Jan 03 2009
Best Surf Writing of the Year
Read this to your non-surfing friends and ask them if they have a clue what’s he’s talking about. From Cloud Broken by Derek Dunfee, Transworld Surf, February 2009. He writing an account of surfing Cloud Break on Tavarua, Fiji and breaking his leg.
“I had been out for about an hour before the bigger sets started rolling in. After catching a mushier outside wave that pushed me into the channel, I spotted a perfect inside west bowl. The inside waves that have more of a west-swell direction thend to barrel over a heavy ledge through the Shishkabobs section, and this one looked to be a drainer, so I paddled hard to make it to the takeoff zone. It stacked up to around eight to ten feet, and paddling into it I could tell I was going to be a little deep on the A-frame, but I went anyway. Off the drop it had a foamy chandelier-type section that I had to break through to make it into the heaving Shishkabob section up ahead where it would open up. I grabbed my rail with all my weight and tried to huck myself through the foamy part and into the clean section of the barrel. When I tried to punch through the foam, the lip of the wave struck me in the back of the head and top of my back. I was so determined that I was going to make it into the barrel that I didn’t even anticipate getting lipped in the head.”