Cloudbreak Delivers Tasteful Season Opener

I’ll usually report YouTube videos that rely on all-caps titles to advertise themselves as “Violent or repulsive content.“

“CLOUDBREAK LIGHTS UP! PERFECT 6-10FT SWELL IN FIJI!” read Koa Smith’s new post on the video-sharing platform. ‘Cloutbreak,’ I thought. Still, I didn’t report.

It was hard to look away from the thumbnail: Koa standing inside an aquamarine orb, while a man on the channel raised both arms above his head. Was he doing it out of stoke, or was it a sadistic competitive instinct aimed at ruining the picture taken from the boat?

Either way, I clicked through, and it turned out to be quite an entertaining video of a trip among friends to a place that is probably benefiting from its distance from a good number of major surfing populations worldwide.

Shot over a week, Koa Smith offers a comprehensive POV tour of the wave breaking far outside the heart-shaped island of Tavarua. In tow for the first proper swell of the season were Troy Eckert (daddy of Volcom), the Colapinto brothers, Parker Coffin, and a few other surfers of high caliber.

The jump-on-my-board-and-let’s-paddle-together-toward-the-horizon view brought by Koa offers visuals you won’t get during a WSL broadcast: paddle-outs, tubes, wash-throughs, wash-ins to the lagoon, lineup banter, and the inevitable casualties.

“Yeah, that’s a stitcher,” Troy Eckert told Parker Coffin while gauging the dimensions of a gash on his head, before politely asking, “Should I get one more?”

It was that good.

After breaking his last board, Koa hopped onto a thruster again, Griff’s no less, to get his trip-best wave.

The vlog/unassuming leak also tells us that Griffin (and Crosby?) are putting time aside to get acquainted with the wave in the lead-up to this year’s Final 5 showdown at the end of August.