Coming Soon: Real Axe – Japan (a must-watch!)

Words by Elliot Struck | Photos by Duncan Macfarlane

If you’ve ever stood on a surfboard, then you can relate to Real Axe. Few video series have captured stoke, road tripping with mates and scoring good waves as well as Toby Cregan and Creed McTaggart’s mini travel documentaries. So far, we’ve travelled vicariously through the boys to New Zealand, West Oz, and across Australia. The latest episode, dropping a week from today, lights up Japan. Creed, Toby, WA super grom Shaun Manners, and guide/local legend Kaito Ohashi, based themselves in Miyazaki and chased around typhoons, via a whole lot of mini-mart stops.

“We were getting up at like 4:30am to go surf since it gets light so early,” says Toby. “Then there’s always a lot of driving. But we’d literally stop at the minimart like every 20 minutes. We were rolling pretty deep with a fair crew, so we’d stop and hit them way too often, to the point where we’d never get to surf (laughs). Everyone was just scoffing shit tons of sushi. The minimarts there, you could live off them, they have little hot meals and shit. We’d go there and load up, then go skeg-dogging (surfing), then go play karaoke. As cliched as you could imagine! We were so frothing. We’d eat at epic restaurants and play karaoke every night.”

Which sounds like a great time, any way you slice it. Even though scoring swell isn’t always so easy in Japan. “We surfed a bunch of different spots but only two of them were any good,” says Toby. “The not-so-good spots, that’s the part in the middle of the video where it’s all mucking around. That was most of the trip; us not getting waves. There was two swells and we grinded it out on the days the waves were good. The rest of the time we were trying to get waves but not getting shit. It was still real fun. The way the video’s laid out, that’s how it happened. We rocked up and that one session at the start, we bagged it up and I was like, ‘sick, we’re going to get fun waves the whole time.’ But it kinda went shitty, and we got deep in the karaoke. You’ll see the boys doing run-ins and stuff cause I was like, ‘we’re not gonna get any more waves, we need to get some footage of something happening.’”

So, what else should we know about this video, Stab asks Toby. “Can we talk about Kelly Slater? I don’t know why but somehow Kelly Slater keeps popping up. When we were on the road trip, Creed wrote ‘Kelly Slater’ on his swag. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just… when you write down the greatest surfer of all time’s name on your shit, it’s just funny. You’re talking about Slater all the time anyway just because he’s the best surfer of all time. But somehow he’s always been present in these videos. We were surfing a spot and Funky Duncy McNicol was saying he’s a better surfer than Kelly Slater and shit. It’s just funny to compare what Duncan does to what Kelly Slater does, ‘cause they’re both supposed to be pro surfers. Then we caught Shaun candidly saying ‘I don’t like him,’ so the bit in the trailer is him trying to justify saying it.”

Watch Real Axe: Japan exclusively on Stab next Thursday, November 5 (Oz time).