If your hobbies include surfing and procreating, it’s a given that you’d want your kin to surf. 

But would you want them to surf professionally? 

While pursuing a leadership role at your local Burget King may be more financially desirable, the degenerate charm of pro surfing can be too much for some to resist. 

And let’s be honest: Some kids just fall into it. Never hurts if your dad is one of the most widely respected and adored surfers of his era.

Billabong just launched a new podcast series with the French duo ‘Impact Zone.’ It’s called Bloodlines — a nod to the brand’s longstanding tradition of youth initiatives — and focuses on the relationship between fathers and sons who happen to fucking rip and (mostly) get paid for it. 

While the Impact Zone boys might not carry the same clout as Joe Rogan, Shane and Jackson were still gracious with their time and spoke for over an hour about life, surfing, their relationship, and how all those things intersect.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), they recorded it the day after Jackson’s 18th birthday. It’s a great listen whether you’re a parent, a child, or even an incel. 

Highlights include: Shane talking about becoming a father while juggling risk and reward as one of the world’s hardest-charging surfers, 

Jackson. Always wanted him to surf. Never imagined him being a pro surfer. 

Bloodlines is a four-part series with more coming. 

“Everybody has a nickname here on the Outer Banks,” Bo Raynor tells us.

“I’m Bo Grom, yes, still grom. I’ll probably never outgrow it.” You might not have seen Bo before, but you’ll see him soon. 24-year-old Bo Grom was one of our lucky(ish) Stab Highway tour guides who chauffeured us through their homes. Bo took his job so seriously that one team started referring to him as their “mascot.” He said he wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. “I think we had too much fun, I might’ve fed em’ too many beers,” Bo said.

“The Outer Banks feels significantly different than anywhere else in the U.S.,” says Bo. “It actually feels like you’re on a different planet sometimes. It’s just sand dunes and old restaurants and occasionally fun waves. And it really is a melting pot, with people from all over the place coming here for the fishing and to get away from things. And then there’s the creatures — and I don’t mean the animals. I mean there are some classic characters around town.”

Speaking of occasionally fun waves, the 13-minute edit you’ll see above is full of them. Aside from having plenty of good surfing, there’s also some original claymation (that features an example of a “creature”) and a little backstory on Bo’s life — from East Coast child prodigy to working class, semi-professional surfer. Bo still surfs for Billabong, but he works winters as a painter with his dad and summers teaching surf lessons.

“There’s definitely some mixed feelings about the Netflix show around here, but personally, I think it’s a good thing for the town,” Bo said. “Tourism is super important for the economy in the summer here and if the show brings more money in and more people to look at (laughs) then that’s a good thing.”

Since Bo still has a Bong sticker on the nose, I had to ask him what his surf plans were like for the rest of the year. “The past few years I’ve kinda been limboing in terms of contests. Sometimes I feel that fire to do them and sometimes I just don’t,” Bo admits. “But this year I have some trips planned and I just want to keep filming, saving up clips, and hopefully I’ll be able to throw up another edit like this soon. I want to push myself in bigger and better waves — situations I’m not as comfortable in. I’m also just trying to get the surf school dialled in. I’m learning how to actually be punctual and professional now and not just a little kid.”

You’ll catch Bo very soon on Stab Highway East Coast. The first episode drops next week, Thursday, January 23rd at 5 PM PST.

Apricity stands for “the warmth of the sun in winter.”

The word likely made its way into English in 1623, thanks to its probable creator, Henry Cockeram. It hasn’t seen much use since the 17th century and is pretty much dead in modern dictionaries, with only the Oxford English Dictionary bothering to keep it around.

Now, it might find its way back into the lexicon of surfers, snow bros, and sisters alike, thanks to a Swiss snowboarder-cum-surfer’s dissemination of her new bi-element short film.

Directed, filmed, and edited by Morgan Maassen, Daria Fuchs’ portrait begins in the Bernese Highlands of landlocked Switzerland — a place she holds dear and where she first discovered snowboarding.

But when the snow melts, Daria has to go elsewhere to keep her rails wet. Halfway through the film, a small cloud interrupts the apricity, marking Daria’s transition to her liquid element, and the scene shifts to an idyll that should resonate with our readership a little more — the Ments.

As part of a developing surf nation that relies on a single wave pool to satisfy its population, Daria’s done a hell of a job getting her surfing up to scratch.

After all, surfing and snowboarding — they’re cut from the same cloth. One’s on liquid, the other on ice. Not many of us have the 20,000 hours to master both. Daria’s putting in the time.

Roughly a year ago, we reoported on one of the surf industry’s young talents — Hayden Garfield — being diagnosed with cancer.

“Hayden was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer called Adamantinoma,” read his GoFundMe. “It’s very rare, less than 1% of all bone cancers and there isn’t a lot of research or information out there. This kind of bone cancer does not respond to chemotherapy or radiation. Surgery is his only option at this point.”

Now, roughly a year and some hectic surgeries later, Hayden is fortunately 99% healthy — so naturally, he’s made a film. The edit above features Juliette Lacome, whose life ended up taking a strange parallel to Hayden’s. 

“Basically Juliette and I were in Hawaii two years ago, and we wanted to do a film,” he says. “We just wanted to make some projects, and by the time we got around to it, I got diagnosed with a super rare bone cancer. Six months into my recovery, she messages me and says she has a tumor in her leg in pretty much the same spot, a little bit farther up in her knee. What are the odds that we’re friends, in the surf world, similar age, and then we’re both trying to make this project together? That’s how it all started. Juliette and I had a similar tumor, but it was a different type, if that makes sense. Mine was cancerous, Juliette’s was not.”

“The recovery was definitely gnarly,” he continues. “They basically took out four inches of my left tibia out and put a cadaver bone in there with some plates and screws to just remove all of the cancer. It was a full year before I was fully walking on my own.”

“Juliette and I got through all the recovery and stayed in touch through such a weird, crazy time. Then we met up in France and we finally got to do our little project. Now we’re looking forward to making more.”

Welcome to Stab’s first annual Comment of the Year winning ceremony.

There’s no red carpet, no trophy, no paparazzi — just a small army of keyboard warriors huddled together over their computer screens to see whose quip will take the inaugural win.

In summary: Each month, the Stab staff compiled a list of favorite comments and voted on them in our internal Slack thread. Here are a few factors we considered: Were they insightful? Were they topical? Did they get likes from fellow Members? And, most importantly, did they make us laugh, grimace, or think?

If you want to see all 12 comments and the context in which they first appeared, we broke it all down for you here.

To decide the winner, we, again, polled the Stab staff on Slack, but we also did something different; we polled you — our Stab Premium audience — and gave you 50% of the vote.

That being said, let’s cut the niceties and get to the prize.

Your winner is…

Turtle, for his comment (it is a he, we checked) on this article announcing Kelly Slater’s quasi-retirement after his post-heat interview at last year’s Margaret River Pro:

Side note: Turtle won both the Stab Premium vote (19.19% of the votes) and the Stab staff vote (60% of the votes).

To jog your memory, Here’s the photo Turtle is referring to…

And Turtle is a prolific, deserving champion — he’s currently sitting at 808 comments and 2,401 likes in his Stab Premium career.

Quantity = Quality, eventually.

Turtle, please shoot us another email at [email protected] and we’ll get you sorted with a new board, some merch, and a Barnes & Noble gift card (he lives in the U.S.).

P.S. January’s COTM campaign is already raging. Here are our current favorite contenders:

From this article on the potential World Record wave at Mavs.

From this article begging the question: Can you even make a living as a freesurfer in 2025.

From our 2025 Rookie class review.

Happy scribbling everyone!

The 2025 Da Hui Backdoor Shootout might’ve been dragging its feet for the first three days, but today hit with a punch. No other way to say it: it was positively fucking firing. 

“In four years, I’ve never seen this many big scores,” says multiple time event-winning captain for team Snapt, Logan Dulien. “The first two times we entered, we won both team and individual divisions. Mason took it, then Benji. Last year, we were runners-up in both.”

This year, team Snapt were due for a day off, and mother nature handed them one. With conditions firing in the second half of finals day, their early-morning time slot didn’t exactly work in their favour.

“It’s all about timing. I swear, every event out here, Pipeline picks the winter. The Banzai picks — she chooses who wins.”

Team Japan snagged the prime slot, made their luck count, and took the win.

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“Team Japan just went to town. They dropped tens and elevens. They went absolutely off,” says Logan, who had a final word for the WSL and the island’s energetic fields. 

“Let’s see how the Pipe Pro goes, because these guys score every year. I’m not sure if it’s because the locals are running the show in their own backyard, tapping into the island’s energy, or whatever rituals they’re doing, but it works. Every time. No one can deny they consistently have the best waves.”

Additionally, Koa Rothman claimed bragging rights for best individual performance, threading a series of Pipeline body-hunters for team 96712.

Another year of Da Hui, another year of the gods tossing perfect waves at them when it mattered most. Got time to kill and a soft spot for the golden days of Pipeline contests? This one’s worth a glance. You can find he full replay here.

Congrats, team Japan. All eyez on you, Lexus Pipe Pro.

Empty tissue boxes, rags scattered across the floor, and a room full of satisfied middle-aged men. This is, of course, the aftermath of a watch party for Dave Rastovich’s EAST — drool running down our chins as we sat there, hypnotised, listening to someone dissect the finer points of an alt-performance surfboard.

It’s clear that we enjoy watching people with far more wisdom and skill than us jabber on about things we’ll never fully understand. Most of hardly know the surfboards we own, let alone explain why we like them. We need someone higher up the ladder to step in — someone capable of running the kind of experiments that actually get to the heart of the matter.

In the vid above, Mikey Feb — a man of similar appeal to Rasta — breaks down the Feb’s Fish model from CI. He talks fins, tail tweaks, and gives a breakdown of the modern engine powering his old-school design.

For an upgrade in wisdom, watch above. To peruse CI’s selection of Feb’s Fishes, click here. For a full interview with the South African style magnate, click here. 

The 2025 Da Hui Backdoor Shootout Day Four is on, and as is tradition, Pipe has arrived right on schedule.

Per usual, eight teams of five get to surf Pipeline six times during various rounds (which translates into 4 enviable hours of perfect, empty Pipeline), with each individual surfer’s top three waves overall being counted. And because some waves at Pipe are that crazy, the scoring scale goes to 12.

TEAMS:

North Shore Boys (NSB): Team captain: Billy Kemper. Surfers: Barron Mamiya, Billy Kemper, Kala Grace, Eli Olson, Jamie O’Brien

Snapt5: Team captain: Logan Dulien. Surfers: Mason Ho, Benji Brand, Josh Moniz, Clay Marzo, Parker Coffin, Harry Bryant (alt)

Japan: Team captain: Kawika Stant. Surfers: Shinpei Horiguchi, Riaru Ito, Riku Matsumoto, Shogo Harada, Shohei Kato

NSSS Ohana: Team captain: Coral Chandler. Surfers: Eala Stewart, Makai McNamara, Landon McNamara, Steve Roberson, Legend Chandler

Volcom: Team captain: Dave Riddle. Surfers: Balaram Stack, Moana Jones-Wong, Noa Deane, Makana Pang, Jake Maki, Maikai Burdine (alt)

96712: Team captain: Makua Rothman. Surfers: Koa Rothman, Makua Rothman, Ivan Florence, Nathan Florence, Jose Angel

New Earth Project: Team captain: Peter King. Surfers: Kelly Slater, Bethany Hamilton, Kai Lenny, Koa Smith, Kaulana Apo, Luke Tema (alt), Hayden Pacarro (alt)

Peru: Team captain: Alvaro Malpartida. Surfers: Alonso Correa, Joaquin Del Castillo, Cristobal de Col, Gabriel Villaran, Alvaro Malpartida, Noah de Col (alt), Bastian Pierce (alt)