Australia’s Jordy Lawler is no slacker. He took on a full-time competitive schedule on the QS in 2016 and has been splitting his time between that and the Challenger Series since 2021. Last year things were especially packed on that grind: a full six-stop CS slate paired up with nine QS contests. Throw in his two bouts on the Championship Tour in 2022 at the Pipe Pro and Sunset Pro and Jordy Lawler has suited up for a grand total of 35 contests between the QS, CS and CT since the beginning of 2021. That’s a grind. It’s tiring just to think about the nonstop travel and the nights spent sleeping wherever a bed is available.
Naturally, Jordy is friends with people on the same grind. Micah “Margo” Margieson and Reef Heazlewood are no strangers to chasing rankings themselves, with similar resumes across the CS the QS between them and a handful of CT cameos for Heazlewood over the years. Combined, the three friends accounted for a total of more than 30 events and more than 70 heats in 2023.
You can imagine there isn’t a ton of downtime in all of that chaos but when Lawler wasn’t locked up with an event in pursuing a CT dream, he used the opportunity to…surf some more. He and filmmaker Tom Hoy teamed up throughout that busy 2023 in between comps with a pretty simple idea for a surf flick — “an edit where people can watch and want to go on a surf trip with their mates,” Lawler tells us. To do that, he picked up the phone and called friends of his own to lay down the inspiration for others. Margo, Heazlewood, and free surfer Oscar Langburne joined Lawler and Hoy in parts of New Zealand, Hawaii, Portugal, and El Salvador on random trips throughout the year to put together 23-minutes of clips.
Lawler and Hoy even rounded out the whole indie feel of their project, CADENCE, by renting out a studio back home in Australia, where Jordy grabbed some more friends and laid down a few original tracks to finish it off. Not a bad way to cap off a busy year filled with more heats than most of us will see or surf in a lifetime.
