“It was like an old television slowly coming on when I started to make out the wave. I just hoped I would make the drop. My whole body was shaking."
It’s the wildest sequence captured this Hawaiian season, the Korean-Australian surfer Sam Yoon losing an edge on a thirty-footer at Jaws, the wave turning off Yoon’s lights, as they say, and photographed by Maui’s Aaron Lynton.
Yoon, who is famous for riding his self-shaped twin-fin guns, a man who ain’t afraid to push the envelope, was found unconscious by those angels who patrol the lineup.
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“Great job to the Maui boys for holding it down with water safety,” wrote the noted big-wave surfer Dave Wassel. “Retrieving unconscious victims is no easy task. Great job to the crew as always.”
Early reports suggest Yoon also suffered a broken back although Yoon’s filmmaker pal, the Soul Queen Andrew Kidman, tells me he got a text from Yoon yesterday.
“He def went to hospital but got out the next day,” said Kidman, who featured Yoon in his gorgeous, if wildly slow-moving film Spirit of Akasha, a sequel of sorts to Morning of the Earth and which premiered at the Sydney Opera House.
Kidman told Yoon’s story in Surfer eight years back.
The passage below details Yoon’s first taste of Jaws.
In the winter of 2011, Korean-Australian shaper Sam Yoon was on the island of Kauai, living out of his van with his wife, Ecco, and their two young children, Moana and Reno. One day a text came through from Jaws paddle-in pioneer Lyle Carlson. “Friday Jaws” was all it said.
Two days later, Yoon and his family were making camp on a bluff in an abandoned pineapple field that overlooks Jaws’ fabled reef. “It was night and we could hear the wave breaking,” Yoon recalls. “The whole family was nervous. Ecco knew I was planning to surf, and the kids didn’t know what was happening, but they could feel how tense we both were.”
Before dawn the next day, Yoon made his way across the lava boulders that cradle Pe’ahi. He was carrying a heavy single-fin gun he’d shaped in his backyard in Tugun, Queensland. He watched as another surfer picked his way across the rocks and jumped off, and then Yoon hurriedly followed. “I didn’t want to wait and watch,” Yoon explains. “I think the longer you watch, the more scared you get.”
The ocean was black and the channel was empty when Yoon caught his first wave. “I couldn’t see anything,” says Yoon. “It was like an old television slowly coming on when I started to make out the wave. I just hoped I would make the drop. My whole body was shaking. It was like surfing a wave in my dreams.”
