How Many Ride of the Year Candidates Can Squeeze Into One Session?

If you’ve watched Snapt5, last year’s Best Surf Film, you’ve already seen the waves in question.

What you may not have clocked is just how ruthlessly efficient the day was behind the lens. On March 7, 2025, at Cloudbreak, Tucker Wooding’s raw-footage-to-keeper ratio approached Japanese industrial perfection: nothing wasted, everything sorted, colored, and repackaged for consumption at fiber optic speed.

“I probably did thirteen battery changes,” Wooding says, describing the logistics of flying, landing, and relaunching a drone from the bow of a boat rocking in the channel. “If there was a lull and my charge was at thirty percent, I’d bring it in, swap batteries, and get straight back out there.”

The irony of the setup wasn’t lost on him. While some of the heaviest surfing of the decade unfolded a few hundred metres away, Wooding spent most of the day hunched over a screen in his lap. “The funniest, and lamest, part is that I was basically staring down all day while this insanity is happening right next to me,” he laughs. 

“Compare that to someone like Tom Jennings, who was swimming under those mountains of water all day. That’s the purest way to document it. Meanwhile I’m just neck-cranked for six hours, getting square eyes, barely looking up.”

Between battery swaps and hard-drive backups, Wooding was also racing against the Surfline-media clock. Staying at Tavarua with Billy, Nathan, and the rest of the Snapt5 crew, he knew most of the footage was destined to be locked down for the film. Jai and Soli were the exception.

“Those were the only guys I wasn’t officially there to document,” he says. “So I just posted them straight away. Jai was a little eggy about it going up so fast, but that’s surf media. If you don’t go first, someone else will. Hopefully they’re not too bummed on it now.”

Cloudbreak has always been a challenge for surf cinematographers. From boats, the footage can be shaky and rides get lost mid-wave. From land, the action is distant and inscrutable. Drones solve both problems, hovering close enough to read the choreography inside the barrel, and document the complete ride. Wooding, along with Ryan Williams and a small cohort of other drone pilots, leverage their benefits brilliantly.

“I actually kind of hate drones,” he’s said before. “I just happened to get good at flying them and realised how under-used they were in surfing.”

The irony is that this accidental specialisation now keeps him employed most of the year. When the swells go quiet, Wooding trades tropical reefs for cold water, captaining sockeye salmon boats in Alaska, hauling bulk fish out of the Bering Sea and the Aleutian chain.

Here’s the best of March 7, 2025, at Cloudbreak, from someone who spent most of it staring into his lap.