Surftime Magazine

Before the sun awakens over the vast Indian Ocean, peacocks begin calling through the trees, monkeys crash across bungalow roofs and the humid air slowly fills with the sounds of another day beginning. The sweet scent of incense drifts through the village as morning offerings are quietly placed outside homes and temples, adding another layer of tranquillity to a place that already feels worlds away from the rush of modern life. By the time the first boards are strapped to the roof of a tuk-tuk, the jungle has already decided the rhythm of the day. I first arrived in Arugam Bay just before heading to university in the UK. I’d only recently fallen in love with surfing and, like so many others, had become obsessed. Indonesia filled the pages of every magazine I owned. Perfect reefs, heavy barrels and legendary line-ups were the dream, but deep down I knew I wasn’t ready for them. Then I found Sri Lanka. I had no idea that one decision would quietly shape the next chapter of my l...

For most surfers, Tahiti begins and ends with Teahupo’o. For David Biner, it was just the beginning. Based in Indonesia, working under the moniker INDOEYE, David recently spent a month travelling through French Polynesia. His resulting film, South Pacific, captures the waves, landscapes and characters he encountered along the way. As he examined the thundering waves of Teahupo’o, David also took the time meet the locals and their approach to life on Tahiti. He came away with a film that not only impresses with pinpoint focus, music and editing in the surf, but with a film that celebrates the generosity of the island’s people, the depth of their connection to the ocean and the sheer scale of the environment. South Pacific is a surfer’s film. Not just a series of endless clips. For any real surfer, it is not to be missed.

Padang Padang Bridge, Bali, Indonesia, 27/08/2026, 7:05am Knowing that the Rip Curl Padang Padang Cup is on is a force that draws you out of bed. You feel like a kid on Christmas morning. After all, this day, if the swell abides, comes only once a year. For competitors, the gift they are given is an empty line-up at Bali’s best barrel. And for you, it’s a show unlike any other. Padang Padang Cliffside, 9:15am Making your way through the acacia trees that form a dry, thorny tunnel leading to the judging and broadcast compound, you hear the waves before you see them. Each barrel unloading onto the reef drowns out the new sounds of the modern Bali that you have left behind today. The buses, the motorbikes, the groaning cement trucks, the pounding beach clubs, and the ever-present screeching of the rampant construction that is scarring this landscape forever. And in this moment you are reminded of what you came to Bali for. The shared elation of it all, the smiles, the waves and th...

Peter Pan, the famed book by J.M. Barrie about a boy who never grows old, is a door to a universe “where dreams are born and time is never planned.” And nothing could better describe the life that the Mentawai kids are living in this moment. The book overflows with magic and is seen as a wellspring of entertainment for little dreamers and rebels. Yet a closer look at this timeless novel reveals that entertainment is actually its least important element. And that its world of pirates, fairies, and mermaids serves as an artful disguise for a parable about the tragic nature of human life. A child, according to the author of Peter Pan, is someone who can be happy without a reason. A person who lives in the present, delighting in each moment. When the forever-young Peter Pan hears the call of challenge, he is “standing on a rock, facing challenge once again with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him.” That drum is the heroic fantasy of his readiness to live, or with...

“Christa is probably the person who shoots the most, especially on big days,” says Hawaiian big wave master Mark Healy in the new documentary, First In, Last Out. The documentary details Christa’s story from her beginnings as a competitive swimmer to joining the Coast Guard and her determined rise through the ranks of A-list surf photographers on surfing’s grandest stage, Oahu’s North Shore. With her hair flipped over her helmet, and her head bobbing in the channel as she swims for hours, she makes for a unique site in male-dominated lineup. Nathan Florence says, “We’ll go out for a morning session and surf for a few hours and then go in. “When we come back out, hours later, Christa’s still out there; she’s out from dark till dark.” Here she is discussing the journey of her life and the making of the film. On Beginnings: Christa Funk: Well, I didn’t just hop into the water at Pipe right off the bat. I started with small days at Sandys, then small days in town, small days a...

This spring I got my first taste of surfing in British Colombia, and I haven’t been able to get it off my mind since. The people, the place, the waves, the water, the Canadian surfing experience is something special. It cuts down to the core of why we all started chasing waves in the first place. Adventures into the unknown, abundant wildlife, wild weather and the opportunity to create some deep, core surfing memories. Even if it does take full wetsuit booties and gloves. A few weeks ago Canadian photo ace Marcus Paladino reached out to me and shared that he was holding some nice shots from the last couple months. Indulging my newfound love for Canadian waves, I asked him to send some photos along. His trove of A-plus images didn’t disappoint. In fact, it did quite the opposite. It inspired me to go back. I’m based in San Clemente, California, and summertime in Southern California can be a bit of a drag. Traffic, clogged lineups. And to be honest, the surf this summer has b...

It’s odd that, historically speaking, the tube remained uninhabited territory for so long. The conventional line is that it was the board’s fault, that those big, heavy balsas and longboards were too crude, too ungainly to fit into that hollow space between the lip and the face. I’m of the opinion that it wasn’t a failure of the board, but of the imagination. Case in point: two examples of what would someday become the modern tube ride, filmed in the early 1960s and featured in Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer, the most successful surfing documentary of all time. In the film’s Waikiki sequence, surfer Wayne Miyata is shown doing what Brown describes as “the ultimate thing,” wheeling his big board in from behind the peak at a hollow little wave called “Garbage Hole,” pulling in under the lip, completely disappearing from view, then exiting the curl cleanly; Miyata even gives us the first modern claim. Why Town surfers didn’t start riding Kaisers Bowl in the same manner for another fiv...

It’s six in the morning. Kuta wakes you up slowly. Not with alarms, but with heat. The kind that pushes through thin hotel curtains and stale fan air. The smell of frangipani drifts in from somewhere outside, sweet and unmistakably Balinese, and before long the streets begin calling. A quick Bali coffee. A rushed breakfast. Then the familiar march toward the beach. Jalan Legian is already alive. The coffee leaves that earthy bitterness on your teeth as scooters buzz past and last night’s memories flicker in fragments. Bintangs, neon lights and bad decisions dissolving into the humid dawn. In Kuta, nights blur at the edges. Every few meters someone calls out an offer. “Massage, boss?” “Transport?” “Bintang towel?” The soundtrack never changes. Then, finally, past the imposing stone beach gates, warming in the dawn, and then feet hit sand. Boards get waxed under a rising tropical sun while the first empty waves roll across the inside section at Kuta Beach. The surf isn’t perfect. You...

“Everyone had their own addiction problem. Everyone was hiding it. We all just turned into these closet-case, drug-addict monsters.” For us humans, the truth is often really tough to accept. Especially when that honesty requires a higher level of self-examination: when families have been destroyed or people have died due to reckless lifestyles. Bruce Irons’ quote, above, from the 2018 documentary, Andy Irons: Kissed by God, drips with tragic honesty, as he weaves his family’s story without pretense or bullshit, while interview cuts from surfing royalty corroborate his sordid tale. Remembering that Bruce narrated the documentary with that level of honesty unnerved me. After watching it again I almost wanted to tap out in the middle of it. It’s like a Greek tragedy, supported by a cast of gifted players. Only these players weren’t acting. They lived it in the most painful of ways. There is no blaming others in Bruce Irons’ narrative, as he blatantly states. No asking why there wa...

“Under water, time takes the shape of waves. I listen to the clash and the silence mingling beneath the surface. I end up looking at what the eye cannot see: the states of matter; the hidden folds of the wave; the ever-changing schemes of the sea.” -Ben Thouard- You can purchase Ben Thouard’s fine art book, Aqua Obscura and others at http://benthouard.com Photographer Ben Thouard’s

The world of guiding visiting surfers in Sanur’s line-ups clearly defies surfing’s traditional etiquette, which gives the right of way to the surfer closest to the peak (a time honered system that allows the best surfers to get the best waves as lesser surfers pay their dues as they attempt to climb up the ladder). But on one of the happiest islands in the world, surf guiding, or rather, hiring a local to strong arm waves for you, usually leaves a bad aftertaste with visitors. Is it fair? To the locals, certainly. They are making a living using their local resources. But from the visitor’s point of view, is it exclusive of those with the financial means to pay for waves? Let’s call him Wayan. He was born in Sanur, and he runs his own guiding program now after working for foreign-owned surf camps and hotels his entire life. He and his apprentice, we’ll call him Ketut, met while surf guiding for a camp that catered mostly to German surfers. When Wayan was encouraged by his elders to ...

Kya Heuer got beat up. It happened while she was paddling out into a heavy set at a harrowing Eastside wave that rarely, if ever, sees women in its line-up. But Kya is no ordinary woman. Trained literally since birth in the pounding, below sea level barrels of the Mentawai, (Kandui Lefts is in her front yard), Kya is a fearless surfer with a fine tuned ability in gaping eight foot barrels. But accidents do happen. And when she found herself driven face first into the reef that day on the Eastside, she came up with what could have been a life-changing wound on the side of her face. But, staying calm amid all the blood and the pain and the rescue from her friends, Kya and her cohort made it to the hospital and into a special plastic surgery theatre that, quite frankly, saved her considerable beauty. Immediately following surgery, we found Kya Heuer sitting up in her hospital bed in her normal clothes, with over one hundred stitches on the side of her face, sitting up as if what hap...

By Rio Waida (The following is the entire narration transcript for PERTAMA, the new short film featuring the life of Rio Waida. After a number of popular premieres on the island, Surftime is honored to offer these heartfelt words from Rio in hopes that they will inspire the next generation). “I am Rio Waida. The first Indonesian surfer in history to make it to the world stage of professional competition surfing”. “I knew pro surfing. Would happen to me. My dreams were too powerful for it not to happen”. “I never dreamed that I would carry the Olympic flag for my country on the biggest athletic stage in the world”. “Entering the Olympic stadium. I felt like I was walking on a cloud. But I also felt the weight of Indonesia on my shoulders. And all I could think of was to stand up straight and try not to weep with pride”. “I know that I must carry the spirit of my past into the future. The spirit of my struggles, the spirit of my family, of my dreams, of my island, of my country....