Photo: Jamie O’Brien // YouTube
Sometimes, no matter how horrible it looks, you just have to go out. It’s a sentiment that can be true of drastically different scenarios in surfing, whether you arrive to the parking lot to find a lake instead of the peaks you were promised, or if conditions turn out to be just a tad bit gnarlier than expected. In the latest video from Jamie O’Brien, he found himself in the latter situation, while surfing Sunset with John John Florence, Nathan Florence and Lucas Godfrey.
The whole expedition started off with O’Brien finding Pipeline to be horrendously un-surfable, and then turning to an only slightly more manageable Sunset as a backup. As suspected, though, the conditions were not for the faint of heart. “Sunset just surfed me into the beach,” lamented Lucas Godfrey afterwards. “Took my board, snapped my leash. If you ever want to have a survival experience, go out to Sunset Beach when it’s too big. You learn real quick how to survive.”
“Some heavy beatdowns just went down,” chimed in Jamie. “It was hard out there. It was every bit of 12, maybe 15 feet. The buoys are maybe 12 feet, 17 seconds. It’s just a lot of water moving, but you always gotta kind of go out there and try and give it your best. That’s what we did.”
But how did the slab hunter and world champion fare in all this? According to Jamie, the Florence’s had a much different experience. “John got a couple of fun ones, [so did] Nate,” he added. “Me and Lucas just got pounded.”
