“I Ran Straight Into The Reef With My Board, In The Tube”

Though one might never think it spontaneously — Mikey Wright and Stab Highway sender Rolo Montes are quite similar surfers. Maybe my thoughts on this have been accentuated by the above clip — featuring the two natural footers dismantling some Indonesian reef maulers while wearing matching ankle braces — but the comparison stands.

Sturdy regs with a strange-if-not-massochistic desire for ledging sections and absurd corpse-hucking.

Granted, their approach to each of these pastimes is slightly different, illustrated by the session at the left above. Rolo picking off the doubled-up dry reef roll-ins while Mikey puts himself under the hook on the stupid ones.

“Yeah, that’s usually the program,” Rolo laughs when I ask him about the session. “It was washing through and it was hard to pick good ones, but if you got the right wave you were gonna get barreled. Lee [Wilson] has been there a bunch, so we were following him.

It was definitely hard to surf, it was huge,” he continues. “We had to duckdive 10-foot white waters in between the sets, and it was just Mikey, Lee, and myself out there. It’s so shallow too, it got to the point that Lee and I both hit our fins on our last waves. I pretty much just ran straight into the reef with my board, in the tube.”

As for the matching ankle braces, Mikey was healing from his surgery at the time and Rolo had a “pretty fucked” bone bruise, which eventually led to some time out of the water. To make matters worse for the Puerto Rican, he fell ill on the subsequent boat trip. 

“It was my first boat trip, and I was pretty much seasick the whole week. I was useless,” he laughs. “I made the mistake of having a few beers the first night, and felt hungover the entire trip. We still had a really good time though. We got fun waves with no one around and caught a bunch of fish.“

As of now, the boys are filming for a covert project in a covert location — somewhere between San Diego and Ecuador — and we’re looking forward to it.