Pipeline has been good to Koa Rothman. Growing up on a steady diet of the world’s best barrel has turned him into one of the world’s best surfers, and he’s parlayed that handily into a career in surfing/vlogging. So when the North Shore winter ends, Koa’s generally not happy about it. Especially this year, when the world was shut down and his summer-time travel was thrown in the trash. But now, Pipeline is rolling out of bed and stretching her arms. It’s not fully winter on the North Shore just yet, but the winter’s dawn is brightening the sky. And that dawn, historically, has seen some pretty good runs of swell.
“Over the past few years,” Koa says, “I’ve gotten some incredible waves in early-to-mid October.” And that, of course, is right now. And the waves Koa gets, of course, or incredible.
It’s not the safest place on earth to surf, though, and Koa took a few minutes to explain to the layperson who has no fundamental understanding of why surfing could be dangerous (big waves, shallow bottom). “We have these massive swells coming from across the North Pacific smashing into these little islands here with an extremely shallow reef shelf,” he said. “Here at Backdoor is literally this deep if not no water sometimes on the inside. When all that energy is focussed out there, there are some ten-foot sets. That ten-foot set will push you straight into dry reef. And the reef here is not like… it’s not like how you would think a flourishing, live Tahitian reef is. It’s like cement pillars. Gnarly caves. It’s like falling on the gnarliest concrete. That’s why North Shore is so dangerous: we have such big, powerful waves on such shallow reef.”
Winter is coming, folks. Winter is coming.
