Mason Ho + Clay Marzo Attempt To Rebrand Waimea Shorey As ‘Surfable Wave’
If they can’t, you can’t.
Albee Layer said something interesting last week after surfing Pipe for the first time in over a decade.
“A huge reason I never surf Pipe isn’t just the crowd—it’s that I find the footage boring. Everything that can be done out there has already been done. Unless you’re one of the guys who gets the seas to part for every set, you’re not going to do anything new. Sure, you might get a crazy wave, but there’s always been a crazier one before it. All I want to do in surfing is something no one else has done, and Pipe is the absolute last place I’m likely to do that,” he concluded.
Albee’s take on Pipeline isn’t the standard-issue frustration about crowds or hierarchies—it’s deeper than that. For him, surfing is a frontier, and Pipe, while still one of the most dangerous and consequential waves on earth, is a frontier that has already been conquered. The landmark waves have been ridden, the heaviest wipeouts documented, the deepest tubes threaded. Sure, another one might come along that is slightly taller, thicker, or more impossible, but the margins are razor-thin.
Albee has always built his approach to surfing around NBDs (Never Been Done’s). He was among the first to commit to paddling into the kind of Jaws waves that, in the past, only tow-ins dared to touch. He was also among the first to land a 540 air in a way that didn’t look fluked or awkward. He has spent his career chasing the unseen—moves and moments that have no historical precedent. So, if Pipe isn’t offering that, why bother?
Plenty of surfers take the opposite approach. Some define themselves within a particular field and commit to mastering it in a way no one else has. Chippa Wilson, for example, has devoted his life to the most technical and explosive aerial surfing possible, perfecting tricks that wouldn’t look out of place at a skatepark.
Jamie O’Brien, meanwhile, has done the opposite of Albee at Pipeline—rather than walking away from a wave where everything has already been done, he has dedicated his career to innovating within its constraints. Swapping boards mid-barrel, surfing it on soft tops, sitting deeper than anyone else—he has found ways to make something old feel new.
And then there’s the Mason Ho and Clay Marzo approach, which might be the most creatively liberating of them all. Instead of chasing NBDs on the world’s scariest waves, or refining a single discipline into an art form, they operate under an entirely different premise: everything is a wave.
Under that definition, even the Waimea shorebreak, which breaks in knee-deep water and folds over itself like a collapsing building, fits the criteria for a session worth documenting.
It’s not about progressing surfing in the way Albee seeks to, or perfecting an established discipline like Chippa or JOB—Their approach isn’t about pushing boundaries in the traditional sense; but ignoring them altogether.
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