Is It Wrong To Call Your Friend Into A Dangerous Wave?

Mason Ho makes treacherous waves look fun. Which is why you’ll see a lot of today’s youth surfing in front of a certain exposed pile of rocks on small North Shore days.

While Mason might be opening people’s minds to the idea of surfing previously unsurfable spots, he’s not actively encouraging others to do so — in fact, it’s quite the opposite. If you ask Mase, the reason he started surfing these waves in the first place was to escape the crowds, not create them.

That said, there are a few close friends that Mason will invite to join him on these masochistic misadventures. It’s typically his west-side pal Sheldon Paishon who tags along, but sometimes Mase invites fellow Rip Curl riders, like Gabriel Medina, or in today’s case, Ireland’s Gearoid McDaid, to these undesired shelves.

But bringing someone to a treacherous wave invites moral introspection. If they end up getting hurt, is it your fault? Sure, it can happen anywhere, but it did happen here — at your terrifying, dry-reef-running death tube. There must be some culpability involved.

Even worse, what if you call them into the wave that breaks their leg? Ends their career? No doubt that’s keeping you up at night. An ethical quandary indeed.

Fortunately, in this case, it appears both Mason and Gearoid escaped unscathed. Must be all the rubber. Or they just know how to fall.