"On a perfect day, offshore winds, good swell direction, you could easily get the longest tube of your life.”
Earlier today and after a flurry of ado since its taping into Micronesia around one month ago, the Travis Rice-engineered surf contest Natural Selection premiered on YouTube.
You might’ve heard of Trav’s Natural Selection, a freeride snowboard contest designed in 2021 to take athletes away from snow parks and into raw backcountry environments.
The concept, as the name suggests, draws from Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” where competitors must adapt to unpredictable and wildly rugged terrain to succeed.
Natural Selection now also includes mountain bikes, skiing and, here we are, surf. If you watched you might’ve been left in a couple of minds about it all.
The lack of star power hurt, this thing has Kelly Slater written all over it, the wave is a hell of a thing, sure, but it’s open to wind and impossible to shoot unless you’ve got a Larry Haynes (RIP) or a Dan Russo shooting wide-angle while the usual land guys, Miller and so on, zoom around on the back of skis.
As it was, the judges, the film crew, were on a boat skippered by the great Martin Daly, read all about Marty here, and here, and here, flying in and out of the channel, Teahupoo esque.
At one point a smaller support boat coming in to the stern of the film vessel was lifted up by the ten feet of swell and pushed a hole into its hull. The contest was put on hold, briefly, Marty threw on his tank, dived into the drink and epoxied up the hole.
You’ll find out the winner in two days, Feb 20, USA time, but in the meantime, I interviewed Harry Bryant, a twenty-eight-year-old Australian with a bushy hairdo and albino moustache that twinkle like glitter on a burlesque dancer’s corset.
There is a recklessness to Harry’s surfing as well as drama and attitude.
The wave, he says, although not in so many words, is like being rimmed by a trannie who might be your uncle. Danger mixed with a terrific excitement, a wild ol what-if.
Harry says he heard about Natural Selection while he was hovering around the North Shore in December, readying for the Vans Pipe Masters. He says he’d never really tuned into the snowboarding Natural Selection event but was pricked curious “to see if someone other than the surfers, the WSL or Stab could run a surf event that was more exciting.”
Did they?
“Uh, I reckon, you know what, extremely tough circumstances to run an event smoothly the first time,” he says. “I reckon the actual format will get smoothed out over time. This first one, we were all the way out in the Pacific trying to mould the format around the waves. It’s a pretty gnarly and tough zone to run an event: off a boat, on a wave in the middle of the Pacific. Pretty gnarly.”
The problem, apart from the wind, was getting the judges and camera crew in the zone to see and record the magnitude of the rides.
“Martin’s one of the best captains and super aware of his surroundings but he wasn’t anchored, just sitting in the channel, and accelerating and reversing to get the judges in the spot to see every wave. All the cameras were on the same boat so if the boat wasn’t in the spot then there was no footage and the judges couldn’t tell what was going on.”
He describes Marty’s feat of repairing his damaged boat as “fucking crazy. He had an epoxy gun and was able to seal the boat while submerged underwater with fucking twelve-foot waves breaking around him.”
As for the wave, this righthander made lightly famous by Kelly Slater back in 2012, Harry says it’s “one of the best waves in the world on its day. I’d love to see it in all-time conditions. It’s definitely prone to swell but when you’re prone to swell you’re prone to all the elements. I saw the Florence lads went there a couple months prior and it looked similar: super windy, too big, real ledgy, deep water, super hard to surf. It’s really hard to navigate, to know what to ride. I haven’t been to many waves like that. You can’t compare it. Teahupoo is the closest thing. It’s so ledgy. It comes out of deep water and this is a similar takeoff to Chopes but you’re locking into a kilometre of a long, long stretch of reef. On a perfect say, offshore winds, good swell direction, you could easily get the longest tube of your life.”
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Size-wise, although it may not be apparent in the vision accompanying the event, he says it was twelve-to-fifteen foot on the sets.
“I pulled back on one wave that genuinely petrified me. I’ve been hunting slabs for the last five years and have gone to some pretty gnarly waves, pushing myself in bigger slabby waves. There it gets to a point where it’s too big to paddle, too slabby, moving too quick and so steep. Everyone was stumped on the conditions. Trying to get a wave and successfully ride it and trying to hold an event and get a few waves in a heat, it was hard to comprehend.”
Haz says he rode a six-foot Timmy Patterson, the only board he could access as his others were buried under a ton of board bags on the boat. He says he was impressed by everyone who came on the trip. Everyone had a swing, as they say.
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“For how gnarly it is, no one had been there, no one had competitive edge. We were in the same boat , literally, paddling out and not knowing what the wave was going to do, what to do, how to approach it. Everyone was going really hard. Eithan and Al had a heat together that was sick to watch, one of the sickest heats I’ve ever seen in front of my eyes. When that style of surfing goes down it’s pretty special to watch.”
Although no surfers were gravely wounded during the event, Soli got a few stitches in his wing but that was about it, the photographer Jason Murray had his leg destroyed some days later while filming from the tinny. The boat flew over a wave and he landed awkwardly, snapping his ankle, which would require surgery to secure it with bolts, and ripping the MCL in his knee.
“The whole thing was dramatic, to tell the truth,” says Harry.
Tune in on Feb 20, US, Feb 21, Aus, for Finals Day.
