Florida skimboarder Brad Domke takes his 52-inch disc to the world's biggest wave…
As chronicled yesterday, the Florida skimboarder Brad Domke had arrived in Nazaré, Portugal, to skim a 50-foot swell. Nazaré, I presume you already know. It is a wave caused by an undersea canyon 16,000-feet deep and 140 miles long and has become a mecca for the tow set.
Men with two-way radios stand on the beach directing tow-teams across a two-kilometre playing field and, reigning over it all, is the Hawaiian Garrett McNamara, a benevolent dictator of sorts, ensuring safety for all participants and maximum media coverage.
“Its an ancient beast. It’s like there’s a monster in the water making the water move really strangely and scary. I don’t know why. You look at photos with these barreling waves and you’re, like, when our turn came on the wave it wouldn’t make sense. It feels so mutant and big. It blows my mind, actually.”
However you feel about tow-in surfing, and I admit I can sometimes veer towards the ambivalent, it’s hard not to scream a barbaric yaw of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the wave.
Twelve or so hours ago, in waves that were “forty foot faces” according to his tow-pal David Langer , Domke, rode Nazaré on his 52-inch long, and only a little more than half-an-inch thick, five-pound disc. Did you know Domke only has one board? This is the same carbon-fibre aureole he rode at Teahupoo. Quivers? Who needs ’em?
I asked the unconventional and dazzling Domke of his first impressions of Nazaré
“Its an ancient beast. It’s like there’s a monster in the water making the water move really strangely and scary. I don’t know why. You look at photos with these barreling waves and you’re, like, when our turn came on the wave it wouldn’t make sense. It feels so mutant and big. It blows my mind, actually.”
His tow-pal Langer says, “Why are there no sharks here? It’s like there’s something living underwater. That canyon is miles deep. It’s like the Grand Canyon. It leads all the way up to the shelf and onto a huge sandbar that makes Puerto look tiny. It’s crazy, crazy stuff.”
Yesterday, Domke says, “was like heaven on earth. Ten-to-15-or-20 feet or something.”
And the experience of skimming very big waves?
“It’s just like downhill skateboarding, how they deal with logistics of rocks and all sorts of weird stuff. Here there are gnarly patches of boils and weird things from the wave before and then you’re dealing with all the froth. It’s crazy that you can coast down a wave that big. Sometimes it’s real clean, sometimes there were crazy mutant chops.”
Tomoz it’s a little bigger. Footage as it comes.
‘You look at photos with these barreling waves and you’re, like, when our turn came on the wave it wouldn’t make sense.’ I have a fuzzy feeling of confusion now and i napped.
There’s no way those are his real legs.
Haha, an ancient beast. Genius.