Swellnet Sessions

"The channel bottom has its rightful place in Australian surfing history and is as current today as it was in the 70s." says Phil Myers of Free Flight. "It fits perfectly into today’s high performance modern surfing. It's easy for a lot of shapers to dismiss them as a fad simply because most modern boards come out of a machine and is all too easy. Let alone finding the glassers and sanders with the experience to make them as well."

Every time we tell tales of sessions that stretched our legropes, we also tend to stretch the truth. So as October started we werenʼt sure how much truth was in the stories we were reading. There were claims starting to emerge that this was going to be the biggest swell to hit Indonesia in several years.

While the webcast cameras were trained on Sunset Beach, which was hosting the World Cup of Surfing, the photographers were burning up the megapixels down at Pipeline. 

The first day of the Vans World Cup of Surfing kicked off in fine Hawaiian style: six-to-eight foot of not-too-heavy North Pacific power was on offer at Sunset. Light trades completed the pleasant scene.

The first event of the Triple Crown, the Reef Hawaiian Pro, suffered out of control conditions at the beginning of the waiting period, abject flatness through the middle, and then bog average surf at the end. At least the sun was shining.