Surftime Magazine

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...

“My dad was one of the pioneers of United Kingdom surfing, and he had me and my two brothers riding waves as soon as we could swim. I was born and raised on the North coast of Cornwall, high cliffs, sandy coves, little fishing villages like St Agnes. Where I grew up, winters get battered by huge North Atlantic storms, and that’s when the waves are at their best, though the cold is brutal, with water dropping to a bone-chilling eight degrees. England’s not exactly known for its surf, but stuck out in the North Atlantic between France and Ireland, it’s no wonder Cornwall’s breaks can be as good as anywhere in the world. I spent my teens, twenties, and most of my thirties there, and honestly couldn’t have wished for a better place to grow up as a surfer.” - James Hendy, President Director, Rip Curl Indonesia - A JETHRO HAYNES PORFOLIO/ WORDS BY JAMES HENDY

“You might never fail on a giant scale, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all. In which case, you fail by default.” -JK. Rowling-

“And tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time when we were young and on the sea. The sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks and sometimes a chance to feel your strength” -From Great Writers and the Sea, Joseph Conrad, “Youth”-

“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...