In 2024, two 20-something-year-old Kiwis who’d kinda been living in Portugal (don’t tell the immigration authorities) decided to scour secondhand sites and compile a quiver of approximately ten boards from 20+ years ago and convince a bunch of people to surf them semi-competitively.

The reasoning was simple: The boys had been born too late to appreciate the late ’90s/early ’00s era of surfing, but there was something in it that they wanted to explore. They called their event the Alto Pro Am, and it arguably only began once the sun had set over Ribeira d’Ilhas.

The next year, Billabong stepped in to make it a lil bigger (and better), but the roots still ran as deep as your lawn. The surf side of the event could be summed up as follows: A well-executed roundhouse will get you an excellent score, while an air reverse would see you disqualified.

This weekend — again with the help of Billabong and a few other brands — they’re bringing the concept to Sydney’s Northern Beaches. We’ll let them pick up the yarn from here.

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Instead of traditional heats feeding into a rigid contest structure, surfers will run through a series of sessions on Saturday, with their best scores stacking onto a live leaderboard on the beach.

Judging follows the ALTO lens: radical manoeuvres performed with speed, power and flow — but with style carrying the most weight.

The top six men and women move through to Sunday’s finals. The final heats are filmed, and later that night the footage is shown back to the crowd at 7th Day Brewery, where both competitors and the audience vote to decide the winners.

If you’re around and can demonstrate a proficiency to forcefully direct a 6’4″ at a big end section, you might even be able to sweet-talk your way into a wildcard. Otherwise, the night comp is open to everyone and is not one you’ll want to miss.

Godspeed, power, and flow.

Strong lineup in this one: Creed of the Dark, Chippa Wilson’s second-best aerialist ever, and Sir David Rastovich. Shot and chopped by Toby Cregan, set to a blend of lad-rap and Texan emo. Yeah, you’re clicking that.

The surfing is excellent. But beyond the clips, we’re also gifted a few unsolicited philosophies from Creed McTaggart. Highlights below:

On grips:

“You gotta line up the slit with the point. Hit it right on the head. And you gotta pinch down the sides real good.”

“You gotta wax your grip. Can’t stand people who don’t wax their grip. I just don’t like them.”

On the scenery:

“Good for airs, sick for punts. David Rastovich.”

A concise worldview, if nothing else.

What else do you need? Hit play above.

It’s been almost a year since Jacob Willcox shared his 130km walk across Western Australia on YouTube.

The Cape 2 Cape series is still well worth a watch, if only for a closer look at a surfer who, like many on the CS, can get lazily filed under “comp guy”.

After a hiatus from internet broadcasting, Chippo is back, sharing the duality he lives in: surfing for numbers, and surfing for content.

The near 20-minute episode follows his recovery from a high ankle sprain during a US Open heat, the extensive rehab, and the slow return to both free surfing and competition. A thinking surfer, he offers musings on balancing both worlds, before deciding to take the edge off with a trip to Fiji and a return to basics.

Those involve a very fun, playful day at Cloudbreak, a few boat issues, and a proper swell to seal the excursion.

And no, there were no box jellies in the lineup this day.

You don’t think much about your own neck. Until it forces you to.

If where you look is where you go, the neck plays a crucial role as a hinge between the head, where the eyes sit, and the rest of the body. That hinge does quite a lot of work: compressing, twisting, extending, and occasionally malfunctioning.

On January 14, 2025, Vincent Duvignac’s neck reminded him of both its existence and its fragility.

It also happened where he didn’t expect it to. The sandbars in Les Landes are ephemeral and fickle. While they can turn on unannounced and bring nothing but hoots, hysteria, and an urgency to suit up, Duvi tends to take caution, observe and study them before taking the rip ride out the back.

His reputation has been built on thousands of waves like these over hundreds of sessions. Until that day, when one folded differently and obliterated his cervical vertebrae.

Out of Line is a 37-minute documentary by Pierre Frechou, charting the slow, repetitive, and unglamorous recovery process, and asking some bigger questions: can he surf again? 

Should he?

Mechanically perfect waves, a decent place to sit with food and drink, and comfy beds — all in the same 200 meter orbit. Sounds a bit too good too be true?

Well, thanks to the advent of combining wavepools and accommodation it’s actually quite real, this time in Virginia Beach, of all places.

Atlantic Park Surf is attempting the equation at scale, using Wavegarden tech to produce waves the ocean rarely delivers on that stretch of coast. Beginner to expert, you pick from a menu based on ability. And please, be honest with yourself.

Like URBNSURF Sydney, Atlantic park Surf is home to a 46-module WaveGarden Cove, so you can expect a similar ramp to the one that launched Joel Vaughan to a lien-flip victory last October. The main difference is that Atlantic Park Surf is just a stone’s throw from dozens of restaurants, pumping nightlife, and ocean waves — plus it’s heavily backed by Pharrell (yes, that Pharrell).

We’ll be there this May for Stab High presented by Monster Energy — and here’s where we’ll be staying.

Overlooking the pool is The Sitio, a boutique hotel intentionally kept small. There are only twenty rooms, which means the halls, the bar, and the private pool deck never feel crowded, but you might still meet someone worth talking to.

Though it may come as a surprise to our international audience, the VB surf scene runs deep. It’s home to the oldest continually-run surf competition in the world — the East Coast Surfing Championships (ECSC) — which has been handing out trophies for over 60 years. The city of about 450k people has reasonably fun waves and is only a brief drive away from the objectively superior surf of the Outer Banks.

And, for the month of April, The Sitio is offering a Surf & Stay deal. Book a Standard King or Double Queen room, and a daily surf session plus beach passes for two come with the key. All for roughly the price of a decent dinner in most coastal cities.

Use code SURFnSTAY at checkout, or hit this link to get in the rotation.

We should probably tell you not to sleep on this one. But in this case, that’s the point.

It’s funny how we relate to some people’s surfing more than others’.

“I grew up studying surf videos,” Dane Reynolds said on StabMic, “wanting to surf like Taylor Knox, Justin Poston, whoever.”

No one saw that coming.

Dane continued: “I don’t know who kids are looking up to now, or who they’re psyched to try to replicate.”

We tend to gravitate toward surfers with similar body types or styles, maybe because we believe we see a bit of ourselves in them.

If a surfboard test features a regular footer, goofyfooters feel unrepresented. Use a tall guy, and the short kings revolt. Go smaller, and the comments fill with height jokes. You can’t win.

When CI launched Mikey’s Shorty, Mikey was the obvious main character. But, at 6’3” and 185 pounds, he’s not exactly a universal reference point.

CI’s solution (not that Solution) was casting, and giving everybody a bit of everyone on their international team: different approaches, different styles, female, male, a full spread of sizes. From proper units like Gabe Morvil at 6’2”, 200 pounds, down to supergrom Ale Dotti at 4’5”, 73 pounds dripping wet.

Their stock dims cover a generous range, too.

Pick your avatar.

It’s hard to find a story much stranger than that of surfing becoming an Olympic sport, which goes a little bit like this: 

In 1969, a man named Fernando was born in Argentina. He started a sandal company that used photos of wonderfully curved women to market its products. It worked. He got rich and could focus on his other passions. 

Curiously, he proved to be most passionate about two things: funny hats and the idea of surfing in the Olympics. 

Fast forward to 2021, and there is surfing on an empty beach in Japan, looking like it normally does, but this time with the gravity of an ancient Greek sporting tradition weighing down on it. 

As a knock-on effect, those organizations that had been propping up tents and running (mostly) youth contests for decades, had to suddenly report to the International Olympic Committee. 

One such organization was USA Surfing, but an audit revealed they were doing it poorly, and temporarily surrendered their status as an Olympic National Governing Body, or NGB. 

Last year, a cashed-up ski federation run by a former WSL CEO tried to swoop in with a bid to govern American Olympic surfing. Backlash ensued, and support for USA Surfing poured in from just about everywhere — including the WSL CEO, the aforementioned ISA prez, and some world champs. Eventually, the ski crew realized they’d veered off piste, but it didn’t mean USA Surfing would automatically get re-certified. 

This week, however, the light finally flickered from yellow to green. 

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At this point in the story, you may be wondering what it means to be the National Governing Body for Olympic Surfing. Beyond propping up tents and running (mostly) youth surf events, they’ve got to provide coaching, infrastructure, and support for the nation’s best surfers in a way that ensures more of those ‘best surfers’ exist in the future. 

The reward for all this? Well, you get to walk into the Kellogg’s office and ask them if they’d care to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to partner with the United States’ Olympic surf team heading into a year in which Los Angeles will host the Games. 

While unlikely to play a major role in your experience of a finite amount of time as a conscious being on this planet, it is generally good news that surfers will be calling the shots here instead of a group of corporate ski reptiles based in Aspen.

As you were.

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” said the infamous Captain Ahab. “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts”.

Though they hold a similar philosophy, John John Florence is a lot easier to understand than Herman Melville’s peg-legged protagonist.

If we’re to continue the metaphor, John’s white whale takes the form of the innumerable visions he collects along his sailing quest.

“Just thinking about the way the three of us were raised, the experiences we’ve had and all the places we’ve gotten to go, it’s something I want my son to be able to experience, and maybe he can learn something from it too,” John says in the video above.

Episode five of the Vela series finds the brothers, Lauryn, and Darwin set up somewhere in Fijian waters. The ideology of the trip is reflected in the video’s surfing-to-family-time ratio. It tilts toward the latter as they take in sublime tropical locales.

There are humorous and revealing reflections on the Florence’s original spark for exploration, sibling tantrums, and the bond children have that transcends languages. All very sweet, wholesome and grounded. But damn, I wouldn’t mind the brothers sharing a few more clips of that right during golden hour.