You Read The Book, Now Watch The Movie: Nic Von Rupp And Nate Behl At The Biggest Greenbush Ever

Greenbush is widely considered one of the world’s scariest waves, despite the fact that it rarely gets bigger than double overhead.  

Noteworthy performances at the spot include: 

1. The crew from Scratching the Surface, but mostly Dusty Payne. If you believe the folklore, Dusty wasn’t in priority when that famously robust wall reared its chin, but the superstar surfers ahead of him quickly declared their disinterest, so Dusty, still at the peak of his powers, swung and went, cementing his legacy with one of the best waves in Julian Wilson’s signature film and a Surfing Magazine cover. Afterward, Dusty reportedly quipped, “I’m never surfing there again.” We wouldn’t either, after seeing the damage it did to Taj’s fin boxes. 

2. The crew from Strange Rumblings in Shangri La, but mostly Damien Hobgood. As the story goes, Damo showed up to Greenbush the day before the rest of the Globe crew arrived, and surfed the joint on a peaking swell with no one around to document. The day that Dion, Creed, and co. arrived was smaller and more perfect, and Damo clicked into a different gear, bouncing off the reef countless times and emerging with cuts all over his body, saying, “Not today. Not today,” and laughing maniacally to himself as he paddled back out for more. Joe G tells the story even more convincingly on our Drop podcast, but it’s a real character-revealing tale for Mr. Hobgood.  

3. The crew from Everything’s Wrong But in the Right Places, but mostly Soli Bailey and Louie Hynd. On this What Youth trip, a crew of young, virile men vied for the Bush’s affection. Some were rewarded time and time again with her warm, wet embrace, while others got the cold shoulder (i.e. not a single clip). 

4. This guy, Shawn Dennis, who happened to be at Greenbush the day that Kolohe Andino and crew were filming for Reckless Isolation. While we haven’t yet seen what Brother, Crane-o, and the Colapintos were able to do in this session, Shawn let us know that to his eye, Crosby was sitting the deepest and charging the hardest. We’ll know for sure soon, as RI premieres across the US throughout this month (get tickets here). 

All of those sessions were memorable and impressive (hence why we can still recall some of them a decade later), but none of them hold a goddamn glowstick to what Nic von Rupp and Nasty Nate Behl surfed at the top of this page. You can read more about their story here, including the part where Nate nearly passed out underwater but was saved by the voice of his grandfather, or simply sit in awe for 10 minutes while Greenbush unloads its biggest, cleanest walls we’ve ever seen.