If you’ve ever scored beyond your dreams at a random spot on an unusual storm swell, or even if you just appreciate gobsmacking barrels, you’ll like this.
It’s film of a recent hurricane swell that hit Western Australia and lit up the whole coast with heaving tubes from the wrong direction.
WA is known for it’s heavy, hollow waves but its surf almost always comes from a southerly quarter thanks to an almost perfect angle on the storm-drenched Roaring Forties. But in late February, Cyclone Bianca rumbled around offshore for several days threw out swells like no one there had ever seen. And Taj Burrow happened to be back at home.
Hurricane and cyclone swells like this can throw such weird curveballs that finding the optimum spot to surf becomes a high tension gamble – simply because no one knows what works when the swell comes from a weird direction. Taj and his mates seem to have made a pretty good guess at what might happen, when they hit this long beach that Taj says is a close-out.
What they got was a day of rising storm surf, chunky 8ft beachbreak barrels and sore throats from all that Australian bro hooting. See for yourself.