Watch: ‘Milked’ — Featuring Skip McCullough, Tosh Tudor, Jacob Szekely, and Jade Morgan

Last June, Indonesia’s scattered buoys didn’t spend more than one consecutive day below 6 feet (~ 2 meters) at 16 seconds.

Nine of those days saw readings above 10 feet (~3m) at 17 seconds.

The wind, under some archipelagic mysticism, puffed Southeast in the eastern part of the island chain and variable Northerly in the western corners.

“That month was probably the best run of swell I’ve ever seen here,” said Justis St. John, part-owner of Kandui Resort.

“It’s just one of those windows where you’d have to be a fucking idiot not to score,” laughed filmmaker Lachlan McKinnon when I asked him last year.

Among those who excelled on this roundabout intelligence test were Skip McCullough, Tosh Tudor, Jacob Szekely, Jade Morgan, and filmmaker Connor Hookway. 

Though we did a brief story on their orb-shaped misadventures last year, they’ve finally released the full-length film from their extended dry-season stint — ‘Milked’.

“It was the biggest swell of the season and I remember I was trying to make a call,” says underground hellion Jade Morgan.  “Zeke, Skip [McCullough], and Tosh [Tudor] were trying to decide where they were going, and we were all kinda freaking out. Me, Tosh, and Hooky were in Australia, and Zeke was in San Diego with Skip.”

Though Jade might be the name you least recognize from the above roster, he’s every bit as qualified as the others to speak on the quixotic pursuit of very big barrels — as you’ll see above. After spending almost a decade making a name for himself in waves of treacherous depth throughout California, he’s spent the past couple years continuing his trend along Australia’s East Coast. 

“I had just got back from a trip and I really needed to work,” remembers Jade. “But then, the boys were all saying they were gonna fly Hooky — my roommate — out to Indo so he could film. I was like ‘Wait, so all of my best friends are gonna fly my roommate, who they haven’t even met, to come chase waves in Indonesia? I gotta be on this trip.’” he laughs.

“Tosh had the first ticket and then at the last second Zeke got his and I just said ‘Fuck it,’ and bought my ticket a day before the swell. Skip was still working but he came later.

“At first we thought it was a huge Supersuck swell,” Jade continues. “I’ve never been to Supersuck. I’ve been to Deserts a lot, probably 15 times, and we wanted to go somewhere new. This was the first big Indo swell of the year that was West enough to have options. All the QS guys were out in Sumatra and a bunch of pros had just gotten on the Mangalui, so we figured it was a good call to go to Supers. 

“Me and Tosh got to Bali, rented a car and just started driving through Lombok right away. As we were driving through, our friend Carlos was like ‘Come on guys, let’s just go check the Grower, really quick, it could be fun. Let’s just go check it,’” Jade laughs. “I was like, ‘Dude, Carlos, fuck off bro. We’ve been to the Grower a million times. Let’s go to Supersuck.’

“But we ended up deciding to stop at Deserts for lunch and say what’s up to Budi. And, literally right when we showed up it was pumping and there was nobody there. We kinda started freaking out. Budi just gave us the top deck at his spot. We already had a full spot booked at Supers, but it just couldn’t happen. It was just too good and empty at Deserts. Plus, turned out the winds were terrible at Supers.”

After five days of Jade, Tosh, Zeke, and Hooky enjoying the fruits of the Indian Ocean, Skip finally finished hammering nails and hopped a flight.

“I was slammed with work in the middle of a project and Zeke was like, ‘We’re going, dude, you don’t have a choice,’” recalls Skip. “I remember I was like, ‘Dude, you don’t get it. I have fucking work, I can’t just leave. I need to finish,’” he laughs.

“Matuse ended up hooking us up with some tickets,” continues Skip. “I’d missed the first five days, so I pulled up late and they had already gotten insane waves. Their whole trip was like a movie already. I pulled up in the morning, nobody had slept, I’d never met Connor, he just wandered out of bed in super baggy cargo pants talking about some wild night on a motorbike or something. It was like, ‘what is going on here? Do I even belong on this trip?’” laughs Skip. “But I finally got a piece of the pie and yeah, it was just a score fest at Desert Point for the next 10 days.”

As you’ll see above, Skip wasted no time collecting an inhuman number of perfect funnels.

The best wave he caught on the trip, however, never made it onto a hard-drive.

“Even though we had Hooky filming, Skip decided to get another filmer,” chuckles Jade. “We had two filmers, and Skip goes to the Grower and gets the most fucked up wave of the trip. And, I guess the other filmer barely got it on his iPhone with his camera in the foreground,” laughs Jade. “It was the wave of the trip, really.”

“It hurt too bad,” laughs Skip. “I didn’t even want the blurry iPhone clip after. I’ll just keep the memory, thanks.”

After spending those weeks bouncing between Deserts and Kuta Lombok, Jade headed back to Australia and the boys decided to chase the next pulse to the Mentawais — cowboy chartering a rickety overnight fishing boat.

“Getting to the Mentawaiis was the biggest milking I’ve had in my life,” laughs Hooky. “Just sitting in that shitty fishing boat with all my camera equipment, 4:00 AM in the middle of the fucking ocean. Why the fuck did I pay to be here?”

“People don’t drive through the night on those shitty ass boats with no GPS in a huge storm with a huge swell,” says Zeke. “The more and more people that I’ve talked to about that the more people are telling me that we’re fucking crazy. Our boat could have gone under and nobody would’ve ever rescued us or found us.”

Despite the chaos — the fellas managed to score Macaronis, HT’s, and Greenbush all in one day. As you might expect, that was when they started to realize they had a movie on their hands.

First a loosely edited premiere at White Monkey after a healthy dose of late nights, followed by a string of premieres in San Diego. 

“For the premieres, Skip spent his own money, swiping his own credit cards, he got us some mechanical bulls and I got a dunk tank,” recalls Zeke. “Oh, and the music was loud at the first premiere, but it wasn’t loud enough, so Skip bought two new speakers to just play the fucking music off these huge mega amps.”

“We all put our personality into the parts,” says Jade. “Tosh is extremely particular. Everything in his edit is perfectly to the beat, perfect timing, no sketchiness, all soul. Versus Zeke is a classic video pretty much straight off his YouTube.

“Zeke actually fucking tried to put a wave pool section in his part,” says Jade, as Zeke cackles in the background. “We actually got into arguments over this. Like, we’re not putting your wavepool clip in our fucking Indo movie,” Jade grins.

“I don’t know dude, I’m a narcissist,” responds Zeke. “My parts the longest cuz I got the most milked,” he laughs.

And wait… what does getting milked even mean?

“Well, we just kept getting fucking milked everywhere we went,” says Zeke. “It became the word of the trip. They charged us double on everything, the boat was broken, the guy fucking milked us once we got to the Ments. Then we just started using that word for everything. Like, you boys want to go get milked tonight in Kuta? We embraced it.

“The next one’s going to be called Still Getting Milked,” finishes Skip.