Watch: Jacob Burke Pushes The World’s Best At Soup Bowl

Jacob Burke can’t be reached.

Getting him on the phone takes patience. He has been competing in the Barbados Surfing Association’s Surfer of the Year series, and for every heat he advances through, more time is spent in the water and less on land screening calls.

When his voice finally crackles through my speaker, I ask how the event went. “I won Open Men’s and Longboarding,” he says. I wasn’t surprised, especially after watching his new edit, Fish Out Of Water.

He immediately tells me about the waves he’s been getting on the south coast of the island. “Perfect, peeling lefts,” the 25-year-old Bajan regular-footer tells me. 

But The Bajan Queen is the real reason we’re having a chat. Sorry Rihanna, not you.

Soup Bowl faces northeast into the Atlantic on the Caribbean’s easternmost island, and according to Jacob’s older brother Josh, his little brother is one of the best surfers he has ever seen out there. That’s no small compliment considering Kelly Slater has called it his favorite wave and Taylor Steele has said it’s where he witnessed the best surfing he’s ever seen.

Jacob takes the praise, barely. “I definitely enjoy bigger waves,” he says, then pivots somewhere unexpected. “I’ve never touched alcohol or drugs in my life, so surfing big waves has always kind of been my drug. I like the feeling and the adrenaline, and naturally I guess I’ve gotten pretty comfortable in those conditions.”

Last year, Griffin and Crosby Colapinto arrived in Bathsheba after conditions aligned for proper Soup Bowl. Word is that Jacob was turning heads among the heavyweights he was sharing his lineup with.

“He’s a natural in the barrel and he isn’t afraid either,” Griffin said. “That wave is scary when it’s that big.”

After I try to dismantle Jacob’s wall of modesty, he concedes: “I felt like I surfed well and kept up with those guys.”

He quickly shifts back to the Colapintos. “Griffin impressed me a lot. Some stuff he did was just mental — like, how did he do that? Turns, barrels, airs, everything.” On Crosby: “Soup Bowl is a hard wave to read, and Crosby looked like he had been surfing it with us all these years. Like he already knew the lineup.”

While the way he surfs his home break isn’t so different from the way a world title contender would, Jacob remains largely unsupported — save for AJW, who has been making him boards (many, one can assume) for a couple of years now. To support himself, he’s been teaching surf lessons and coaching a group of local kids, which still keeps him in the water, where he prefers to be.

Edits and film matter to Jacob. The one above is his first, cut entirely by himself, as was his brother Josh’s upcoming SEOTY entry. “I had a bunch of clips from a few different swells and I wanted to do something with them,” he says. “I’m always the type of person that if I want to get something done, I find it easier to just buckle down. It’s so much easier to put my idea into action than to talk about it.”

He recently bought an iPad for exactly that purpose. “They’re just easier to use. I’m not a big computer guy.”

Asked about the future and whether he sees himself following his older brother’s path, he answers: “The last couple of years I’ve really focused on training and competing more. But if I’m honest, my real dream is about making surf films, traveling, and surfing crazy waves. Contests are part of it, and I enjoy them, but that’s not the whole picture.”

The crazy wave box seems to have been well ticked.