You, a wave and a torrent of water fording your
ass. "It's sexy!" says Keith Malloy…
Keith Malloy is the middle brother of the Central
Californian family famous for their purist
behaviour. Bar fights! Much board paddle! Big
waves!
Last year Keith released a film documenting the pleasingly
simplistic craft of bodysurfing called Come Hell or
Highwater. There’s also a book that fits alongside the film
called The Plight of the Torpedo People, featuring Keith,
but made by the photographer Chris Burkard, who also shot the photo
you see on this page. (Click
here to buy! You should!)
Keith sat in a Eames aluminium group office chair in tan denim
pants that were somewhat cowboy-ish, a black Patagonia t-shirt and
with his head wrapped in a Farmer and the Cook hat, an organic cafe
in Ojai, California, near where he lives, and delivered to me (and
hence to you) the following primer on bodysurfing.
“It’s sexy!” says Keith. He ain’t lying…
1. It’s more dangerous than you think: Getting
smashed is part of bodysurfing, pulling into barrels and getting
flogged and washed up on the beach with sand in your hair. But it’s
super easy to break your neck. There’s nothing to break your fall.
So it’s easy to end up head-first in the sand or reef. The main
injuries are shoulder dislocations. I’ve seen ’em all over the
years. I saved a bodysurfer once who broke his neck in the shore
break at Ventura wedge. He came up screaming. Luckily he wasn’t
paralysed. There’s a couple of guys from the (Newport) Wedge crew
who are paralysed right now. What do you do? Use your common sense.
Don’t think you’re invincible, especially in hollow waves.
2. Learn to pull through the back. If you’ve
been bodysurfing long enough you’ll do it without thinking. Mike
Cunningham, Mike Stewart, Chris Kalima and I surfed Teahupoo for 10
days straight, six-foot plus, and there wasn’t one scratch on us.
One guy didn’t have the experience and he got shredded. What’s the
trick? All you gotta do is ride it out as long as can and at the
last minute, drop down extra low, penetrate the water and twist
back through. Lead with your hands.
3. Always the hands, sometimes the chest: In
most biggesr waves, always have a hand out in front. The only time
the chest gets a workout is when it’s a mushier section.
4. Bodysurfing etiquette ain’t that diff from the
usual: If you’re bodysurfing with a pack of pals, you
don’t take off on somebody and ruin their wave. That isn’t hard to
remember. But what you might wanna realise is that bodysurfers are
the lowest of the totem pole. A 10-year-old girl will drop in on
you and not think twice about it.
5. The best waves? Makapu’u on Oahu’s East
Side, Point Panic on the South Shore there, The Wedge in Newport,
Boomer in San Diego with Teahupoo as the mythical Jaws-style
pinnacle
6. The best bodysurfers in the world are Mike Stewart
and Mark Cunningham: Mike is number one, Mark is the
legend. It’s like Slater and Curren. Mike is the hot-dog master,
Mark is the master. Cunningham has the best style and the best
technique. Mike does half the shit on a bodyboard without the
bodyboard. He does crazy things like getting sucked up the face,
blown out into the flats, and keeps going.
7. Travel is easy. A pair of fins. A wetsuit or
a pair of trunks. Maybe a hand plane for when it’s small. There
ain’t a lot of excess.
8. Bodysurfing isn’t a pain in the hierarchy:
The one thing that’s nice about bodysurfing is it’s not going to
affect the lineup no matter how popular it gets. Stand-up paddle
boarding ruins the lineup. But when you bodysurf you pick up the
scraps and you still have a fucking better time than anybody out
there. You get more waves because you don’t need a great wave to
have a great time.
9. It’s physical and it’s sexy. It’s super neat
not having anything between you, your body and the wave. You’re
completely submerged in the ocean and the wave. There’s a classic
line in the movie where a guy from Wyoming (cowboy country) talks
about bodysurfing and how erotic it is, all that water rushing over
your body.
10. Bodysurfing smashes ego: It’s connected.
It’s what surfing’s all about. You’re not putting on a show. Nobody
is watching you. It takes you back to that state when you were a
kid when it wasn’t not about your fucking ego. Whoever has the most
fun wins. I love that aspect. I started bodysurfing while I was on
the tour. It was driving me crazy trying to tear a wave apart from
start to finish and surf under the contest criteria. I was living
on the North Shore and I started going bodysurfing with Mark
Cunningham and it was a breath of fresh air: riding waves without
being tethered to equipment, the glide. It was like a vacation from
surf contests.
