An elementary and graphic lesson in surf etiquette… 

The German big-wave surfer Sebastian Steudtner has released a graphic clip of what can happen when, panic-stricken, you throw away your board to get under a wave.

Steudtner, who has been a regular at Nazaré since 2012, was whipped into a set and, “setting up my line, saw a friend of @maya paddling out and thought I’m gonna go around him and give him space. He jumped off his board to dive under the wave, shooting the board right in my direction as I passed him. My right arm prevented damage to my face but redirected all the force to my chest.”

The collision dislocated Steudtner’s clavicular, fractured his ribs and tore hell out of the muscles in his neck and chest. 

Two months later, Steudtner is only just back in the water.

The handsome German, who is thirty-five and from Nuremberg, famous in the thirties and forties for its lavish Hitler rallies and for the post-World War II trials that strung up as many of the bastards as the Allies could find, moved to Hawaii when he was thirteen to pursue his dream of becoming a big-wave surfer.

He is a two-time winner of the XXL Biggest Wave award, in 2010 and 2014.

"A gaping hole near the limb’s brachial artery, the arm’s flexor muscle exposed."

Here’s a little reminder of what can happen when you’re wrangling twelve-to-fifteen foot waves at a wild offshore reef.

Russell Bierke, twenty-three, is the diminutive and deceptively fragile looking son of noted Californian-born shaper Kirk Bierke whose boards are sold under the label KB Surf and made in Ulladulla, three hours south of Sydney.

On Thursday, Jan 21, much of Australia’s east coast was raked by a powerful south swell, igniting a bonfire in the loins of Russ who planned on cavorting at a reef nearish to home.

This is his second wave, paddled into on his seven-eight at seven-thirty am. Russ swung for a double-up, hit a little backwash from the previous wave and, as Russ explains, “bodysurfed straight onto the bottom on my elbows with arms out in front of me.”

Russ, wearing an impact suit, figured it wasn’t too bad. He’d been dragged along the bottom before, which is mostly barnacles and cungeboi, and figured he’d have a little reef rash.

Then he saw the blood pouring out of his wetsuit.

“I pulled it off and got a shock,” he says.

A gaping hole near the limb’s brachial artery, the arm’s flexor muscle exposed.

Russ is a practical sorta cat and had a stretch tourniquet handy.

Immediately, Russ was thinking about nerve damage or muscle that could keep him out of the big-wave game for months.

In the clip, here, we see the moment, upon his return to shore, where he examines the wound with his friend Sean Mawson and filmer Andrew Kaineder.

At a nearby hospital, Russ was relieved to learn he’d avoided nerve or muscle damage and, after eleven stitches and a couple of weeks kept dry, he’d be back in the ocean.

Still, ask him what he hit and he still doesn’t know, definitely wasn’t a fin, he says, and theorises that it might’ve been a pressure split, where the skin splits upon impact.

Russ is no stranger to injury, of course.

He is one surfer who is prepared to pay, what Hawaiians call, “the ultimate price.”

In 2017, he was “blue as a Smurf” and “on all fours spewing” after a wipeout in fifteen waves in Victoria, an injury that put him in intensive care.

"That is life, that is man."

Did you know there are 2024 lines of dialogue in Hamlet? 

But, would Shakespeare have felt inclined to spill so much ink and time if he’d ever had the privilege of witnessing the sport of kings?

Specifically this clip in particular?

I doubt it.

He would have lain down his quill with the words,“See that there? That is life, that is man.”

What is exhibited in this one thirty-second clip is nothing less than the full spectrum of humanity itself.

What’s encapsulated in this narrative is, in a word, literally, Everything.

Needless to say then it warrants a closer look.

The work opens with a familiar scene (Act one scene one: establish normality), a crowded line-up. The supporting cast. A wave approaches. Several figures scratch for the drop. Four make it.

Thus we have our leading men, our major characters. Three surfers and a bodyboarder. Questions of priority we will leave for ensuing generations of critics and scholars to mull over. For now we’ll concern ourselves principally with plot. The surfer furthest on the inside is lost early, call it timing, positioning, bad faith snaking – we can’t know. Save it for the prequel.

Regardless, his story is lost. Hopelessness.

That leaves three.

One, all in white, struggles in the foam, not gone, but lost. His cause looks futile.

This? Life.

The bodyboarder looks to have it. He pops to a drop-knee position. Does he know of the surfer on his inside, further towards the pocket and to whom many an observer might say the wave belongs? He seems oblivious, concerned only with his own ensuing gratification: Solipsism. Egocentricity.

The inside surfer looks back seemingly concerned with the fate of The Lost One: Compassion. Empathy. Curiosity.

Regardless of motive Inside Surfer’s focus on “the other” will prove fatal.

The Bodyboarder, either through hubris, a desire to get back further towards the pocket or out of territorial malevolence, cuts back into the path of Inside Surfer. Villainy.

The audience holds its breath.

Inside Surfer ploughs into Bodyboarder and stacks it over the lip. Out of shot. Out of existence. “Nice guys finish last,” the universe seems to tell us. Bodyboarder must surely have it now.

But wait.

Inside Surfer’s board pounces like a conscious animal still loyal to its fallen master and tonks Bodyboarder on the head. He could take the hit, hold his line, ride on. Instead he puts up his hands to guard himself against the blow and in doing so loses said line and swerves off up and over the lip! Vanity. Cowardice. Lulz. Justice.

And thus ends the tragedy?

Sweep to stage right to reveal: The Lost One, our angel all in white, once assumed to have gone the way of Hopelessness is resurrected, muscling through the foam, thanklessly and inexplicably chasing the lost cause. A picture of patience. Lazarus and Sisyphus combined. Tenacity.

But there’s still work to be done. No Bodyboard hubris here. He waits. After all, what’s another half-second compared to the previous twenty?

The wave jacks slightly.

He carves out of the foam and at last he’s on the wave!

And then suddenly the universe obliges further. From nowhere a barrel, and he’s in it, bent at the waist, slightly ungainly, a touch of poo-stance, but hey, who’s judging?

He emerges. Only a scoundrel would resent the claim: arms aloft in victory, in gratitude.

Effort. Reward. Vindication.

Curtain.