Why East Coasters Love Waves You’d Hate

I haven’t met anyone more eager to surf a bad wave than someone raised on the East Coast of the US.

They’ll sprint across frozen sand dunes and hurl themselves into short-period windy slop with the joy of someone who’s just been resurrected and told they’ve got one more go at life. It’s infuriating.

But the thing is, they’re not wrong. Once they paddle out, you realize they see things you can’t — if, that is, you grew up surfing currentless reefs and points. Their years of surfing shifty beachbreaks without proper banks amount to a kind of monastic training. It’s cruel, boring, and endless, but it breeds skills that put them ahead of most when they’re handed a bunch of lemons.

Slater once credited small waves as part of his success. Finding a pocket of energy and a curve on a ripple, he claimed, was much harder than finding it on a bigger wave, making the latter feel almost easy.

Now, you wouldn’t call what Benny Bourgeois, Micha Cantor, and the Barton brothers, Blayr and Kai, found in Nicaragua “subpar.” But it does serve as a real-world example of the above. What many would call a closeout, they called (an East Coaster’s) paradise, and went at it like pigs in mud.

Tap the button above for evidence.