New Zealand
You don’t need to leave New Zealand to have an adventure. Explore the backyard with our featured stories on some of New Zealand’s best surf towns and coastlines.
Mount Maunganui-based surfer and ocean photographer Lou Burton mixes Xmas and New Year with a little pulsing east swell for the perfect summer tonic. Together with her mates she proves the great Kiwi summer surfing roadie is alive and well … with an occasional shark scare thrown in. Christmas came......
He may prefer to hide away from the limelight, but Jamie Civil keeps drawing attention to himself in pumping hollow waves. Civil would have to be one of New Zealand’s best barrel riders and this edit by Tim Shaw and Oscar Johns attests to that. Filmed over a winter in......
Kaikoura turns it on for the semi-annual Pete and Danny Memorial Contest recently. Glassy conditions and waves in the 3-6-foot range ensure competitors are fizzing at a local righthand point break, but it is the smoky campfires and laughter between two tribes that steals the show. Back in 1995 two......
It’s official! World Surf League today confirms the Piha Pro QS10,000 is real and will take place in March 2020, 2021 and 2022. The World Surf League (WSL) hasn’t been to New Zealand shores for five years – its last event a women’s 6000-rated Qualifying Series (QS) event held in......
When a low-pressure system parks itself off the east coast it spins everyone into a frenzy. The recent July swell was no different and Piha photographer, CPL, fresh up for air after a deadline, wasted no time. He picks up the story … “Yes!” That was the emphatic reply I......
Filmmaker Sara Guix, interviews singer songwriter Joe Wilson in Raglan for her next installment of her Why Did You Leave? series on travellers and inspiring people. “It’s a wonderfully honest and fun video on why I committed to travelling and leaving home to follow music,” laughs Joe. “This is an......
Details have been revealed about a bid for Auckland to host a World Qualifying Series 10,000-rated event at Piha in March 2020: the Piha Pro. But it is not a done deal … just yet. A document leaked to the NZ Herald today suggests the event will be a QS10,000......
A group of Southern surfers chase a record-breaking swell as it lines up a remote reef break buried deep in the Catlins. What transpires has it all: blood, guts, an inhospitable peak and the rise of a new talent in big-wave surfing. New Zealand Surf Journal takes you inside one......
Surf photographers go to extraordinary lengths to capture our waves and those who surf them. One of New Zealand’s finest even employs SAS-level training and wears a specially made sniper suit to roam the coastline completely undetected. He does it to capture line-ups that you’ll never find. He makes sure......
The February swell that swept into the East Coast and drifted south made a direct hit on Gisborne. The wonky, wobbly swell hit with such intensity that only few breaks could properly handle the volume of water moving around. The unusual easterly swell direction added to the confusion. But if......