Layer says of the bromance’s origin. “He actually made fun of me the first time we met, which not a lot of people do. It was something like, ‘Do you think when I’m your age, I’ll just start giving people unsolicited advice too?’ It was a really funny.”

Ryan casually floated the idea of heading to Maui to surf with Albee and the boys, then a forecast appeared with one genuinely good wind day. “I told him to come and that we’d definitely get one fun day, and maybe a couple of others with light wind,” Albee explains.

Ryan stayed for a week and logged plenty of water time in the first four days. “He smashed me the first two days and I was starting to get annoyed,” Albee admits. “He fucking ripped. He’s kinda stuck on that one kind of trick with variations — the frontside full rote — but I saw him get a couple of different and bigger, nuttier grabs.”

“By the third day I finally started surfing well again and got him back,” he concludes.

Surfing well remains a priority for Albee, who lists the double frontside air reverse as his white whale of airs. But his to-do list doesn’t stop there.

“You know that single-grab thing Julian and John John have done, where it’s kind of like a double oop?” Albee asks. “I’ve been about as close as you can get to a thousand of those things, but I’ve never made one. That pisses me off.”

Now 34, the clock is ticking for Albee to land some of these tricks before his tendons tighten and wings disintegrate. As a point of motivation to not stop flying, Albee has a standing bet with Hank Gaskell: land a double-spin (of any variety) after 40. The $500 wager is valid for two years after his 40th birthday, and wavepools don’t count.

Better hope he gets some weird wind days.