93.73 feet? Photo: Porsche
While competitive surfing heads to the Olympics for the second time in 2024, and the World Surf League has been on a years-long march to bringing the sport to a wider audience, nothing grabs universal attention like big wave surfing. Sebastian Steudtner reminded us of that last week when he and Porsche put the global mainstream media on alert with news of a potential new world record wave ridden at Nazaré earlier this year. And yes, the news is even more popular at the moment than the chatter of Kelly Slater’s (still not official) “retirement” that made headlines on every publication imaginable.
The news of Steudtner’s wave, meanwhile, is as unofficial as Kelly’s retirement. The secondary function of Porshce’s announcement was to highlight a new drone system that was deployed to measure Steudtner’s wave. Steudtner has been based in Portugal working on his Mission Wave Alpha project, which partnered with Porsche for the drone technology as well as exploring advancements in big wave safety and even board design. The objective, obviously, is to keep pushing the limits in big waves through fine-tuning Steudtner’s entire repertoire. They claim his board has been engineered to move as fast as 100 kilometers-per-hour now, compared to the previous 80 km/h, for example.
“Big Wave Surfing is a beautiful sport; I love it and I am very proud to be able to bring it to the next level through development of safety and technology and believing in my dream,” Steudtner said last week. “It is my goal to improve big wave surfing and take it to the next level. Together with my team, which is driven by its unique can-do mindset to define possible…, we were able to accomplish this mission.”
As for the drone system, it’s easy to imagine that if the preliminary measurement and the final measurement from Guinness World Record officials match, then that technology may become more widely used in big wave measurements. In the meantime, we are all left to dissect and guess for ourselves. So why not see if it passes the old eyeball test?
