Koa Smith Gets Tangled With Bystander At Maxing Indonesian Reef Pass

Do you also feel desensitized to the amount of surfing content that Indonesia generates every season?

One could argue that a very good number of the year’s best waves won’t get the attention they deserve due to how crowded and replicable they appear behind our aluminosilicate glass screens.

Koa Smith may have found one way to break the monotony though.

An early and prolific adopter of the vlog format, Koa finds himself in a part of Sumatra that is now far from being a secret, proven by the sheer number of heads sharing one of the area’s best waves when it was on the brink of maxing out.

As bigger sets approached, Koa realised that he could bait and switch some of the crowd into paddling for safety while holding his position further inside, swinging around and going on double-ups.

He was doing just that when another surfer, paddling in his direction, somehow managed to thread his board through Koa’s leash, and the two, for a moment, became umbilically connected under a towering cleanup set.

Unfortunate timing and place, for both.

A tiny floating Koa head comes up on screen to dissect the incident, and the remainder of the session, with the aid of his POV footage.

The format shows potential and could work as a learning aid for surfing in heavier lineups. Just never as a replacement for time in the water.