Zigzag

Odd Grimm Persson is a funny-sounding name, in our language; but in his native Swedish tongue it means ‘the tip of the arrow’. He was raised in a tiny village on the Baltic sea, where the only waves are the ones that come at night, with ferocious wind storms. “Chasing big waves is a calling,” he tells me. “My dad, Joachim, took me to Mullaghmore when I was 16. We watched the guys towing in. I was very jealous, because all I wanted to do was to be out there. “The next day, I paddled into 15-foot waves for the first time. I was alone. I was used to surfing alone, because that’s how it was for me in Sweden. I would surf alone in the darkness, sometimes by Dad’s car headlights.…

"We, the people, have a huge problem, if we love our coast." Let’s start with a hypothetical fish – say, a white steenbras. She pops out of an egg just offshore of the Groot Berg Estuary, on the Cape West Coast. Miraculously, she isn’t eaten during the few weeks until she tastes fresh water and heads for the mouth of the estuary, hard-wired to seek calmer waters with plenty of food. She’s beautiful; silvery-white, and she has large eyes, prominent lips and rakish, swept-back fins with fetching flecks of gold on their upper scales. In the estuary she grows, managing to avoid the hooks and nets that came down from above. After a few years, the sea calls. Following a winter storm the estuary opens, and she heads west through the breakers, into…

I really dug the authenticity of the event. It wasn’t fake, it wasn’t forced, it just naturally fell into place, from the time the sun rose till we crawled into bed. We kicked off with a little beach clean-up. The sounds of African funk on an old turntable, vinyl grain, kids dancing, the smell of chicken and fish cooking on the open fire, fruit squeezing, coconut drinking, big smiles, awesome weather. I couldn’t stop wiggling the whole day. I’m sure I got a few out-of-focus pictures! Everything just felt right. Vibrant fishing boats, dwarfed by those big cotton trees. I reckon that wave could get super-good. It’s just peaks, A-frames, like Nicaragua, coffee-coloured water; but it was pretty small and the tides were springs, so it was hectic, the kids were doing…

In my youth, for my friends and me at the Bay of Plenty in Durban, Hawaii was the red-hot centre of the surfing universe. Hawaii was our Valhalla, a mythic place where surfing gods actually lived and went to battle on the hallowed waves of Sunset Beach, Banzai Pipeline, Haleiwa and Waimea Bay. Our gods had the names of Barry Kanaiaupuni, Jeff Hakman, Reno Abellira, Eddie Aikau and Gerry Lopez. On my bedroom wall at Grosvenor Court, overlooking the Bay’s deep tubes, I had surf pictures of Hawaii; and my favourite was Californian John Peck, crouching and grabbing the rail of his 10-foot longboard at the Banzai Pipeline, the world’s deadliest wave. Pipeline filled me with anticipation – and dread, too; I had seen a photo of Peruvian surfer Joaquin Miro…

JORDY SMITH I bought a house in Hawaii for a few reasons. Firstly, the place is just incredible. There aren’t too many surf spots like this in the world, and it’s US soil so it’s a pretty safe investment. Secondly, I felt my weakness was backside heavy tube waves… lefts. Hollow left-handers were definitely something I could work on. It’s not to say I was bad at it, but I’m competing against guys who are the very best in the world at it. Guys who have grown up on the sand here. Just to get any sort of percentage better at it, that’s what I wanted to do. I think the back half of my career entails heavy waves. A lot more heavy waves. And learning the experiences out there at those…

When I was a little kid, my dad took me to a bookstore during a family holiday in the south-west of France. In the corner of the shop I found my first surf and bodyboard mag. Once it was opened, I couldn't close it! I showed one image to my dad and told him that one day, my photos would be in a surf magazine too. That same day, he bought me a bodyboard. Surf photography was my dream job, but growing up in the downtown of Paris, far from the ocean, in a modest situation, photography school and the equipment were way beyond my budget. Everything changed when the boom of the digital era arrived. I bought my first DSLR camera in 2007. It was a SIGMA SD9, like a…