Surfing World Magazine

Surfing World is the oldest, deepest and most respected surfing magazine in the world. Founded in 1962, it's become a cornerstone of surfing culture both in Australia and right around the globe. It's a premium, high concept magazine, showcasing the best surf writing and photography. It's both classic and contemporary, reflecting the kaleidoscopic surfing culture of today.

Surfing World 423

“PIPELINE FOR THE FUCKING GIRLS!” – Do you understand what just happened? • Anywhere in life, most change happens slowly, quietly… then all at once. Over the course of years the work gets done, ideas get seeded, more people join in, but the change is barely noticed as it takes shape. But then a day arrives – sometimes fated, sometimes a bolt out of a blue sky – and those years of change are crystallised into a moment and a revolution is born in a few short hours. For women’s surfing, that day was February 10 earlier this year. The day the world’s most alpha wave became “Pipeline for the fucking girls.”

Surfing World Magazine

IF KIRRA BREAKS AND NOBODY SURFS IT… did it happen?

THE END OF BIG SURF – the surf industry returns to the garage. • If you’re driving through downtown Ventura, California, just south of the EmmaWood underpass, in between liquor stores, lost souls and Patagonia’s Rancho Relaxo headquarters just up the road, you might drive straight past a small, nondescript white building standing alone on East Santa Clara Street. Signage is minimal and cryptic – ‘Chapter 11 TV Surf Shop’. If you happened to stop and walk in off the street and saw the proprietor sitting behind the counter, shuffling paperwork, trading shit-talk with someone out back, he might strike you as vaguely familiar.

WEEKEND AT JJ’S — the surf store in the old Crescent Head Police Station • Beyond your standard surf shop, the Station Board Store at Crescent is a community built on ‘How are you going, really?’, existing beyond the commercial values of surf retail and more in the realm of shared good times, raw surf culture, and big heart. JJ Star opened his surf store with 80 cents in his account, and says he’s still got about that today. “It’s for the love” he reasons.

SUBTERRANEAN ALIEN—Beau Foster has gone underground • Beau Foster lives in a town you’ve never heard of, on a bay with no surf, and yet is writing the next chapter of his surfing life here. For him, the coast has gone from green and gold to mostly grey. It’s cold, foreign and a long way from his east coast home. But that’s the point. When he moved down here a year ago, he set up a shipping container in the backyard, and spends his days hand shaping his own designs, in his own time. When the waves are on, he jumps in his van and heads down the coast, where he’s found new horizons to push his surfing. Bug’s been doing his own thing for a decade or so now, part of a renaissance generation of young surfer-shapers, but down here he’s gone deep.

GATHER ROUND—a Shipstern swell jam

32 YEARS IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE — it’s goodbye Kelly, for now • It’s mid-morning on a Tuesday at Bells Beach, and Hannah Anderson and I are watching Kelly Slater win a heat. This once incredibly normal, even mundane thing is now unusual. Kelly is 52 years old; the tour is three events in, and until this first round at Bells, he has not chalked up a single heat win this year. It’s also why we are watching him.

THE SO-COOL PEOPLE Miki left Japan as a kid to go find them • The wafting aromas of warm dashi broth and deep-fried pork cutlets spilled out of small family restaurants and into the alleyways between the corrugated tin houses. The wet stone smell of fresh rain on bitumen was pervasive. Low power lines tangled in the sky between the curved-tile roofs. Above those rooves were bigger rooves, towering skyscrapers, giving the neighbourhood of Nakamura-ku a sense of being...