Sessions
From a dark cloud of calamity emerges a swell like no other. This is the story of Cyclone Gabrielle … It’s a bittersweet tale for the surf community. While Cyclone Gabrielle tore communities apart throughout the North Island, days later its swell brought communities together. The ominous sight of Cyclone......
Nineteen-year-old Chilean filmmaker Fernando Jara brings us this cinematic insight into the arrival of the Cyclone Gabrielle swell as it rolled into Christchurch and eventually found favour on the banks of Taylor’s Mistake. Fernando is a budding cinematographer who arrived in New Zealand when he was 15 to join his......
This was the scenario: There’s a 50-50 chance a marginal swell forecast might be enough to lure a fickle reef break to life. It’s a hell man slab that few can really do justice to. Do you roll the dice? We did (but one of us paid the price). I......
It’s not every day you get to share eight-foot caverns with your mates with less than 10 people out, but given the right circumstances and location, it’s still achievable here in New Zealand. Luckily this was us recently at a fickle beachbreak deep in the Catlins. Ollie Charlesworth had just......
Team Taranaki earned a lineup to themselves in pumping conditions at Meatworks during the South Island Grom Series Kaikoura Grom comp earlier this month. The team paddled out to pay their respects to Jeremy Grainger who passed away earlier in the week. They soon had the peaks to themselves as......
The concept is simple: take a bunch of Backdoor’s best team surfers and put them into the best waves we can find in the south. Covid has other ideas. The lineup is impeccable: newly crowned national champion Daniel Farr, Under 18 national champion Ava Henderson, inaugural Super 16 champion Taylor......
The DHL Super Rugby Pacific competition is a pressure cooker. Especially with Covid running rampant – an axe that could neutralise any team at a moment’s notice. For Crusaders’ coach Scott “Razor” Robertson that pressure is best wrangled with a pre-game surf. It is the morning before the Moana Pasifika......
There’s something very exciting happening at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games venue of Teahupo’o in Tahiti. The local surfers are stepping up to the plate in a big way, led by a mixture of the older guard and the new rising stars in the Tahitian lineup. In this film teenage......
Filmed over the nine months of the university year in Ōtepoti Dunedin, the Bask series returns with a vengeance. Filmmaker Isaac Chadwick has turned up the dial on the party and surf elements of Dunedin’s student surfer lifestyle. It’s clear early on that twice the blood sweat and beers have......
There is no question that surfing has special properties that few of us can fully grasp … or thrive without. It just is what it is. Immersion in the brine. The rise and fall of the ocean’s surface and real moments of intensity, fear, power and vulnerability. For Gisborne surfer,......