Watching clips of heavy surf breaks from afar can give one a false sense of security. You look at footage of Teahupo’o or wherever and despite the fact that you know it’s a dangerous wave, you can still kind of picture yourself ripping it up. You think about how much more you could do on a wave like that, versus the knee-high slop at your home break, and briefly forget that you’d probably just end up getting thrashed on the paddle-out, pasted by the lip as soon as you tried to pull into a barrel, or iced out by locals and never even make it to a wave face in the first place.
That’s never a problem at the Wedge. The Wedge always looks insane. Every wave resembles something out of a J.M.W. Turner painting and every moment I look at one I’m glad I’m not riding it, because that would mean I was seconds away from being pounded through six-inch deep water directly into the sand. Though I respect and admire the surfers and bodyboarders who ride the Wedge, I can confidently say I have nothing in common with them because I am not an insane person.
That being said, I love to watch them work. The new video from BEEFS T.V. has everything you could want in a Wedge edit: crushing tubes, flipping bodyboarders, bizarre wave formations… and one lone snorkeler who appears to be calmly dead-man floating through all the chaos. You do you, man.
