In every sport, there are greats of a particular era. In surfing, one of those eras included Andy Irons, Sunny Garcia, Bruce Irons, Mark Occhilupo, Shane Beschen, and Tim Curran. It was the early 2000s, and shorts were so long they weren’t really shorts. Y2K hadn’t, as many assumed, shut the world down. Destiny’s Child was constantly on the radio, Kylie Minogue made her comeback, and Brittney Spears and the Backstreet Boys were everywhere. Brennifer were newlyweds, fresh from the altar. Dr. Dre’s 2001 was still flying off the shelves. Oh, it was a time. And in that time, there was a show called the 2000 Op Pro Boat Trip Challenge.
And guess who was there? All the surfers mentioned above, plus Layne Beachley, Serena Brooke, Rochelle Ballard, and Megan Abubo. Luckily, a bunch of that trip was caught on film (actual film!) by Derek Hoffmann, Jason Murray, and Sonny Miller. The show they created is available to stream here, and it’s worth the watch.
Directed by Sonny Miller and Matt George, the 2000 Op Pro Boat Trip Challenge put six of the best male and four top female surfers on a boat in the Mentawai Islands. From June 5-20, 2000, the men competed for a $65,000 winner-take-all prize. It was the most ever offered for winning a surf contest at the time. The women, depressingly predictable for the time, battled for $35,000. They bounced around from perfect wave to perfect wave with famous skipper Martin Daly.
The Nalu Vault, a streaming service featuring a collection of surfing and bodyboarding films, found some of that film on a tape in their archives called Op_T024_Beta_Maccas_Arvo_AM.
“The tape features never before seen footage of the surfers on the boat and in the water at Macaronis in the Mentawais Islands,” the folks at Nalu wrote. “…We did a speed edit and present the raw footage for your viewing pleasure.”
It’s nice to have a quick peek back in time, isn’t it?
