Surfing
Surfing
Bucket List: 6 waves you need to surf this year
It's time to start making those New Year's Resolutions come true.
If you're anything like the rest of us, your holiday season wasn't spent dreaming of presents and trees and parties – it was spent looking forward, planning new places to go in 2019, and getting very, very excited about the upcoming 12 months.
It's important to have that list – that bucket list – of what you want to do in the upcoming year. Where you want to surf, the countries you've just GOT to go to. So to help you out, we rang up expert passport-filled Andrew Shield to give us his list of 6 must-surf spots in 2019...
1. Surf a Mexican Point on a huge South Swell
2 min
Puerto Escondido's best tube rides
After a summer of big swells at Puerto Escondido, Mexico, local filmer Edwin Morales brings us a bone-crunching highlight package of the worst wipeouts of the season.
Puerto Escondido is an amazing beach break and a good place to be based on a surf trip. But when it gets big and scary at Puerto (for most mortals anyway) there’s an assortment of right-hand points a few hours drive south that are as good as any point break in the world.
2. Surf Speedies at G Land
The reason why the Gold Coast is famous...
© Andrew Shield
Grajagan is an incredibly consistent wave. In most swells at least one section of the reef will be serving up a decent wave. The real jewel in the crown though is the Speedies section. It’s a perfect mechanical barrel that starts from a deceptively mushy takeoff section called the Launching Pad and funnels down the ruler edged reef. When it’s on it makes the rest of the waves further up the reef seem pretty ordinary.
Speedies isn’t easy to score though. It needs a big swell from just the right direction to coincide with a big high tide in the middle of the day. If you love left barrels, grab a tide chart and start circling those dates on the calendar..
3. Score a good day at Kirra
Terrifying... but how could you say no?
© Andrew Shield
It used to be way easier to score perfect Kirra pre-2000. And that’s not just Old Farts saying how “it used to be better back in my day” it’s an unfortunate fact. The swell and right winds are no less rare, but since all the sand pumping and the messing around with the rocks at Big Groyne, there’s no guarantee that a perfect swell now will produce even a good closeout barrel let alone the perfect 15-second plus barrels it used to serve up.
There’s been the odd day in the last few years that have had people saying that the bank is back, but it seems to be a swell to swell proposition. It’s still well worth the gamble though and even a sectioning six foot day at Kirra is still probably going to be the some of the best waves you’ll ever get.
4. Surf BIG Cloudbreak
Andy Irons, submerged
© Brian Bielmann
Andy Irons, a wave and a surfer at their peak
© Brian Bielmann
Reef McIntosh, on the day of days
© Brian Bielmann
Ian Walsh and the steepest perfection
© Brian Bielmann
Cloudbreak at this size isn’t for everybody. Heck, sometimes it's not even for the best surfers in the world! It doesn’t matter if you’re watching from the safety of a boat or if you’re sitting on a big board trying to psych yourself to paddle deep enough on, or at least look over the ledge of, one of these monsters. Just being there and witnessing waves like this is pretty special.
5. Chase a typhoon swell somewhere in the Pacific Basin
15 min
Peaking: Ian Walsh
Ian Walsh and a crew of Hawaiian surfers travel to Japan chasing a massive typhoon swell.
It’s actually incredibly frustrating trying to score waves off a storm system that can travel hundreds of kilometres in a single day. The forecasting of a typhoon’s track has become very accurate in recent times but they can still play tricks on you. A slight deviation off track can mean the difference between a couple of days of epic surf or a trip spent hunkered down drinking San Miguel while torrential rain lashes the roof. When you roll the dice and score though it makes it even more worthwhile.
6. Score some waves somewhere “unusual”
Rewarded, off the beaten track
© Andrew Shield
Not all perfect surf comes with palm trees and bathtub water temperature. Some places are down right inhospitable and you'll wake up in the morning wishing you were going snow skiing rather than surfing. The payoff though is usually a lack of crowds. It’s also pretty cool to be able to show your mates a picture of the epic waves you scored on your latest surf trip and know they don’t have a clue where it is.
