Nic von Rupp had a busy winter. Not that any season is ever really mellow when your livelihood depends on tracking swells and racking up airline points at the drop of a hat. But for a guy whose big wave home base is Nazaré, an exceptionally slow big wave season on that side of the Atlantic actually opened up doors for a series of unique experiences for von Rupp.
“Never in my wildest dreams (did I think) I would surf Cortes Bank, the Eddie Aikau, and get barreled at Jaws all within two weeks of January,” he wrote us in an email.
Ironically, the flurry all really started with the day the Eddie didn’t go back in January. Von Rupp had just been on the North Shore competing in the Pipe Masters with enough downtime at home in Portugal afterward to pretty much drop his bags and have to turn around again. The expected green light for the Eddie — the green light that never was — meant a return trip to Oahu then scrambling to chase the same swell elsewhere. And “elsewhere” turned out to be a session at Cortes Bank, which he’d only really ever surfed growing up on a PS2.
“I felt like fish bait,” he says of being in the middle of the Pacific waiting for waves.
The Eddie did eventually run once Nic was back on Oahu, and before going home one more time he decided to stick around just in case the Pe’ahi Challenge ran. It didn’t. But there was one really good Jaws swell that churned out a barrel von Rupp still remembers as clear as day.
“I just had the most incredible vision.” Then… “the lip just exploded on me. That was one of the most incredible lines I’ve ever drawn in my life,” he says.
