Nowadays, the opportunity for a friend to call you out of the blue and be the one to announce, “It’s pumping,” is rare.
“Yeah, I know, Greg. I’ve been watching the forecast for the past two weeks and clearing my schedule so I can work on my wetsuit tan for the next 72 hours.”
Those spontaneous calls and impromptu sessions were a thing of beauty before every single one of us was plugged into the same two or three forecast services at all times. I can’t remember the last time a friend told me a swell was coming before my phone did. But when you’re friends with a guy like Nic von Rupp and have the will and resources to get to places like West Africa at the drop of a hat, those spontaneous calls are still very much on the table. They’re just on an entirely different level.
And that’s just the call Pedro Boonman got when von Rupp had been eyeing a swell directed at Skeleton Bay a couple of weeks ago. The waves were flat in Portugal — a coastline Boonman knows just about every nook and cranny of. The flight wouldn’t be cheap, the trip wouldn’t be easy, but Skeleton Bay was a wave Boonman was itching to cross off his list. Worth 23 hours of travel time just to get there and forking out a small fortune to do it all on a whim?
“It was like a last minute call. I booked the flight one day before, like a strike mission,” he told The Inertia. “But…mission accomplished. I just got the wave of my life.”
Boonman was still traveling when he first told us about the whole thing and you could hear that little bit of euphoria lingering in his voice. The wave in question lasted about 45 seconds, navigating multiple barreling sections throughout the whole thing and at least once looking like he was so deep he might not make it out. You can see by the look on his face right after that he couldn’t really believe the whole experience.
Mission accomplished.
