I couldn’t wait. Thanks to countless social media shares, surf forecast apps and ad nauseam news coverage, this was set to be the greatest winter of surf a California kid had ever seen.
But just one month in to the 2015-16 winter season, this nearly 40-year-old “kid” shredded his shoulder on one of the biggest days he’d seen on the Central Coast. Just like that, El Niño was over.
The next morning, I woke at sunrise with a volcanic hangover and a right arm half hanging off my torso, uncertain just how long it would take before I paddled out again. But as the sun rose over the ridgeline, I was startled from my morning haze by three surfers sprinting through my beachside campsite as if Tony Robbins had organized a hot coal walk.
While I’ll never disclose the location, I will say one of those surfers was Jeff Johnson, of 180° South fame, and a pair of buddies who charged some of the biggest waves I’d ever seen on this stretch of the Central Coast. No cameras. No hoopla. Just three dudes charging monster sets on a coastline that’s blessed to encounter waves like this only once a decade, if lucky.
The trio struggled to get out once the wind shifted, but at least one from the group caught a bomb that was so big I didn’t even recognize he was on the wave through first glimpse from my telephoto 300mm lens. Upon further review, the surfer actually took the left. He was so small in comparison to the wave that I followed the right with my viewfinder and never even saw the ant-like figure going backside, skimming down the face like as if this was Titans of Mavericks.
As I scrolled through the footage captured on this epic day, I realized that wasn’t the end of my El Niño. This was just the beginning. I spend the next dozen weekends capturing some of the most epic surf I had ever seen in the Golden State.
Enter The El Niño Effect, an independent surf film that showcases local surfers charging those 2015-16 El Niño swells up and down the coast of California. The film also features original music from local, up-and-coming bands from around the state and has been made available for free on YouTube.
The film is not a “traditional” big-wave surf documentary dominated by World Surf League pros, rather it’s an independent, sponsor-free film documenting “Average Joes” making most of El Niño’s powerful swells at everyday surf spots.
But unlike many surf films, I decided I didn’t want to name any of the spots filmed out of respect for the local surfers and the hometown breaks they frequent. In fact, the only surfers or sports named in the film came during the highly-publicized Titans of Mavericks Big Wave Surf Contest, which I filmed from the water. You can see that footage from the Mavs contest, and more importantly, the swells local surfers were blessed with up and down the coast in our new site El Niño Effect.
Editor’s Note: To learn more and watch the film for free, visit ChasingSurf.com.
