Last year was a bit of a roller coaster for Nate Behl. And that’s not hyperbole. For a guy who spends a solid amount of time traveling to the best waves one can imagine — definitely more often than the average Joe ripper — his typical itinerary of dream destinations didn’t exactly roll out as planned.
It all started with a planned trip to Indonesia in June, 2019. And by started, we mean started crashing down. “I tore my MCL in June right before the best run of swell of the year,” Nate tells The Inertia. So he headed straight back home, got that stem patched up, rehabbed, and was ready for another crack at another world-class destination by August: Namibia. Again, it was the swell of the year, which just so happened to coincide with weather conditions and air traffic control complications that forced his plane to turn right around mid-flight. Are you sensing a trend here? Maybe the third time’s a charm, right? Wrong. With a second crack at scoring in Indo planned for September, Behl had one more chance to score in 2019 only to find himself grounded in Japan for two days when a typhoon struck.
“Ended up that I missed the swell and then another swell popped up,” he says. “Then I got a massive infection before the second swell and then flew back home.”
Sigh. Poor guy.
This year hasn’t presented the same litany of changed plans for Nate Behl (at least no more than everybody else on the planet in 2020, we assume), but he did spend the past six months working back home without surfing. So, as one might say, Nate was due. More than a year after tearing that MCL, he found his way back to Indo recently.
“Our friend that lives over here most of the year helped us get a Visa, and we were super lucky to be able to squeeze into the country,” he says. Then he walked straight into this wave as soon as he and his friends arrived.
You earned this one, Nate.
