Korea’s Sam Yoon returns from near-death wipeout with “the most unexpected barrel you’ll see today”

“It was like an old television slowly coming on when I started to make out the wave. My whole body was shaking."

The Korean-Australian surfer Sam Yoon, whom you previously met on these pages two years ago when he was found unconscious at Jaws, his lights turned off after he lost an edge on a thirty-footer, has made a glorious return to the winner’s circle with a ride called “the most unexpected barrel you’ll see today.” 

Yoon, fifty or thereabouts, who is famous for riding his self-shaped twin-fin guns, was filmed during the recent, like current, run of swell on the  Gold Coast. 

We see Yoon crouched deep, catching rails hither and thon, successfully run through a series of not-so-easy sections, his eyebrows raised in a mild astonishment at the feat.

No holes in this bitch’s fishnets, as they say on the streets.

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Comments lit up.

That was fucking mental! Absolutely pinned the ears back

Crouching Tiger hidden dragon 

Homeboy surfing/looking like a RICK GRIFFIN CARTOON!!!!

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.”

And over at Surfing World, and shortly after the wipeout when the memory of it still loomed vivid, Yoon described the almost tragedy thus:

“I fall almost like falling from a coconut tree. Then I thought I was just going to relax, and it’ll just be like another wipeout with a bit more violence. But the moment I hit that the face of the wave, instantly, like a lightning struck my body. The neurosurgeon said to me later, my spine might have snapped, and when my spine snapped, your body’s natural reaction is your nerves, they shut down. Your arms and legs get really hot, especially your arms and your thumbs get hot. And like, fucking, you no can move. It’s like, paralysed. So, after the shock when I land, I felt like the most peaceful feeling ever. I knew that my spirit has left the body, just real quickly. If that was death, I was talking to myself and saying, ‘Sam, don’t worry. Just take the ride.’”

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