Bruce Irons, frontside pool style, Playa Las Americas.

For one thing, you don’t go to a wavepool with high expectations. Not even if it’s built into a mountain, fringed by a giant artificial beach and not even if, as the sun sets, the joint is suddenly illuminated by cinema lights. But, here, in Tenerife, you’ll paddle into a smooth righthander wedge with at least one finner section. The use of a jetski is usually mandatory in a pool; here, you can survive without. This wave was one of six caught by 30-year-old Bruce Irons, a Pipe Master and Eddie Aikau champion, from Kauai’s north shore. Bruce travelled for thirty hours to be here, carrying four surfboards. He snapped two on his first night in the pool. I ask, how did you get sold up the river on a wavepool shoot, considering a week or so before you were riding 15-foot beachbreak barrels in Mexico. “An email came floating by that said, “Explosions, wavepools, animals and naked chicks,” says Bruce, manipulating the controls on his new remote control helicopter, bought for 160 Euros from a gas station. “Knowing Stab, I didn’t think anything less so I knew it was going to be…ha!… I knew it was going to wild.” Did the pool impress or depress? “Fuck! It’s a trip! A beach and waves that are not in the ocean? I rode six waves and broke two boards, but I was just getting out the kinks.” I say, in as non-fawning way as a groupie can, that Bruce’s style is perfect, highlighted by his always well-arranged arms. He thanks me and says that he, “never wanted to be agro and spaz out” highlighting Occy, Slater, Curren and Lopez as  stylistic influences. Also, he grew up surfing alongside a tough audience.  “My friends we’re very, very mean to each other. You definitely don’t want to be spazzy around ‘em.” Bruce says that a bad style can lead to a nickname, like Stinky Style. I say, that’s Jamie O’Brien’s super unkind nickname. Was it a result of Jamie’s style? Bruce corrects me. “I gave it to him when he swam through an open sewer in Oceanside when we were there for the US Championships. We were both sponsored by Quiksilver. I was 12; he had to be fucken eight. I fucking terrorised him. His dad gave me the green light just to fucken smoke him if he was acting up. Fuck, he swam through this sewer! I said, what the fuck are you doing, you stinky little shit! Hence the nickname.” More from Bruce, an entertaining and surprisingly easy-to-be-around man, tomoz. – Derek Rielly.