While the South Island Surfing Champs were down here a lot of surfers stayed a little longer to enjoy our waves before heading back up for the Canterbury Champs at the weekend. These freesurfs are always very exciting to watch and especially when you get a collection of some of New Zealand's best surfers on one peak.
It's nice to know that a handful of those are our very own born and bred Dunedin locals. Elliott Brown, Jack McLeod and James Murphy are part of a group of five or six local surfers all around their late teens, early 20s and responsible for pushing the standard right through the roof. They've set the bar and the next swarm of surfers coming through now have that bar in their sights.
The future of high-performance surfing is all about high-speed surfing, power carves and explosive above the lip airs and rotations. We have some incredible waves for that type of surfing. Sadly, it doesn't always marry up with competition conditions that are often held in small and underwhelming waves. Being good in those conditions is a whole other story, but an essential chapter to a successful career.
So, as much as we're blessed to have quality waves on tap, it might just be working against our best surfers. From my perspective, I just like to shoot beautiful waves and if there are surfers at the cutting edge doing unbelievable things on them, then that just makes it even better.
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS I love shooting our wildest slab waves – those reefs that produce top-to-bottom barrels with enough room to fit a bus, but what young Aussie photographer Leroy Bellet is doing to capture those moments is seriously next level. Check it out here on NZ Surf Journal. And, no, don't expect me to be towing in second place any time soon – I've had enough water housings to the head, hold downs and brushes with the reef to know just how dangerous this is.
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