Four Truths About Our Tube-Wrangling Cast: Shane Dorian, Anthony Walsh, Mikala Jones And Ry Craike

Assembling the team to head to the desert in quest of the ultimate GoPro HERO 7 and Fusion POV footage wasn’t difficult.

When it comes to collating the world’s most precise and skilful under the curtain shooters it didn’t take long to shift through the folios (see: Instagram accounts) and land on Shane Dorian, Ry Craike, Anthony Walsh and Mikala Jones.

The charts looked favourable, so barring a last minute swing achieving mind-blowing footage from inside big tubes was also an unusually controllable variable. What we couldn’t predict, however, was how our four personalities would gel.  

Ry Craike and a wave that’s far bigger and more critical in the flesh.

Anthony Walsh was the trip’s Extra Joss.

We’ve all seen ample footage of the North Coast New South Welshman turned Hawaiian resident in the tube, more often than not through POV and shot on GoPro, but apart from an incurable love of big hollow waves, most of the surfing population doesn’t know much about him. After the desert mission, we can confirm that AW’s a teetotal maniac who doesn’t stop from the moment he wakes up (which is insufferably early) until the moment you force him to go to bed. “Walshy would not stop surfing,” Joel Scott, the man who put this trip together told us. Now we’re privy to Sir Walsh’s unquenchable froth the amount of footage he puts out, and the way he’s been able to sculpt a career for himself in the “content creator”, tubing wave specialist realm (which isn’t easy to do) makes perfect sense.

A crisp shot, sure, but lacking in context: in reality Shane is quite small, and this wave quite large.

Shane Dorian is a genuine surfing icon, and, like many men with large reputations, in life he’s small in stature. You’d be forgiven for not previously considering the dimensions of the Momentum ripper turned big wave paddle (and tow) pioneer, as when you think “Dorian” you’re likely to go straight to a mental image of him free-falling down a mountain into the bowl at Pe’ahi. What Dorian lacks in height, he makes up for in aura, according to our tour operator, JS. “He’s like the godfather,” he says. “He’s got such presence, but also doesn’t take himself too seriously. He was the first to admit that he was scared shitless of the sharks, but still couldn’t help charging straight out to the big right first morning.”

Mikala Jones is a certified POV master.

The fact that Mikala Jones is “mellow” should come as no surprise. Hell, he looks mellow. What might come as a surprise is his prolificacy as a POV tube documenter. Mikala doesn’t just hunt tubes in remote parts of Indonesia, take off with his GoPro in his mouth and upload the footage to Instagram for his adoring followers. He’s dedicated to his art, and has fine-tuned his shooting equipment to maximise the documentation of his deft tube-riding skills.

“I thought I had it pretty dialled, but I felt like an amateur compared to Mikala,” his partner Ry Craike told us. “I was there with my little handheld mount and Mikala was pulling out poles and tail-mounts, it was amazing. I definitely feel like I learned a lot.”

Ry Craike and when the lean back goes right.

He’s been threading left tubes for so long that it’s easy to forget quite what a phenom Ry Craike was when he was first exposed to the world.

We’d never seen anything like it: the tube mastery combined with gouges and punts, on waves previously considered far too critical and dangerous a venue to do so. If there’s a lasting image of Ry Craike in the surfing consciousness then surely it’s a still of him leaning back with his arm out on a wave far to terrifying to be dealt with so casually. The GoPro has only enhanced this silhouette, but Ry says his signature capture isn’t without its dangers. “It’s got to be a pretty roomy pit to get it out behind you for starters,” he says of the process. “One of the bigger ones I got in the clip was so round, so I held the pole right out behind me and was leaning back styling thinking I had the thing easy. Because I was trying to do this massive soul arch this foam ball hit me from the back and swallowed. I got so flogged. You can definitely get a bit carried away.” And for all the nuances of trip, what Ry touches on is perhaps the most fascinating. That no matter how many visions they’ve had, and how well they’ve documented them, these guys are still learning and completely enamoured with the POV process. It’s refreshing that the masters of our sport still have a child-like enthusiasm for its intricacies.

Dive in here and kick off your POV obsession.