Watch Live: Natural Selection Surf Goes To Africa

Streaming courtesy of Red Bull TV.

Last year, Natural Selection Surf arrived in Micronesia with private jets, Martin Daly, enough cameras to document a moon landing, and the aim of putting surfing’s most entertaining (non-CT) humans in a pseudo contest at a terrifying reef pass. 

It mostly worked.

Last year’s event was filmed beautifully, was occasionally confusing, and produced some properly deranged surfing. Five surfers reportedly claimed the wave of their lives during the filming window.  During our post-event podcast, we described Milla Coco Brown as ‘unchained,’ while our finals-day autopsy tried to answer whether all the helicopters, boats, cameras and mystery-location theater justified themselves.

Today, we get our second data point. 

Natural Selection Surf has relocated to South Africa’s Western Cape, where 12 surfers spent 10 days chasing conditions around a remote stretch of coastline before Round Two of the new competition format.

The men’s field is last year’s winner Soli Bailey, plus Eithan Osborne, Noah Beschen, Eli Beukes, Balaram Stack, Hughie Vaughan, Jarvis Earle and Mikey Wright. The women including returning champ Milla Coco Brown, Kirra Pinkerton, Eden Walla and Sanoa Dempfle-Olin.

Sounds less like a contest roster and more like somebody raided our YouTube search history.

The format remains loose and moves with the swell. When it arrives, surfers are judged using NST’s CREDO system: Creativity, Risk, Execution, Difficulty and Overall Impression; which is basically taking the decimals out of scoring and replacing them with increments of emotion.

Notably, Eli Beukes, the lone South African in the men’s field, is competing on a coastline he knows considerably better than the visiting Americans and Australians.

Otherwise, much of the appeal remains the same: good surfers, unfamiliar waves, and enough production horsepower to make sure that if someone gets the wave of their life we won’t miss it (probably).

The two-hour Natural Selection Surf premieres today, September 25, at 4 p.m. PT on Red Bull TV and YouTube. Click above to watch.