How To Handle An Oncoming Section, With Brett Barley

Mindsurfing is the best. It allows you to stomp impossible drops, survive way-too-fast of sections, and do upwards of six turns on a bona fide closeout. But sometimes, and this is rare, but sometimes there are waves  that are tricky even to mindsurf. 

North Carolina native Brett Barley is, as we know, a tremendous tube-rider. But being a tremendous tube-rider requires much more than your basic late-drop and highline skills. Perhaps more than anything, it requires a partly nature, partly nurtured ability to read shape-shifting swell lines. In the first few waves of this clip, we see Brett, through the eyes of GoPro, stroking into your basic forehand pits — easy peasy. But after the first barrel is successfully threaded, we can see another section looming down the line. Here’s where the skills of a tremendous tube-rider come into play.

With this soon-to-be-barreling section in your sights, do you:

• A: pump your ass off
• B: stall, motherfucker!
• C: some combination of the two

As is true in most cases, the answer was C. And while Brett seemed to have little issue reading between the lines of his homebreak, I could easily see myself outrunning or under-pumping these sections and ending up wildly ashamed.

But boy was it fun to watch.