Tabla de contenidos para Autumn 2016 en White Horses

How do you get to the place Shane Dorian got to this winter at Peahi? Or Aaron Gold, or Billy Kemper, or the Walsh brothers, or Albee Layer, or Tommy Dosland dangling upside down from his leash framed against a 50-foot wave face? Are they crazy? Are they stupid? The way these moments are presented to us, it’s as if they’re just kinda falling out of thin air. Even as if they’re not real, but sorta CGI — green-screened, colour-corrected, like so much of the apparently super-hero-ish but essentially bullshit behaviour we’re subjected to by today’s rather frightening entertainment-industrial complex. The truth is far weirder. These rides are not faked. They are utterly real, as real as the three-foot shorey you duck-dived yesterday. And their riders are not stupid or…

I was heading up to Lady Elliot Island for a work assignment earlier this year and pulled into Vic Hislop’s Shark Museum in Hervey Bay along the way. I guess I was drawn to it because sharks have been on everybody’s mind lately, and I just wanted to see a bloody big shark. It’s fairly confronting inside, there’s three shark carcasses in a big refrigerator, memorabilia, photographs of other catches. It’s pretty controversial. Old mate Vic Hislop’s take on the situation is basically, “I hate sharks, kill them all. They kill us, we’ve got every right to kill them”. So it’s a bit of a bloodbath. Apparently I’d already seen this display when I was seven – Dad reminded me recently – but I can’t remember any of it. So…

Ever have those moments when things don’t quite seem to register? When just for the briefest moment, you just have to check yourself, get your bearings and reset? I had that feeling recently, staring at a bakery sign or all things The sign read Lobster Pies, $15.00. I’d never equated lobsters with pies, let alone pies that cost the better part of 20 bucks. But then I remembered where I was. King Island. And it’s no ordinary place. KI is a chilly kaleidoscope of weather and waves, it’s as fickle a surf destination as you can imagine. It’s also the one place in Oz I’ve always dreamed about getting to, but never have. As a free surfer I always find myself traveling to places like Indonesia, Tahiti, Hawaii – places…

I’ve always felt fortunate, among fellow wanderers, to be a surfer, forever chasing after the next ride. It adds another focus to travel. My preferred flavor of surf travel is by motorbike with surfboard and camping gear loaded up, girlfriend on the back, on a long overland route. I’ve spent the last the last two years on two wheels, first circling Africa – covered in two previous issues of this fine Horsies journal no less – then traversing Europe and Asia. When it rains you get wet, when it’s cold you freeze, when the bike breaks you get greasy, and you spend a lot of time sleeping in the bushes. But it affords countless opportunities to find a nugget of fun on coastlines that you’d never bother to look for…

The sun faded on the horizon as watched the day’s final sets wash shoreward. Eighty-four oil platforms peppered the scene. I stood with surf guide Harold Koechlin watching punchy lefthanders. It had been two of the best weeks of my life, tripping the north Peruvian west coast, surfing perfect forehand lefts day in day out. I’d been summoned by the Peruvian Tourism Board as a surfing/travel journo to explore their nation’s best liquid playgrounds. It had been the ultimate surf trip, until I found Lobitos, a “tortured paradise” that would have me questioning the world of surf travel like never before. Founded a century ago purely for oil, what was once one of Peru’s richest towns had been badly affected by civil war in the ’60s, until waves were discovered…

BORDER CROSSING BY DUSTIN HOLLICK Working on the cray boats that plundered the remote South West coast of Tasmania over summer was a lucrative job for a young bloke. We’d be at sea for between six days to two weeks, depending on how long it took to fill the boat. On return you could expect a cheque for over $3000. A lot of cash for a teenager in the early ’90s. It wasn’t the ideal preparation for an aspiring pro surfer though. Fourteen-hour days capped off with several beers and the odd scoob – let alone not actually surfing – didn’t do much to sharpen my competitive skills. Nonetheless, the funds allowed me to hit the road and compete on the Billabong Junior Series – which at the time was…

As usual with The Hoss, many feature headlines have been unimaginatively scraped from song lyrics: I Am The Passenger (Iggy and the Stooges); Make It Up As We Go Along (Talking Heads); Feels Like The First Time (ahem … Foreigner … cough). We’re fortunate to be able to pull the magazine together while listening to music the whole time – tinnitus be damned. If you’re on Spotify, search for our playlist: WHmagSOUNDTRACK through which the everchanging tunes that accompany the construction of this title are shared. No Foreigner though, promise. (As we type we’re listening to The Lemonheads’ Rudderless. Do yourself a favour etc.) Tell ya. Putting Horsies together is a deadset privilege. You get to connect and work with heaps of interesting, talented and generous people. It’s always astonishing…

I can’t help but have one regret: that I never held on to all the surfboards that meant something to me in my life. Like, I’d love to still have the board that George Downing and Bob McTavish shaped the day after the December 1967 Duke contest. They gave it to Randy Rarick. He didn’t like it and gave it to me. It was one of the weirdest shapes I’ve ever seen, and one of the best boards I ever had. McTavish turned up at Sunset with this big, widetailed Keyo board. He drove to the bottom, turned and the thing went straight back up to the top, a little bit of side chop knocked him off, and so he’d swim in. He did this about three times. Everyone was…

Some people love the Shaka, or at least its modern incarnation. I am not one of them. God knows this is not in line with White Horses’s stated mission to bring positivity into our debased and excessively sarcastic surfing culture! But it is a sad fact, a dark reflection on my own tendency to cynicism and irony, a tendency unaltered by many years of raw exposure to the ocean and its moods. I see that waggled thumb and little finger being used by, say, a Brazilian surf corporation as its logo, or by some strainingfor-effect Baby Boomer launching a SUP into the sheltered waters of Byron Bay, trying to pretend to some sort of Island Lifestyle, and think, Fuck off! If only you KNEW. For the tale of the original…

“Aerial bombardment Sir, are you familiar with it?” Cape Wrath, is not for the faint of heart. Located in the far north-west of the UK, it’s a remote, expansive area covering 277 square kilometres of unforgiving moorland, jutting out into the North Atlantic and squinting into incessant westerly gales. The Vikings used this Cape as a bearing to turn their ships – the name Wrath deriving from the Old Norse for turning point, ‘Hvarf’. My phone conversation with Captain Walker of range control continued in a curt, yet good natured manner: “A combined NATO exercise of air, sea and land operations will close the range to the public between the 7th to the 10th, and the 13th right through the month. So if you still want to do your ‘surfing,…

My dad’s been mates with filmmaker Shane Peel for ages. So when Peely rang and said, “Hey, Jye, wanna come on a surf trip to PNG for a little project? Bring yer old man!” I knew it was going to be heaps of fun. Summer on the Sunshine Coast is not known for pristine surf conditions, so the thought of a trip to the tropics surfing reef breaks was exciting to say the least. With the help of Patagonia, the thought became a reality, and I was on my way. This trip was White Horses’ first ever movie filming mission. They were going to investigate PNG’s Surf Management Plan, and put a little clip together about it. Peely explained to me that there’s a fair bit of aggro in some…

Back when I was young and even stupider than I am today I lost my licence, through every fault of my own. I was living in a small village on the NSW South Coast. Nowhere was very far from the beach, at least it didn’t seem that way until I couldn’t drive there anymore. Overnight, the three main surfing options in town got whittled down to the one closest to my place because it would take at least an hour or more to walk to the others. The situation turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I actually got resourceful. There was this old fella who lived up the road who had a yard full of old pushbikes. I went and asked him if he had one that I…

As Gary demonstrates the single concave with a steel ruler, a swipe of ash-grey hair hovers above eyes deep in concentration. Maybe it’s his English accent, but I’m picturing a WWII aviator checking over his Spitfire before crossing the Channel to do battle with the Hun. Gary faced a very different menace with this project, in the form of my late-onset middle age and slowly advancing weight. We’re throwing tech at the problem. The 5’11” was Gary’s first crack at a Varial blank. It was also his first run at a range of experimental cloths, supplied by John Dowse at sanded.com. We chose Nylextra, jute, basaltband, basalt hybrid, and an ultra-thin, shimmering reinforcement fabric that we quickly christened “wedding dress”. We used entropy bio-resin, refined from 50% organic sources. The…

It’d been over a decade since my last dog, and on a visit from good ol’ Jan (my mum) and my Aunt Lorraine they hatched a plan to put me out of my lonely misery. They’d been searching through the local paper on the sly and casually mentioned there were heeler pups for sale – I reluctantly agreed to go for a look. Two dogs stood out: one was a perfect-looking blue with a mad glint in his eye, and then there was The Furball – a bit stand-offish, awkward-looking, and definitely not part of the pack. I went for The Furball. He was four months old and I named him Furry. A month after bringing him home I started to twig that Furry was deaf. He’d stuff his head…

OH, THE PASSENGER HE RIDES AND HE RIDES HE LOOKS THROUGH HIS WINDOW WHAT DOES HE SEE? HE SEES THE SILENT HOLLOW SKY HE SEES THE STARS COME OUT TONIGHT HE SEES THE CITY’S RIPPED BACKSIDES HE SEES THE WINDING OCEAN DRIVE AND EVERYTHING WAS MADE FOR YOU AND ME ALL OF IT WAS MADE FOR YOU AND ME 'CAUSE IT JUST BELONG S TO YOU AND ME SO LET’S TAKE A RIDE AND SEE WHAT'S MINE…

“What’s this round black thing?” I ask Pete, just sitting down in the hotel lobby for breakfast on our first morning in Scotland. “I don’t know, but it’s really rich.” He answers, a little queasily, having already put back about three quarters of it. I sheepishly take a nibble, attempting to stay true to my mantra of the new year, to be less fussy about food. I don’t like it. When the server comes to our table, I politely ask what it is. “Oh, that’s black pudding!” She replies, slightly shocked that someone could be so clueless. “And what’s it made of?” “Oh, you know, sheep’s blood, and, uh, other insides and stuff.” I meet her response with suppressed laughter and maybe a little bit of that “I’m about to…

WAYNE MADE BY DAD This was my first board! It’s pretty special because my dad made it. He’s a builder and a carpenter and he’s pretty handy, he built boats and all sorts of things. He turned up with this around Christmas in ’59, I was six or seven. He was always involved with surf club stuff, but for a guy who had never surfed, it was pretty impressive! The rocker in it’s amazing. It’s almost like a modern board. It was my introduction to the surf. A year later, in 1960, we graduated to fibreglass boards and this board disappeared. The old man gave it to someone or it ended up going somewhere. And that was that. In ’86, Dad rang me and said, “Can you have a look…

In an age when virtually everything is computer designed, it was refreshing to have the opportunity to restore a craft from a bygone era. The Boston Whaler 13 was conceived not from the inner workings of a machine, but the mind of a genius, coupled with some good old-fashioned imagination, a lot of trial and error, fused with a dream. The genius was American Dick Fisher. In 1954 Fisher first came up with the idea of building a lightweight, outboard-powered skiff utilising the then-revolutionary melding of polyurethane foam and fibreglass. His original design was loosely based on the Nova Scotian “Sea Sled” and Fisher went to work. He’d literally glue chunks of foam to the bottom of his hull, shape them to his thoughts, glass ’em up and take to…

BACKGROUND: Growing up on the South Coast of NSW, I've always been involved with the ocean, and have a passion for all types of surf craft. When my bodyboarding career took off I kept up with my standup surfing, because I love it just as much. I’ve done a heap of travel through Indo, the Pacific Islands, North Africa, Europe, Hawaii and more, but I always love the quality here on the South Coast. There are a lot of slabby waves down here, which is where my surfing has found its place. I'm not one for pumping down the line for a punt, or a real vertical attack, so trying to draw some smooth lines to set up a tube or a nice drawn-out cutback is where it’s at for…