A photo of one surfer on one wave, with two camera angles of the same moment. So meta. Photos: YouTube//Screenshot
Nate Florence is a sucker for a slab. That fact was made obvious when he began traipsing all over the planet looking for the biggest and heaviest of them. Called the Slab Tour, his travels saw Nate tucking himself into cavernous tubes with lips as thick as the wave is tall on numerous occasions. But when it comes to slabs, The Shock might be one of the scariest.
Florence recently released an edit detailing his trip to Rio. The Shock is not a wave for most surfers. It is, of course, stupidly heavy. It’s unpredictable and almost impossible to catch. It breaks over a whisper of water, and it’s a wave that really could kill a person.
“We went out first time to The Shock, you could say I got the full Shock experience,” said Florence in the first edit. “The ocean was just non-stop crazy chaos. The chops were as big as the waves, so it was hard to read it, but we did the best we could.”
He didn’t come away from the first session without having the fear of God put into him. “I think I got really lucky,” he said of one particularly bad wipeout. “Had I slammed the rocks in front of the wave… I think it would have been game over.”
One of the scarier moments of the second came before Nate made it out to the lineup. Mahina, Nate’s wife, was filming when Francisco Porcella fell on a thick one and just… disappeared.
“Umm, hello?” she asks from behind the camera. “Oh my goodness. Hello? Wait, what? Am I confused, or did he not pop up?”
As it turned out, Porcella was washed inside, but the Mahina’s reaction was one of muted terror. It would be hard, one would think, to watch your spouse put themselves in situations like that on a fairly routine basis.
In the follow up video you see here, Nate gets a little deeper into what it’s really like surfing The Shock. Instead of towing, he opted to paddle — which, to the layperson, looks to be nearly impossible. And it was. Taking five waves on the head and needed a ski to pull him back out didn’t stop him from grabbing the rope, though, and all the cameras pointed at him made for a pretty interesting multi-angle view.
