John John Florence’s Vela isn’t even close to a plain ol’ surf edit. In fact, it’s about as far from one of those as John’s surfing is from the average Joe’s. It’s a four-part series, beautifully shot, that shows a sailing trip with John John, Kona Johnson, Nathan Florence, Jacques Vincent, and Eric Knutson.
Florence has been interested in sailing for a long time now, but like many of his exploits, it seems to have been a little bit understated. Over the years, he’s become something of an expert, and with a bum-knee, he decided that he had some time to take a trip he’d been thinking about for a long time. Thus, Vela was born. The trip was an open ocean voyage larger than any they’d made before, so it made sense that there were some nerves.
“I love surfing and competing,” he said, “and that’s where I put the majority of my time, but getting injured this year kinda gave me that silver lining to go sailing and do this dream trip I’ve been wanting to do. I just wanted to do an open ocean trip and go somewhere that none of us had been. I was pretty nervous about a trip this big.”
In the fourth and final episode that you see above, the crew travels from Palmyra Island to Washington Island and Fanning Island for an exploratory trip that we’d all be lucky to do at least once in our lives. And of course, they surfed. But more importantly, they learned a whole bunch of new stuff and met a whole bunch of new people.
