Italo Ferreira Caught 63 Waves In An Hour - Stab Mag

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Italo Ferreira Caught 63 Waves In An Hour

And other stats from our Stab in the Dark production.

news // Mar 15, 2023
Words by Michael Ciaramella
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Italo Ferreira has had a tough string of events in 2023 — but not for lack of trying.

In his last heat in the recent Portugal comp, Italo caught 10 waves in 40 minutes, logging 14 points that easily could have been 18, had the judges deemed his final tube complete.

For those of you who failed third grade arithmetic, that’s one wave every four minutes…in competition…at large and unruly Supertubos. The fitness required to achieve this is hard to fathom, but I suppose the same could be said about most Olympic gold medalists. And frankly, after working with Italo on this year’s Stab in the Dark (coming May 9th!), it didn’t surprise me at all.

Having logged the stats from each of his sessions, I can say that no one has ever come close to these numbers in my experience as a surfer or surf fan.

Italo’s stats

Average session length: 42 minutes
“Doing short sessions lets me stay focused and perform at his highest level,” Italo says. “If I go longer, I get tired and slow.” He generally likes to keep his sessions around the length of CT heat, so he can always stay in that performance mindset.

Average # of waves in a session: 12 (1 wave per every 3.5 mins)
“I hate sitting still, and I hates crowds,” Italo says. “I’d rather go surf a shitty wave by myself than wait for a set and get burned by someone. Plus, if you can surf a shitty wave well then you can surf anything.”

Max number of boards ridden in a day: 8
Italo doesn’t surf for long, but he surfs a lot. He does quick sessions with a ton of waves, which equates to him being able to test an incredible amount of boards in the space of a day.

Max waves in an hour: 63 (more than one a minute!)
“One day, my friends challenged me to see how many waves I could catch in an hour — we counted 63,” Italo says. “And I wasn’t just standing up — I was actually surfing the waves. I landed like 15 airs in that session.”

Total waves caught during SITD: 261 (in 7 days of surf filming).
Total keepers: 215.

Air completion rate: 66%
96 attempts, 63 makes. On one of the finalists, he went 13/13.

Broken boards: 3
“That’s why I stopped riding PU.”

Red Bulls per day: 3-5
“Don’t tell people that [laughs]”.

Catch episode one of Stab in the Dark on May 9th, only on Stab Premium.

Watch previous SITDs here:
Jack Robinson
Taj Burrow
All-Stars
Mick Fanning
Jordy Smith
Dane Reynolds
Julian Wilson

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