The term “novelty wave” gets dropped give or take 8,000 times a day in the realm of surf media right now. I know this because we feed that beast daily from The Inertia office and can’t think of a more appropriate description of the weird waves we know shouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be looked at twice in the absence of a deep, deep fiending for some surfboard riding. Thanks, Ben Gravy.
See, here’s the beauty of it: surfers have always thrown around the word “perfect” with total disregard for the fact that no such thing exists. Every human understands the irony of perfection is that it’s an idea, not a tangible thing, but humans who surf are all guilty of looking at and looking for waves that we want to describe as “perfect.” I’d argue most of our lives end up being consumed by it and guided by it.
Novelty waves are the exact opposite of all that. We surf them because they’re accessible when perfection isn’t, and we find fun in navigating their little quirky (or sketch) takeoffs and bumpy faces. We get in the water with zero expectations of paddling into perfection. And we just have fun. That’s liberating. No pressure. And on top of all that, a fulfilling session at a proper novelty wave also often brings the same luster as perfect Pipe because many of them can be just as rare.
“It took over two years for another big black blob to light up those inside harbor walls,” Editor in Chief of Blue Magazine Jan Blaffert told The Inertia.
While the entire world was eyeing Nazaré a little over a week and the rare black blob floating in the Atlantic that turned it on, Jan was chasing down weirdos in the port of Amsterdam. “Seems like wallride-surfing has caught on over here, since there was a local crew already on it,” Jan says.
Just goes to show how far people will go for a few blown-out waves refracting off a harbor wall, all while one of the most popular waves in the world is over 50 feet and much of Europe is lit up like the Vegas Strip. So if you appreciate rare moments, this fits the bill.
