CLOCK IN CLOCK OUT PULL IN
It was a week before famed Australian slab surfer Mark Mathews’ Cape Fear contest was set to run, featuring an international field of big-wave legends including Shane Dorian, Bruce Irons, Ian Walsh, Albee Layer, Jamie O’Brien and Makua Rothman. The only problem was that the World Surf League (WSL), locked in a cold war with event sponsor Red Bull, threatened to ban any surfer who competed in the event from participating in future WSL contests. The big names all pulled out.
It might not have mattered, however, since it appeared the contest wouldn’t run. Couldn’t run. The forecast just looked too big. The system spawning in the Tasman Sea would eventually be known as the “Black Nor’easter” and would batter the whole Eastern Seaboard, washing houses into the ocean and lighting up reefs and bommies that had lain dormant for a generation. Cape Solander — Cape Fear, also known as Ours, pre-branding makeover — was a dangerous wave at 6 foot, and with the storm sucking fuel from the Tasman, it appeared it would be two or three times that size and beyond contemplation. But with the storm eye tracking the coast and the whole thing so damn volatile, at the last minute Mathews saw a glimmer of hope. He traded calls in turn with his forecaster and his insurance broker. If it ran, it would be something else.
That only left the problem of finding someone to surf it. Where, at short notice, could you find a group of lunatics gladly willing to sign the waiver and surf the blackest of black-diamond days? Where indeed.
Since it first appeared on magazine covers and in videos in the early 2000s, slab surfing has been a misunderstood movement, cast almost immediately as the redheaded, snaggletoothed cousin of big-wave surfing. While traditional big-wave surfing could trace its ancestry to the ancient Polynesians, slab
