Watch: Ryan Callinan in ‘Interim’
What has your favorite surfer’s favorite goofyfoot been up to?
Some say the true test of a man’s character is whether or not they will plus-one a scruffily-dressed stranger into the Qantas gold class lounge.
Ryan Callinan once tried.
Even though the receptionist took one look at my coach-class booking and measly bronze status, grimaced, and politely shooed me back to peasant-dwelling on the carpets of Sydney Kingsford Smith, I’ve never forgotten the gesture.
R Cal for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Interim is the first edit we’ve seen from the beloved goofyfoot since becoming a daddy to his baby girl, Penny. And, as the name of his edit suggests, he’s using this year as a bit of a freesurfing sabbatical.
After 62 Championship Tour events, runner-up finishes in France and at Bells, and a decade spent on the competitive circuit, he admits the bread was tasting a little stale.
“I’ve had so much change in the last few years, like starting a family and changing sponsors, and rehabbing lingering injuries. My approach to competing just wasn’t working, trying to accommodate all of it.”
Ryan took paternity leave for the 2025 Gold Coast event, the penultimate event before the mid-year cut, sacrificing much-needed points at a critical stage of the season. Though he wouldn’t change a thing to be present when the Penny dropped, he was relegated to the Challenger Series in WA and spent the rest of the season juggling the demands of being a new father with torching money to surf 4-man heats in subpar conditions.
“Or the waves would be cooking in the morning for the comp, and then by the time the heat rolls around, it’s onshore and you’re trying to figure out how to get a couple of sixes.”
Needless to say he didn’t requalify.
“The first-round losses definitely didn’t help,” he laughs. “When you’re winning, it’s always harder to step away. But I think the decision was building through the year, which probably didn’t help my mindset when I was going to the events, and probably translated into the results.”
In 2027, he’s hoping to get a call up to the first CS of the season at Newy. In the interim (ha, see what I did there), he’s winding back the clock to his Cluster days, unleashing his hypermobile limbs on the less quantifiable, more artistic side of surfing — like trying to decode this cockeyed wedge which breaks directly on the rocks, backside.
Or (not featured in this edit) travelling to Chile to hunt down left points and serendipitously serve as Harry Bryant’s surf buddy on EAST.
Speaking of which, according to Danny Johnson, who was tasked with keeping his camera pointed at Harry, Ryan was surfing well enough to make that difficult — expect those clips to drop sometime next year.
“It’s been a pretty insane perspective shift. I used to turn up to the beach feeling like I was training for something, or with a specific objective: this will help me prepare for an event, or I need to test these boards and find the best one. Now I don’t have that. It’s more like, what’s the best surfing I can do whenever I look at the ocean and paddle out? It’s given me so much freedom. If I can harness that and learn to keep this open mind, it could help me so much. I’m just enjoying surfing more than ever.”
Surf scarcity owing to a newborn is likely a joy-enhancing factor too.
“Craig [Ando] and I obviously have children now, so we feel like we’re on similar programs,” Ryan says. “We were like, ‘We can do two days. We’ll get up at three, drive for however many hours, get there, surf twice, stay the night, surf, and then drive home the next day. Just milk it for all its worth.’
And subdued is the self-preserving instinct to stay injury free for contests.
“Now I’m like, there are these cool, weird waves that I can be open-minded about surfing. Not to hone my skills, but to see how I go, or have a crack, or experience something new. Surfing new places, the adventure of all that, and trying to figure out your fears and what’s possible, that’s been cool too.”
Ryan has always taken photographs, selected tasteful music and displayed a stronger interest in filmmaking than his previous sponsor of 19-years generally knew what to do with.
You can watch his previous quality edits: Ripples in the Void, Beneath a Pear Tree and JustForNow here.
