Surfing is full of lopsided ratios.

Thousands of dollars spent on a surf trip for a handful of waves ridden. An hour-long session for a minute spent on your feet. Excesses of money and time are distilled down to mere moments, yet it’s the moments we hang onto.

“Great art is an instant arrested in eternity,” said James Huneker and he may well have been referring to surfing’s way of distorting time; how we pause the action to savour the moment.

This week we ran a Wave Of The Day photo Chris Peel took of João Chianca at Cloudbreak and it’s an instant that deserves further scrutiny.

Taken earlier this month, it shows João pushing hard against the wave’s energy. 

2023 has been a good season for ol’ João. He first made the tour in 2022, was arguably the season’s most exciting surfer, and yet he failed to make the cut.

He requalified through last year’s Challenger Series, then took a stand when the Championship Tour resumed earlier this year. You see, instead of toning it down, João reprised the swashbuckling approach that’s made him a fan favourite and stormed the castle all the way to a fourth-placed finish.

He kept on storming, beyond the contests to the tropical South Pacific.

Modern high-performance surfing involves sudden bursts of acceleration, something multi-fin boards are willing to oblige. Direct your bodyweight towards those fin faces and feel it turn into lateral speed. Deep tube riding, however, requires deceleration. Slow down, allow the wave to catch up, then hit the pedal once you’re out of sight, hoping you’ve got the timing right.

The hand drag or extended bottom turn are the usual deceleration methods of choice. Each allows the surfer to maintain the same line into the barrel while granting last-second adjustments should timing be off.

On the other hand, the tail stall - similar to what João’s done here - is the free climbing method of deceleration; putting it all on the line just before the moment of glory.

But why do it? Will not the coming barrel feel good enough?

Your guess is as good as mine. But I imagine at least part of the answer is because few people can swap rails while hitting the handbrake on any wave, let alone big Cloudbreak. João is a competitive surfer, a successful one too, so first ascents and Never Been Done’s are hardwired into his brain.

The other part, I imagine, is child’s play: feeling that rapid loss of speed, then the rapid boost, not unlike the sensations felt by a kid on a swing set.

In real life, the moment would be over in less than a second, its difficulty disguised by haste. But fortunately Chris Peel saw the light and sensed the move, opening the aperture for 1/60th of a second to arrest the instant, which I’ve now stared at for a small eternity.

Yet another lopsided ratio.

- Stu

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