When Do You Know You’ve Surfed The Wave Of Your Life?

“I just came back from the ferry and I’m getting sick, I think. I’m done.” 

Natxo Gonzalez is driving back to the Basque Country after an entire winter away from home. “It’s been crazy. I think I need to stop and just cruise for a bit,” he says a couple of days before his film premieres in Bilbao, at a festival organised by Basque photographer, cinematographer, longtime friend, and travel companion Jon Aspuru.

At the end of last year, Natxo decided to pack up and move to Ireland, where he stayed for two and a half months. “I then went on a little vacation with my girlfriend at the start of January,” he says. The tone doesn’t make it obvious, but it sounds like he had to take that trip to rid himself of negative credit. “Morocco was looking pretty massive, and I went chasing that swell straight after.”

“That swell came, then another, then another, and I ended up staying in Morocco for a month,” he tells me.

Part of his life, and most of his gear, were back in Ireland, so he had to return to the Emerald Isle. “Another beautiful swell came through and I had five days of really good waves!” He sounds giddy despite saying he’s coming down with something.

The film he’s about to premiere isn’t so much a film. As simplistic as it may sound, Natxo is showing only two angles of the same wave. “I’m putting the best wave of my life up on a seven-metre screen. I’m pretty excited,” he says. “It’s going to be emotional.” 

How he ended up on that wave was anything but simple.

The wave was ridden and filmed at Mullaghmore. “I was going crazy, I was out of my mind and could hardly speak,” he remembers, recalling the moment he was interviewed on camera after kicking out into the channel.

Natxo had been concussed and injured for three years. “I thought the Nazaré wave had been my career highlight,” he says. “I didn’t expect something like this to happen.”

Back in May 2021, Natxo was surfing big Puerto. “I was on a 9’6, thinking I was about to get the best barrel of my life,” his mind goes back to that day in Mexico. “As I pumped through the tube, the foam ball hit me so hard that I almost passed out.”

The impact triggered headaches, dizziness, vomiting, and disorientation. He had to take a couple of months off.

Then, in November, Natxo paddled into a Nazaré mountain and ended up cartwheeling down its face. He suffered tremors and temporary vision loss, and was eventually rescued by Twiggy. In the following months, recurring headaches, frequent vomiting, and blurred vision became his baseline.

He somehow came back and won the 2022 Quemao Class in Lanzarote, a specialty tube contest at the hollow Pipeline doppelganger. But the victory felt as hollow as El Quemao’s Atlantic caverns.

Natxo’s condition kept getting worse. Depression set in, along with more intense migraines. He was bedridden in darkness. Of those times, Natxo had told Stab earlier: “I didn’t feel like a surfer. Surfing wasn’t even a goal. My only ambition was to someday sit down and have coffee with a friend without feeling pain.”

During the downtimes (double entendre, for sure) he watched Are You Serious?, Stab‘s documentary about Sterling Spencer’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury. Something about it hit close enough to home that Natxo decided to seek professional help.

After seeing several doctors in Spain, tests revealed slower blood flow in a part of his brain — an indication of a previous concussion. To fully recover, he would have to stop surfing immediately.

Fortunately, and thanks to Red Bull, Natxo had access to a team of specialists — doctors, psychiatrists, physiotherapists — who designed and deployed a comprehensive treatment and recovery plan.

Gradually, he started improving and was eventually allowed back in the ocean. He signed with Oxbow in September of 2024 and returned to surfing big waves.

In November 2025, he had what he called “a crazy session” at Mullaghmore. “I thought I couldn’t push my limits any further,” he continues. “Then, on December 22, I got that wave.”

“I pushed my limits as far as I could,” he says. “This wave was another level — a really high level of intensity. I had to use 100% of my technique, skill, and focus to make it.”

That culmination only came after several strike missions to Ireland. “I’ve always been super happy and felt so welcome by amazing people over there,” he explains. “At some point I needed to go and stay for a longer period.”

Having just turned 30, fully recovered, and feeling in top shape, that molten iron was asking for a vigorous strike, and maybe for a hangout and a little fun with his Irish friends while waiting for psycho waves to arrive on the country’s craggy shores. In retrospect, “It’s been the best experience of my life,” he says without hesitation.

I asked about the wave, and if he believes he’s bumped into a glass ceiling entering his 30s. “I don’t know,” he continues. “I don’t really like to say this, but the boys sitting out there in the channel — and the filmer, who’s been filming Mullaghmore for twelve years — all said it was the best wave they’d ever seen paddled out there.”

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And now, with that thought creeping into his brain, something tells me he’s already trying to picture what topping it could look like.

He did revisit his Nazaré comp stand-up barrel, and pulled a Namibian memory from the archive: “I got the best wave of my life at the time — a minute-long barrel. I ended up alone down the point, punching the sand, screaming, then lying down and crying,” he reminisces. “But I was alone,” he adds. “Sharing that wave at Mullaghmore with the greatest team and people made it so much more special.”

With more and more footage being broadcast within the hour it’s shot, more and more waves of a lifetime are certainly infiltrating our feeds at pace, but on an individual level, this one is without doubt a turning point for Natxo, made all the more significant by every setback that led to it.

Though nobody quite knows where the expression “chasing seconds” came from, its overuse across social media accounts flogging surf-skate-yoga packages run by former cocaine-addicted Berlin residents turned retreat facilitators is suddenly excused when those seconds are spent successfully negotiating a steep, heart-in-throat drop into the mother of all set waves at Mullaghmore, angling your gun into, through, and out of a cavernous barrel, before sharing its cold, spitting breath and stray rays of Irish sunshine with some of your favourite people out in the channel.

Well done, Natxo.