Tanner Gudauskas, the man with the permanent smile, has had an on-again-off-again relationship with surfing on Tour. As the youngest of the Gudang trio, he’s spent his fair share of time slogging it out to make it up the ladder, but, as is so often the case, he began to question his motives.
“When I fell off tour at Teahupoo in 2000-something, I had set a personal challenge to requalify,” he told Adventure Sports Network in mid-May. “The weight of that personal vendetta slowly grew until it became hard to carry around. I had linked my personal identity so tightly to this challenge I had stopped seeing why I had started in the first place … What putting a jersey on had become, more and more, was losing. As the dust settled after a humongous learning year I finished in a low-qualifying seed. Lowest I have had since starting the QS, yet my surfing felt like it was better than it had ever been before. I ended in 60th. The nosebleeds.”
He took some time to figure out exactly what he wanted—heading out on a soul-searching mission of sorts—and what he came up with was something called The Paradise Projects. “I am starting an art project this year,” he explained. “I wanted to have a place for quite awhile to keep creating and sharing what I love about surfing. It’s going to be my photos, stories, scrapbooks and surfing in one space and place.”
Now, a few months after the project launched, he’s dropped the third instalment of Project Wide. Along with brother Dane and long-time friend Nathaniel Curren, Tanner headed south to find some perfect Mexican pointbreaks, riding a new CI model called the Rocket Wide… and if we may be so bold, this kind of thing suits him better than a contest jersey ever did.
Follow The Paradise Projects on the website. PROJECT WIDE: Mexico from tanner gudauskas on Vimeo.
