If we strip the entire experience of surfing down it’s an easy argument to make that the pinnacle of it all is to find oneself inside a long, open barrel, looking out at the world with water throwing overhead. The simplicity is both beautiful and damning at once.
With that in mind, there may be no wave on the planet that captures this sentiment better than Skeleton Bay. For years people whispered about a magical left so long and so hollow it sounded more like a mythical land than a real wave. And the journey to find it was just as epic: even if you were already near Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, you weren’t really near it. Then, barely a decade ago, Google Maps gave a few people just enough proof to make the final push and find the treasure. “Cory’s Left” became forever inked in surf’s history books and ever since, surfers have made the pilgrimage across the desert in droves knowing exactly what waited for them on the other end.
“When you get there in real life it’s just like, endless,” Benji Brand says. “It’s a super hard wave to document. We’ve figured out that the only way to really document the whole wave is with a GoPro. But then we find out that doesn’t do it justice,” he adds, pointing out that sure, first-person GoPro footage lets us see the view but somehow, some way, something is still missing from the real thing.
That’s the magnetism of the place and how it pulls us to follow charts and Google as much info about the overland travel as we possibly can. It represents any wave in a far-off place that we long to go to and ride. Preferably, alone. And we’d probably leave anything currently going on in our lives to find it. Or at least in our daydreams. As we’re staring out the office window, we would.
