When Maverick’s winds up, it throws a hell of a pitch. And when it does, you can be sure that Powerlines Productions is going to be there to catch the action. On December 28, that action was real, and there were a whole pile of Maverick’s surfers there to push their limits.
Pete Mel was in the lineup, as you’d expect, and it’s likely he was thinking often about what was likely the best wave he’s ever ridden. It was a wave so good it changed surfing.
“[There] are those singular rides that in their sheer outrageousness have transcended the realm of possibility, instead setting a new standard for what was even imaginable,” Sam George wrote about that wave. “Picture Laird Hamilton’s Millennium Wave at Teahupoʻo, for example, or Koa Smith’s 27-second barrel at Skeleton Bay. Both rides represented more than just the next step in the evolution of surfing performance, but throughout their fleeting seconds (though not so fleeting in Smith’s case) signaled a total paradigm shift, each a point of departure from what was to what now is. The unimaginable suddenly becoming imaginable.”
Yeah, it’s likely difficult for Pete to surf Maverick’s without thinking about that wave. Of course he wasn’t the only one out there, and the whole crew put on quite the show.
