Mick Fanning, meanwhile, says tanks are "boring".

I still see wavepools like a boy examining a naked woman for the first time, looking over the subject each inch by inch, legs apart, stomach pushed forward, a frankness in my stare as I dreamily lick a Turkish delight.

Don’t care if it’s Wavegarden, Slater, American Wave Machines or Surf Loch. I do love them all.

Jamie O’Brien is similarly enriched by the experience.

The almost-forty year old who won the Pipe Masters in 2003 (“It’s a long time ago. Fuck it pisses me off,” Jamie says) appears in a wave pool documentary made by Red Bull that also features three-time world champion Mick Fanning, who presents the counter argument.

Mick, who has diplomatic immunity now that he’s retired from pro surfing, says the tour event at Slater’s pool event was “boring” and that after a day in the tank he’s “done.”

Where do you stand?

Are you JOB or Mick?

"Exhilarating, scary, and crazy good!"

Along with aerial pioneers Sierra Kerr and Erin Brooks, Maui shredder Chrislyn Simpson-Kane is making the existing hierarchy of female pro surfers look a little, how would you say, off the money.

In this short clip, we find Simpson-Kane, nicknamed Sissie, getting whipped into Jaws by Brazilian big-waver and “extreme mom” Andrea Moller, who appears in the Guinness World Records for riding the world’s largest paddle-in wave.

“I towed Pe’ahi today and it was exhilarating, scary, and crazy good! I felt like puking after my first wave but it got better afterwards,” the kid admitted.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CKGH-z6DS1f/

She ain’t the youngest out there, howevs.

Steve “Baby” Roberson, twelve, has been a vet of the joint since he was ten and first surfed Waimea Bay when he was nine.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CKR7ibgnsGO/

Wild, yes?

"Annihilating wipeouts!"

Rare is filmic evidence of Waimea Bay’s outrageous entry.

Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing describes it thus. “This near-vertical plunge from crest to trough is in fact one of the sport’s greatest challenges, testing the surfer’s equipment, wave judgment, fitness, and nerve. The drop will often ‘jack’ (steepen and expand) without warning as the wave curls over, a phenomenon that can actually reverse the surfer’s forward motion and send him back up toward the crest—and then to an annihilating wipeout.”

In this video by Rory Pringle, and featuring Mason Ho, Ivan Florence, Coz Colapinto and co, you get a read on what it’s like to pilot a ten-foot womb-duster over the ledge on a twenty-to-twenty-five-foot day, waves in any other year that would’ve been gobbled up by competitors in the Eddie.

A total crotch fire.

Seventy feet? Eighty-five feet?

In this episode of Jamie O’Brien’s vlog, we find the thirty seven year old who nearly died on a one-foot day at Waikiki, shepherding his friend Ben Gravy into waves very much beyond his level, and with support from North Shore charger Kalani Chapman.

Jamie, who is 190 pounds of rock hard muscle with 40 pounds of sturdy protective fat and who grew up at Pipe, snatches POV footage that is breathtaking.

Even Ben Gravy, as he struggles with the machinations of his borrowed tow-board, unsure whether to jump up and down to regather speed or fade back to the juice, is a revelation. A still from the session, I imagine, will hang over his little bed and perhaps even in a New Jersey cafe.

Are the waves twenty-to-thirty feet, as suggested by Jamie, or seventy-to-eighty-five feet as proposed by movie star handsome Ben?

Whatever, the three survive the “swell of the century” and each man rides the wave of his life.