Money is just a means to an end. And for most surfers, that end is Indo trips.

In 2024, 23-year-old Sean Gunning won Somo Go Soft, a soft top-centric contest held in Cantabria on Spain’s north coast. Sean’s prize? A trip for two to the Mentawai Islands, with flights and accommodations covered. 

For his plus one, Sean smartly got a ticket for his friend Alvaro Cobo, who filmed the edit you see above. It’s the result of a remarkably efficient time management: three weeks in Indo off one day riding a soft top.

With dual heritage from Spain and Australia, Sean’s no stranger to globe-trotting. He grew up surfing in Spain, then moved across the world to Australia to finish high school at age 17. He intended to stay for one year and wound up there for five. When he wasn’t looking for waves on the Gold Coast, he clocked shifts as a dishwasher, chef and even a bartender at the Greenmount Surf Club.

A smooth yet aggressive goofyfoot, he took to Indo well. In “Any Fish Ments,” he’s prone to rotating over sections as well as tucking into frontside tubes. He’s also got a keen eye for boards. Peep that Maurice Cole, a gift he received in 2018 after winning the European championships U16 division. Still feels magic to this day, he claims. 

Sean’s been busy since moving back to the country of his birth two years ago. He picked up deals with Vans and Byrne Surfboards. He’s revving up his YouTube channel, a mix of travelogs, sessions and contests. It’s further evidence that Europe has an eclectic mix of freesurfing talent hellbent on putting on the rashie. Sean’s going to tally more airline miles this year as he qualified for the 2026 Challenger Series via the European QS. 

But the tropics hit hard. Especially when you’re not footing the bill. 

A woman is in reported critical condition after being seriously injured in a shark attack at Sydney’s Coogee Beach earlier today, prompting the closure of the popular eastern suburbs beach.

The woman, believed to be in her 30s, suffered serious injuries to her arm and leg before being pulled from the water by fellow swimmers and bystanders. She was treated at the scene before being airlifted to hospital, where she remains in critical condition.

ABC journalist Patrick Stack, who was at the beach with his children at the time, described the moment the mood shifted.

“Lots of people [were] swimming in the water when we heard a really chilling scream going out across the beach.”

Initially, he assumed it was children mucking around. Then the shark siren sounded. Emergency services were called to the scene shortly after 11 a.m., with police, paramedics and surf lifesavers responding.

The incident comes less than a month after three Australian spearfishermen died in separate shark-related incidents around the country. The circumstances surrounding those incidents differ significantly from today’s attack, but together they form part of an uncomfortable run of encounters that has once again pushed sharks into the national conversation.

For now, the focus remains on the woman injured at Coogee, who is reportedly fighting for her life in hospital. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and all those affected by today’s events.

Timmy Patterson is currently recovering after a near-fatal drowning at a remote Orange County reef break during California’s recent run of swell.

The incident, recounted to us by longtime T. Patterson Surfboards General Manager Scott Metzner, is equal parts harrowing and inspiring. According to Scott, Timmy, along with a few friends and Timmy’s son, Keone, were surfing a powerful and secluded wave in Orange County two days ago during the peak of the swell. Timmy went over the falls on the first wave of a legitimate set. Then things got hairy. 

 “When he went over the falls, he got held under for a long time,” said Scott, who told us the story based on reports from Keone and Timmy. “Out there, it’s not like when you’re at the beach and the wave energy disappears at the shoreline where  it’s shallow. This is open ocean, and the energy drags you downward. So he got dragged under water pretty bad, and there were another 6-8 waves behind it. It held him under so long that he drowned. He got water in his lungs.” 

“Timmy’s son, Keone, was right there in the zone and grabbed him,” Scott continued. “He swam his dad to the shore. The waves were pushing them in, so they were able to ride the current and get him in, but Keone had to drag him through the rocks on the beach.

“Keone said a OC Lifeguard chief Jason Young was on the beach and started pumping his chest to bring him back to life. They revived him right on the beach. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital in Mission Viejo. He was hooked up to the oxygen machine, with a tube down his throat. They put him on heavy antibiotics to fight the infection of seawater in his lungs.”

Scott said the doctors anticipated it could be up to two weeks before Timmy would be stable enough to breath without the machine. But the next morning, Timmy was already on the mend. A few hours later, they took the tube out. Timmy is reportedly still in the hospital but stable and improving by the day. A miracle, considering the circumstances.

“Timmy told me that when he was nearly unconscious, they were pumping his chest and they were almost about to give up,” Scott said. “But they kept going and they were able to revive him.”

What a blow this nearly was for surfing. Timmy’s knowledge of boards rivals anyone in the biz. It’s literally in his blood, with his father and uncle part of the post-war wave of industrial surfboard manufacturing. TImmy started his business 46 years ago and has shaped through numerous eras, styles and trends. Christian Fletcher, Matt Archibald, Pat O’Connell, Andy Irons, Jordy Smith are just a few notables who have hopped on a Timmy P.

He’s also one of the few shapers who has supplied boards to a World Champion and an Olympic gold medalist. His hardware is the weapon of choice for two 2026 Championship Tour surfers with markedly different styles: Italo Ferreira and Al Cleland Jr. But the guy is in it for the love of the game.

“One thing about Timmy that I really admire a lot is that he isn’t just a surfboard shaper,” Jon Pyzel said in his interview with Timmy last year. “He’s a surfboard builder. That guy can do anything with a surfboards. Shape it, glass it sand it Any part of the production, if he needs to jump in there and do something, he can do it. He loves it.”

We wish Timmy and his family all the best during his recovery, and we’re sure he’ll be cheering on Italo and Al tomorrow from his hospital bed.

We will too.

Ethan Ewing caught 199 waves over six days while shooting SITD. In El Salvador, he couldn’t surf more than four before to avoid a Round 2 loss to Callum Robson.

Correlation, causation, or cosmic intervention? Buck and Mikey investigate none of these properly.

The duo discuss the carnage in El Salvador, where a physically compromised Italo Ferreira has maintained the rankings lead, the unlikely but very real scenario in which Filipe Toledo, Griffin Colapinto and Ethan Ewing are all out of the comp, and how an in form Al Cleland Jr is making inroads at a wave perfectly suited to his brand of powerful rail surfing. There are also opportunities to damage your finances with our in-house financial advisor, Michael Ciaramella.

Episode 1 of Surf100 Challenge Series Presented by Pacifico is discussed, its first weak link revealed, and a candid assessment of some of its characters takes up a chunk of airtime before Buck teases Episode 2, dropping soon on Stab and our YouTube channel.

There is also the pressing matter of a Florida man who voluntarily paid his way into 27 wavepools around the world, occasionally going to the extreme of renting a towel, and confirming that Switzerland remains one of the world’s leading innovators in extracting money from foreign visitors.

For those allergic to saltwater, this may be the most comprehensive guide to wave generating machines we’ve ever published.

Guest starring in this episode of The Drop is the infamous El Niño, the weather phenomenon invented by the Pixies for their 1989 hit “Wave of Mutilation”, which accidentally brought immense joy to surfers worldwide and a considerable amount of distress to coastal populations.

Buck and Mikey discuss, analyse, dissect and speculate on what the Northern Hemisphere might have planned for its AW27 presentation thanks to the return of the prodigal son and the apocalypse foretold in his wake.

To wrap up, they wander through upcoming Stab Premium projects and 12 chances for our members to win one of the SITD boards made for (and in some cases ridden by) Ethan Ewing.

All of which is to say: plenty happened in surfing this week.

In the spring of 2001, Rob Brown was sure he was going to win the first XXL Awards — so sure that he wanted to make an entrance.

He paid a buddy, a helicopter pilot, to fly him, his wife, and a few friends to Oakley’s headquarters. They touched down on the company’s helipad next to the steel Blade Runner-style monolith at the entrance.

“I’d taken the biggest picture of my life, set a Guinness record, all these things,” he says.

Mike Parsons’ 65-foot blue monster at Cortes Bank was the talk of the surf industry that year. In January, an expedition to the deep-water spot 100 miles off the coast of San Clemente had seemingly paid off for everyone involved. “Project Neptune” involved two boats, including Brown’s Twin Vee 36 power catamaran, a dozen surfers and cameramen, three jet skis, and a single-engine plane.

At Oakley, Brown ducked under the chopper’s spinning rotors and walked inside to collect his $10,000 check. Instead, the award went to Aaron Chang for a shot that Brown says was actually taken by Chang’s assistant.

“I was furious,” Brown says. “I just felt really screwed over.”

Brown believed that both industry politics and a flawed judging system had conspired to deny him first prize. It would prove to be a common complaint in the world of big-wave surfing awards.

“What did they do to measure this, to get it bigger than mine?” he asks. “I just really felt like they went out of their way to take care of someone else.”

The highlights of Brown’s illustrious five-decade career as a surf photographer are elegantly presented in his new book, Pacific Quests: Big Wave Surfing’s Greatest Adventures. It is organized around his documentation of giant swells in Hawaii, Todos Santos, Mavericks, Ghost Trees, and Teahupo’o, but the real star is Cortes Bank — the lonely seamount due west of his home in Dana Point.

Brown’s last-minute trip there in 2008 could easily have been his last. That harrowing journey, which featured only his boat, his camera, and no safety teams, is explored in the newest episode of How Surfers Get Paid. That day, Brown’s photo of Parsons reaching the bottom of a 75-foot wave won him virtually every major award in surf photography. The image now graces the cover of his book.

“It was so dangerous and so radical and such a long shot,” he says of the trip. “The whole thing was just a miracle.”

In Pacific Quests, Brown’s stories sit alongside contributions from friends and longtime subjects, including Parsons, Brad Gerlach, Greg Long, Shane Dorian, and many others. Some of surfing’s best writers, including Nick Carroll, Sam George, and Evan Slater, also contributed.

The book is available at PacificQuests.com, and Brown will be signing copies at bookstore and museum events throughout the rest of 2026.

How Surfers Get Paid Season 2, Episode 10 (The Bounty Hunters) drops on June 23, only on Stab Premium.

Just as print media tipped into the 2000s, a common trope was to anticipate what the future of surfing had in store.

Listicles were composed of predictions: professional surfers equally proficient as goofy and regular, the rise of what some magazines called third-world surfers (i.e. anyone outside the US and Australia), aerial surfing borrowing more from skating and snowboarding, and other absurd claims, including wavepools producing waves indistinguishable from the ocean’s.

Tuco Arruda is a 22-year-old regular footer from Florianópolis, Brazil. “I was born and raised in RTMF — the Rio Tavares neighbourhood — which is where Pedro Barros also lives.”

People like Pedro, Sky Brown, Shane Borland, Judd Henkes and a growing cohort of cross-discipline experts are what those listicles were hinting at. After watching the aptly titled Both, you’ll add Tuco to that list.

“I started as a skateboarder,” he said, despite being the son of former Brazilian surf pro Guga Arruda. “Our skate culture is really strong. I learned to skate at Pedro’s parks.”

He began competing and winning. A lot. “I took skateboarding seriously,” he said, “but my father was a professional surfer, so I also spent a lot of time in the water.”

The more Tuco traveled to prime surf destinations, the bigger his love for it grew. “But I never wanted to give up skateboarding.”

When you become good at something, plenty of people with unsolicited advice enter your orbit. Imagine what being good at two attracts.

“People always told me that one day I’d have to pick one or the other. But the goal of this film was to show I chose both. I believe the two go well together.”

“To bring skateboarding maneuvers, different grabs, and different approaches into surfing while still respecting its essence” is Tuco’s goal.

“Surfing and skating are historically connected. In my life they’ve always gone hand in hand.”

Growing up skating with one crew and surfing with another turned out to be an elite education. When your neighbours are Pedro Barros, Yago Dora, Mateus Herdy, and Samuel Pupo, being good at one thing was probably never going to be enough.

I was once told, “That is not a question you should be asking,” quite sternly, by the surf team manager of an eyewear brand.

I had only asked how freesurfers were traveling so far, so often, when every time I tried to book a single flight I found myself too close to seeing a minus sign on the wrong side of my bank balance.

For some (or most?), the luxe boat trip or all inclusive resort is now out of reach. But the thing about Indonesia is that its east-to-west span is wider than almost any country on Earth, leaving plenty of room for travel on a budget far smaller than the legacy surf brand trips of pre-GFC times.

Instead of a luxury boat trip or surf camp, Juju Lacome has opted to meet up with freesurfing friends Karina Rozunko, Noah Collins, Jaleesa Vincent, and Alex Knost to explore the coastline of Indonesia’s most populated island by bus.

Waves surfed range from fun to very fun to very rippable, and this video journal that follows Juju’s recent Hawaii Diary was edited by her and filmed by Leo DiCaprio’s doppelgänger Luka Raubenhaimer, with additional footage collected by Indo vet Jimmy James.

If you can’t book the charter, this might still make you want to book the flight.

The first thing that popped into my head when watching this video was; why the hell does a tiny city in remote Chile need so many damn skyscrapers?

So I looked it up.

Turns out, because they’re hemmed in between the Pacific Ocean and the steep, arid Andean mountains, these cities have no room to move, so they grow up instead of out. Plus, Northern Chile is the copper capital of the world, so these highrises serve as luxury housing and office spaces for massive mining operations.

Anyway. 

It’s no secret that there are heavy, perfect waves nestled in along the Atacama desert.

Since Andy Irons won the 2007 Rip Curl Search in Arica, there have been 12 QS contests held at the urchin-infested slab known as El Gringo. 

Though we’re not gonna drop any pins for ya, Nathan and Ivan Florence have released a healthy share of footage from a handful of similar waves in recent months.

Above is Koa Smith’s own take on a Northern Chile cave-mining operation. 

“Slabs are the ultimate fear game,” says Koa. “You just gotta be 2000% committed underneath it or else…”

Click above to watch Koa pick-axe through a lineup of boils, boogs, and jellyfish to harvest some emerald jewels.