Lately, a couple things had me thinking about the tube. First was the foam-ball fest at the recent Championship Tour event held at Teahupo’o, where both men and women competitors put on a display of barrel riding that definitively recalibrated a previously vaulted standard of performance, specifically where competition is concerned. Heat after heat, it became clear that a long tube ride was no longer enough to produce an excellent score, but that now surfers had to lock themselves deep enough in the curl to be caught and lifted by the roiling foam ball, adding a wild, bucking bronco element to already dramatic positioning. Welcome to the New Tube.
Then there was the astonishing performance of young Caity Simmer in a recently released video, in which the diminutive Oceanside charger is shown completely redefining the female surfer’s relationship with the tube. With all due respect to the new wave of young women threading through tubes at heavy but eminently predictable spots like Teahupo’o and Pipeline, Simmers is depicted hurling her tiny frame into improbably long, jaw-droppingly hollow, seemingly impossible barrels at an undisclosed spot in the Cape Verde Islands, almost frantically pumping and weaving her way through torrid section after section as if escaping from a burning building. It’s an incredible display of skill and commitment that takes the tired old “for a girl” line and, forget about the recycling bin, dumps it in the trash for good.
Dropping into our collective consciousness almost simultaneously, these two demonstrations move beyond mere progression and into the realm of a quantum leap, both efforts foreshadowing new levels of excitement to come. Yet at the same time, as with all leaps of this variety, something always gets left behind. In this case, that something is the last vestige of, well, let’s say the mystery that our fleeting moments in the tube once represented.
Surfers who navigate the barrel these days are more skilled than ever. But the barrel still guides them to other dimensions. Illustration: Rick Griffin
It’s odd that, historically speaking, the tube remained uninhabited territory for so long. The conventional line is that it was the board’s fault, that those big heavy balsas and longboards were too crude, too ungainly to fit into that hollow space between the lip and the face. I’m of the opinion that it wasn’t a failure of the board, but of the imagination. Case in point, two examples of what would someday become the modern tube ride, filmed in the early 1960s and featured in Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer, the most successful surfing documentary of all time. In the film’s Waikiki sequence, surfer Wayne Miyata is shown doing what Brown describes as “the ultimate thing,” wheeling his big board in from behind the peak at a hollow little wave called “Garbage Hole,” pulling in under the lip, completely disappearing from view, then exiting the curl cleanly – Miyata even gives us the first modern claim. Why Town surfers didn’t start riding Kaisers Bowl in the same manner for another five or so years is the real mystery.
Of course, Miyata’s waist-high tube would literally be dwarfed in the film’s climactic Pipeline sequence, in which Windansea brawler Butch Van Artsdalen, also riding a big, heavy longboard, drops in late into a clean Banzai barrel, pulls up mid-face, and locks himself into the curl behind the curtain, only to emerge into the sunlight with his own arrogant version of the claim: sitting down and clapping his hands. Viewed today, you’re seeing a performance that, though apparently unrepeated for almost a decade (cue Gerry Lopez) actually presented the template that would be applied to the world’s most famous wave by every Pipeline master right up until to the first appearance of the “pig dog” in 1982. My point: it wasn’t the surfboards, it was the head space. We had been shown how the tube could be ridden in big waves and small – we just couldn’t see ourselves in there. The tube was still a mysterious place.
The late 1960s “Shortboard Revolution” supercharged this mystique. No doubt about it, the shorter boards made it easier to fit into the tube and more than any other innovation since the invention of the fin, riding in the tube was a revelation (though why no one thought to ask Miyata or Van Artsdalen what went on behind the curtain is beyond me). With hot pocket pioneers like George Greenough and Bob McTavish talking about the newly accessible cosmic space with trippy terms like “the green room,” and “the crystal cathedral,” it’s no wonder that the tube ride eventually became imbued with mystical properties. That time spent in the barrel at spots like Honolua Bay, Jeffreys Bay and Scorpion Bay (and even Pipeline) was decidedly ephemeral only added to the trip, bolstering the idea that time spent in that space was somehow special, even mind-bending. As 1977 world champion and tube-riding pioneer Shaun Tomson would famously claim, “Time expands in the tube.” Shaun, an otherwise pragmatic performer, would also assert that from inside the tube he could affect the shape of the wave with his mind, more proof that even at the top levels of the sport, something about riding in the tube was still accounted inexplicable.
Hard to say exactly when all this changed, but even after the evolution of the tube ride and barrel bonanzas discovered at spots like G-Land, Desert Point, Restaurants and Cloudbreak and, of course, the entire Mentawai Archipelago, where the tube still represented a heady trip, I’m going to jump ahead and point to the invention of the GoPro.
Oh, cameras had been taken into the tube before, efforts by futurists like Greenough, Steve Wilkings and Warren Bolster producing spectacular results (as far back as 1972, the surf film Red Hot Blue featured Pipe Prince Rory Russell riding deep in mid-sized barrels wearing a clumsy camera helmet). Yet these were only single frames or glimpses, still leaving much to the viewer’s imagination. GoPro POVs, on the other hand (and eventually in the mouth) graphically usurped our collective imagination, exposing every moment, every nuance, every water drop, every aspect of the space once thought rare, serving it up, in both realtime and epic slow motion, for minutely detailed examination. Amazing to see, especially for the vast majority of surfers who’ll never get to ride a 50-second Skeleton Bay barrel themselves, but I’ll assert, with a nod to Shaun Tomson, that with the advent of the GoPro tube ride, time in there might slow down, but at the same time something was definitely lost – the mystery was gone.
So how do the two examples of remarkable tube riding referenced at the beginning of this story connect with this theory of mine? It’s in what has replaced the mystery I’ve been referring to. Surfers today are riding such intense waves, and riding them so intensely, that their tube rides are no longer experiences, but achievements; they’re not shaping the tubes with their minds, they’re surfing out of their minds. Still, even with this shift in consciousness, does it make what these incredibly talented men and women are doing in them any less “the ultimate thing?”
Gratefully, no. Scroll to the end of the video I was talking about, to where lil’ Caity Simmers exits the water after a tube ride so long it has a plot, with a dramatic first, second and third act, finishing with a traditional Hollywood happy ending. She gets a camera stuck in her face, asked how she feels, and you can see how she’s struggling to put together a good clip quote. Finally, with a look of glazed amazement, she can only giggle, saying, “It was the wave of my life. I was freaking out.”
Making it clear that while she may not have been genuflecting in the crystal cathedral, or striving toward the mystic eye, but riding that tube in the modern fashion, going full anaerobic, sprinting through a cylindrical obstacle course, her trip through the interiors of that particular wave was still…a real trip.
