"It goes beyond just feeling good. It’s a state of mind as well.”

It ain’t cruel to note that big-wave surfer and founder of the Big Wave Tour Gary Linden, who has been whittling boards in his Oceanside factory for almost fifty years, is in the sunset of his life.

Linden, who was born only five years after the self-annihilation of Hitler in his Berlin bunker and in the same year Chinese and North Korean commmies stormed the thirty-eighth parallel, ain’t slowing down, however.

In this edit from the Caribbean, we see the seventy three year old giving hell to a hurricane swell, with very little obvious decrepitude in his approach to surfing.

“I’m a big wave surfer, that’s been my passion. I wasn’t afraid of the ocean or of big waves, and that set me apart from most other surfers,” Linden says. “Even before I rode a surfboard, my father took me to the ocean and taught me to play in the waves, and about the currents, and body surfing. The freedom of it was like nothing else. I had asthma and hay fever, and when I was in the ocean I didn’t feel any of that. Whereas on land the pollens and the dryness just made being on the land kind of miserable. Like a fish out of water in a lot of ways. It was always rewarding for me to go into the ocean. It goes beyond just feeling good. It’s a state of mind as well.”

Essential.


The compelling star of Vans' Weird Waves series rides a five-minute long tidal wave in remote Indonesia!

If you flip to page 314 of the latest Guinness Book of World Records, a compendium of record-breaking feats that was the brainchild of the Managing Director of Guinness Brewery Hugh Beaver in 1955, you’ll find an entry for most turns on a wave.

An obscure record, yeah, but currently held by Cristóbal de Col for 34 turns on a wave at Chicama in Peru, occasionally and lazily referenced as the world’s longest lefthander.

Held by dirty old Cristóbal that is until a few days ago when Puerto Rico’s Dylan Graves (whom you must never ask about old interviews where he said he liked to swish his long hair around women’s breasts, sometimes head-butts his friends when he’s boozed, and likes it “when girls aren’t afraid to let some dirty shit come out. I just like it when they say fuck”), uploading a video to YouTube where he triumphantly rides a five-minute long tidal wave in Indonesia, completing an astonishing forty turns, even throwing in a couple of quasi-airs for good measure.

“One of the funnest/longest rides I’ve ever had on a short board and it happened to have 7 identical twins,” writes Graves. “Recently got to experience/ surf a tidal phenomenon in Indonesia known as the Bono to the locals or in the surf world as the 7 ghosts cause of a unique feature known as “whelps” that occur in undular tidal bores when a tidal wave front is followed by secondary waves known as whelps. In this case there are 7, hence the name 7 ghosts.”

Graves, who is thirty-seven, has submitted the ride to the Guinness people and is awaiting confirmation of his astonishing feat.

A slick edit of the event is in the works, says Dylan, which promises to be “even better than an excellent milkshake served by a happy fat waitress.”

Essential.