I know surfing’s golden rule. You know surfing’s golden rule. Forget all that stuff about “the best surfer is the one having the most fun,” yada, yada, yada and all those other platitudes we like to pretend steer us clear of certain chaos in crowded lineups. Surfing’s golden rule is you don’t burn people.
But then again, every surfer on the planet has justified breaking the golden rule once or twice. A righteous, well-deserved roasting, because we’ve all decided for ourselves at one point or another that the person closest to the peak didn’t actually wait to get there. And then all bets are off.
Apparently, that’s how this wave started out in Spain’s Basque Country during a solid (see very solid) swell. And obviously it could have gone absurdly wrong. Except it didn’t.
“The place is pretty crowded lately and there’s some disrespect to locals [the] last couple swells,” Unai Borda said when he sent us the footage. “The guy in red just took a couple bombs and snaked everyone, so I guess they just didn’t let him get that one.”
“Usually there’s no problem and I know these guys personally,” he added, referring to the two regular foots intending to hand out an old-fashioned stuffing. “They’re good people, nice to visitors who wait their turn but that didn’t happen today.”
When we threw the clip on our Instagram feed Monday, the whole editorial staff figured we’d see a flood of the typical “give the r-word, get the r-word” comments. Instagram comments sections rarely disappoint, but one commenter put a positive twist on it all: “we’re looking at three people packing it into one triple-overhead barrel and some honest-to-goodness solid video footage. Have you ever seen that before?”
“This likely won’t happen to any of them ever again,” he said. “C’mon, man! That’s a seriously epic moment, even if the original intention was to rip each other off.”
