Wouldn’t it be interesting to see Kelly Slater ride a tidal bore? Or Carissa Moore on a boat wake? We get so used to seeing surfers on webcasts or in edits on the same medium: beautiful open faces or inside barrels that are bound to spit. And those are very fun waves to watch for certain. But there’s something intriguing about seeing gifted people do different things than we’re used to: like watching Patrick Mahomes play hoops or Michael Jordan on a baseball diamond. You can’t help but be intrigued.
River waves, of course, have become immensely popular lately – from in-river structures to river mouths dumping into oceans to natural features on remote waterways that have always been there – we’ve maybe just failed to utilize the potential. Until recently of course, when everyone seems to be getting in on the river action. That’s because river waves are more dynamic than we first thought, they’re in more beautiful settings than we ever imagined, and they’re increasingly more abundant as we discover more of them.
That’s where we came up with the idea for Skim River – take a surfer on a mini tour of some of the West’s best waves and make them look different than what we’ve seen before. For that, we needed something new. We needed Blair Conklin, a three-time world champion in the skimboarding discipline who rides waves unlike anyone else on Earth, it could be argued, using his quarter-inch rail to attack shorebreak in his native Laguna Beach, and his skate skills to decorate those waves in fascinating fashion. He brought that same style to the rivers of Idaho and Wyoming and pretty much captured the attention of anyone we came into contact with. Watching gifted people do their thing in places you wouldn’t expect will do that.
Editor’s Note: This feature is presented by GoRVing
