5’5” x 19 ¼” Original
Chris Ward, Cory Lopez, Andy Irons, Kasey Curtis and friends are doing some of the freest surfing imaginable these days on little 5' 5" x 19 1/4" fish. These guys will surf anywhere--Rockpile on the Rocks, Waimea shorebreak, San Clemente Pier--and they'll go for anything--air 360s, sliding 360s, side-slips in the tube.
$29.95
Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t, but they’re always going for it and they’re always entertaining to watch–fast, loose and creative. Just when you’re getting tired of all the sliding and spinning, 5′ 5″ changes tack and shows the indestructible Kelly Slater in a duel to the death at grinding Burleigh Head. Slater takes off on a half-dozen sand-dredging Burleigh bombs and gets ground to bits as the barrels speed past him or close out. Slater breaks his board, runs up to his hotel for a spare and pulls into one of the longest tube-rides ever captured on film or video–a Mach 3 trip through a tube that lasts almost eight seconds. Forget about Kelly Slater in Kolor, that one short segment tells you all you’ll ever need to know about the determined little bugger. From Burleigh, 5′ 5″ goes down the Australian coast to listen in on a strange meeting of the minds between Tom Curren and George Greenough as they trace out and shape a 6′ 4″ roundtail based on an old Michael Peterson outline. Curren loosens the board up at a local beachbreak, then gives himself a mohawk and power squats it through some grinding Kirra barrels. The video ends with Curren surfing a clean, green 4-foot day at Rincon. No tail-slides, no 360s, nothing fancy, just Tom Curren surfing smooth, fast and beautiful on a tiny swallow-tail fish. Like magic, those few waves of Curren’s make all of the other surfing in this video (excepting Slater’s barrel) fade away.
