This short video made me laugh out loud at one point. I don’t mean in a meek Lol text message response that rarely means I was actually laughing out loud, I mean I was sitting at my laptop, passing time by getting distracted with random Youtube videos instead of being productive in the middle of the day, and I blurted out a good belly laugh.
“Mayhem at the Superbank. Ok, you got me,” I said, clicking on the video thumbnail to see if there would actually be some mayhem or if I was signing up for one three-second clip of a guy getting burned and three more minutes of average surfing.
First clip: two dudes, one wave.
Second: two more dudes, one more wave.
And then there’s mayhem, only it wasn’t more people getting roasted, it wasn’t two-and-a-half more minutes of backpaddling or scuffles on the beach. It was just chaos. Wave after wave rolling through with no end in sight. A surfer scrambling to get into one here, getting to his feet, and getting all of two seconds on a wave before it races past him. Another scrambling for a wave with nobody screaming down the line, only he gets caught up on the lip and tumbles over the falls. The camera panning back out all in one shot searching for another surfer on another wave somewhere in the surfer-dotted corduroy. Rinse and repeat. The fact this is all in one sustained clip — takeoff, wipeout, pan, search, takeoff, wipeout, pan, search — is where the realization of the mayhem sets in. The camera work made me anxious, never breaking between waves, just looking for the next surfer on a wave and scanning through bodies paddling endlessly with the current. There are endless waves and endless surfers. We all hate crowds. We all love good waves. And even without the constant annoyance of people burning one another it eventually becomes comical.
Mayhem at the Superbank, an accurately named Youtube clip.
