Terrific wipeouts and many busted rhino chasers…
For a long period, Nazaré occupied joke territory, a gigantic burger populated by monstrous Euro-kooks.
Do you remember those early clips? Brave crabs and courageous stink-bugs zipping down fifty-foot burgers that didn’t break?
Of course, once fifty-foot turned into seventy-five and then a few lizards started paddling the joint, the game changed.
Shane Dorian visited a few years ago and described it as a graveyard for jetskis and said he was happy to ride two waves and get the hell out of there.
The skimboarder Brad Domke, who’s taken his finless Exile sled to Jaws and to Puerto Escondido, told me, “Its an ancient beast. It’s like there’s a monster in the water making the water move really strangely and scary. I don’t know why. You look at photos with these barreling waves and you’re, like, when our turn came on the wave it wouldn’t make sense. It feels so mutant and big.”
This film records a paddle session featuring Kai Lenny (whom you know and love), Nic Von Rupp, Twigger Baker, Mav’s teenager Luca Padua and so on.
From the filmmaker: The Bomb of the day was indisputably scored by Nic Von Rupp, who went deeper than Lucas Chumbo on a massive left hander (01:31) with a vertical drop. Lucas is not used to having someone deeper than him when conditions are at that level, he probably didn’t notice Nic was there until both were fully committed, one for the books right there. Besides this double bomb with Chumbo, Nic also scored an impossible air drop (01:13) an hour later, making him one of the main standouts of the entire session. Both his waves are probable XXL entry material for this season awards.