“That was one of the best days of surfing of my entire life.”
I remember for my twenty-first birthday gift, some years ago now, I was gifted a Bali-Lombok-Sumbawa boat trip from my parents, the journey taking in the then just-established route of Desert Point, Yo-Yos, Super Suck and Scar Reef.
Waves, of course, are as cyclical as the iron-on jeans now worn by the same packs of men who would’ve punched you in the head for dressing like a faggot ten years earlier and three of those four waves went out of vogue sometime in the nineties, disappearing from the pages of magazines and never making it to the online era.
An important case is the wave Super Suck, which winds into glorious Maluk Bay there in West Sumbawa. Forgotten by the surf media but not by the Indo regulars who stay in the pretty little camps in front of what is a relatively fickle wave and one best surfed on a fullish sorta tide.
The Hawaiian heartthrob and scion of North Shore strongman Fast Eddie, Koa Rothman, recently experienced the joy of Super Suck along with his old friend and former tour surfer Dean Morrison.
Rothman, who is thirty, has a golden-brown glazed handsomeness and, unlike most of the bigger name professional surfers, is sharp enough to ad lib his way through twenty-five minutes or so of his day-to-day life for his blog This is Livin’.
In this episode, Koa Rothman Super Suck deals with Super Suck with the same insouciance he shows Pipeline and where the pack, and it’s quite a pack, is fizzing back and forth, Koa calmly threads each section even as it gets quite hairy.
Koa Rothman describes Super Suck as the “craziest wave” he’s ever surfed and says his sessions there comprise “one of the best days of surfing of my entire life.”
The episode is let down, but only slightly, with Koa Rothman’s POV angle, our hero never quite getting deep enough to capture the stunning deep-in-the-hole angle as popularised by his neighbour Nathan Florence.
Still, essential.