Fifty Places to Surf Before You Die: Surfing Experts Share the World's Greatest Destinations

By Chris Santella

Covering famed surf spots all over the world, this unique full-color gift book and travel guide invites you to discover such unexpected gems as the Amazon and the Gulf of Alaska. From the frigid waters off Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula to Nazaré, Portugal, where in 2013 Garrett McNamara broke a world record for surfing the tallest wave (78 feet!), highlights also include: North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii Gold Coast, Australia Malibu, California Faroe Islands, Denmark Cocoa Beach, Florida Hossegor, France Grajagan, Indonesia Montauk, New York Thurso, Scotland Jeffreys Bay, South Africa And dozens more! Fifty Places to Surf takes readers on a wide-roving adventure, divulging the details that make each venue unique—and plenty of tips for those who aspire to surf there. Author Chris Santella writes in his introduction, “Surfing means different things to different people. For some it might mean longboarding mellow chest-high waves in board shorts, followed by a great sushi dinner; for others it may mean donning a six-millimeter wetsuit to brave near-freezing waters and triple overheads. Fifty Places to Surf Before You Die attempts to capture the spectrum of surfing experiences—from beginner-friendly to downright death-defying.” Featuring interviews with seasoned surfing experts such as pro surfer Joel Parkinson and Billabong executive Shannan North, Fifty Places to Surf Before You Die is an essential travel companion for surfers of all levels who are looking to catch that perfect wave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683355007

Book preview

The Destinations

Mount Saint Elias rises majestically behind Yakutat Bay.

ALASKA

YAKUTAT

RECOMMENDED BY Jack Endicott

Surfing adventures can take you to many idyllic places. But breaks framed by eighteen-thousand-foot, glacier-clad mountains are few and far between . . . unless you’re visiting Alaska’s Yakutat Bay.

Yakutat has to have one of the most beautiful surfing backdrops of any place in the world, Jack Endicott began. The scenery is just breathtaking, with the Wrangell–Saint Elias range to the north, including 18,009-foot-tall Mount Saint Elias, which rises abruptly from sea level. The water is very clear, and not nearly as cold as you might think; in summertime, it can get into the low sixties. And there’s virtually no competition for the waves.

It would be an understatement to say that Alaska has a great deal of beach to explore: 47,300 miles unfold from the northernmost reaches on the Beaufort Sea near Barrow to the southeast region that snakes along the northwestern edge of British Columbia. This staggering distance amounts to more shoreline than that of the of the lower forty-eight states combined! Southeastern Alaska, though it comprises a relatively modest portion of the state’s coast—just fifteen thousand miles—is the Alaska most imagine when they think of the forty-ninth state: vast glaciers, impenetrable forests of hemlock and Sitka spruce, breaching humpback whales, and snow-capped mountains rising vertiginously from the Pacific. Yakutat lies roughly two hundred miles northwest of Juneau. The borough encompasses Wrangell–Saint Elias National Park and Preserve, which is larger than Vermont and New Hampshire combined—just to provide a sense of scope. Yakutat Bay is eighteen miles across and opens to the Gulf of Alaska. (The town itself is home to more bald eagles than people . . . and nearly as many bears.)

The Yakutat region has long been known to sport fishermen (the Situk, which empties into the Gulf of Alaska below town, is a world-class salmon and steelhead trout river). Its reputation as a surfing destination dates to the late 1990s, and it began as a whim. I came to Yakutat in 1980 with the National Weather Service, Jack continued, and was supervisor of the weather station here. At one point I took my family on vacation to Hawaii. My kids commented that the waves at home were as good as the surf in Hawaii. A few of us thought, why don’t we make up the name of a surf shop and see if we could get surf gear wholesale? We came up with Icy Waves, and it worked. We bought some bodyboards, and kids in town started borrowing them. Then we made a T-shirt—my wife’s sister designed it—and the little business started growing. Soon, Jack and his cottage industry experienced the power of good press coverage. "A reporter from Juneau passed through town and did a story on Icy Waves that eventually ended up on the front page of Juneau Empire. The AP picked up the story, so it went nationwide. A week or so later, we got a call from CBS News—they wanted to come up and do a story. The story ran at the end of Dan Rather’s newscast, and also on CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood. Things went crazy after that. People were calling, and we were getting baskets of mail. We didn’t even have a dedicated phone or website at the time. We had quite a few orders for Icy Waves T-shirts!"

The surf season in greater Yakutat extends through most of the year, with the best waves generally encountered in the spring and fall. The good waves are here throughout the winter too, Jack observed, but there’s very little daylight to take advantage of them. We always look to the Fairweather Buoys as an indicator of the swell. Direction is critical: It has to be a southwest swell. When you see a five- to seven-foot southwest swell, we’ll have nice areas of break.

One favorite spot is Graveyards. This spot is near the local cemetery [as the name implies], on the east side of Monti Bay, right in town, Jack explained. It’s a friendly, sandy break. When conditions are right—that southwest swell and a big low tide—it can be world class.

Big-wave riders have a chance to find fifteen- to twenty-foot swells in the late fall, delivered from the Aleutian Islands. When the Red Bull surf team was here a few years back, they used Jet Skis to tow pro surfers out to the breaks, Jack added.

There are certain challenges posed by Far North Shore surfing. Brown bears do live in the area, but we don’t see them very often where the waves are, Jack continued. Of course, you’ll want to be careful if you’re hiking through the brush, as you don’t want to surprise them—especially a mother with cubs. In the water, you have to watch out for male Steller sea lions. They are big [average weight of 1,250 pounds] and scary, and can be aggressive. If you challenge a big bull that has cows around, there could be an issue. In late summer, we do get white sharks that will frequent some of the sandbars, as well as salmon and blue sharks. But there’s so much food around, there haven’t been problems with surfers. There is the misconception that we have super-cold water. Our water temps are on par with northern California or Oregon. It’s not that frigid, especially with modern wetsuits. That being said, the air temperature can be a bit brisk, and early spring/late fall visitors may find themselves stepping through snow to reach the water.

But in the late spring and summer, more clement conditions are the norm. I have taken my youngest son out on days when there’s a big swell at Graveyards, Jack recalled. The water’s glassy smooth and crystal clear, and there are head-high rollers, fifteen seconds between, very clean. There’s the blue water, a white swell, and white Mount Saint Elias in the background.

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JACK ENDICOTT has owned and operated Icy Waves Surf Shop in Yakutat, Alaska, since 1999. He worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 1974 to 2010, managing the weather station in Yakutat for the last thirty years of his career.

If You Go

Getting There: Yakutat is served by Alaska Airlines (800-252-7522; alaskaair.com), via connecting flights from Juneau or Anchorage.

Best Time to Visit: Spring and fall feature the biggest swells, though summer sees the most visitors.

Accommodations: Lodging options in Yakutat are highlighted at yakutatalaska.com.

Surf Shop: Icy Waves (907-784-3226; icywaves.com) is the best (and only) game in town.

Level of Difficulty: Spots like Graveyards can certainly be navigated by intermediate surfers. The big fall surf is best enjoyed by big-wave experts.

The waves at Gnaraloo—including Tombstones—are among Australia’s most challenging.

Australia

GNARALOO STATION AND BEYOND

RECOMMENDED BY Felicity Palmateer

Isolation is often regarded as a bona fide when it comes to assessing a surfing destination’s desirability. Using this criterion, Gnaraloo, in Australia’s great and desolate northwest, has to be near the top of the bucket list.

I grew up in Perth, and my earliest surfing was around Western Australia, Felicity Palmateer began. "I traveled up and down the coast—it was normal to drive a ways to find good surf—say down to Margaret River [about three hours away]. I visited Gnaraloo a couple years ago, and that gave ‘driving a ways’ a whole new meaning. It was fourteen hours each way—a really long drive, with a whole lot of nothing along the way. As you head north, the road goes away from the coast. It’s very rugged, wild territory—red dirt, kangaroos, cows, and roadkill. And not much else. If you make the trip, hopefully you have a good music playlist. But when you finally come back to the sea, the contrast of the blue of the water against the red of the land is dreamy."

Gnaraloo—or, to be more accurate, Gnaraloo Station—is ninety miles north of the nearest town, Carnarvon, and six hundred miles from Perth. (Station, in Aussie par-lance, implies something akin to a ranch.) It’s situated in the Gascoyne administrative region, an area roughly the size of West Virginia, with fewer than fifteen thousand residents. For much of the last century, Gnaraloo was the domain of Merino sheep. But in the last thirty years, sheep populations have been culled, and Gnaraloo has been repositioned as a wilderness tourism destination. Its chief attribute is some thirty miles of coastline along the Coral Sea. Hearty visitors will find superb snorkeling along the Ningaloo Reef, where both hawksbill and green turtles are among the reef’s more charismatic habitués. Fishermen are also drawn to Gnaraloo Bay, where a host of species can be found. And then there’s the sport to be had atop those waters.

A visit to Gnaraloo is marked by the absence of any significant infrastructure and by the need for self-reliance. For me, the remoteness of the place is the best thing about it, Felicity continued. You have to bring everything in with you—food, water, gasoline. There’s something neat about that. Usually, people do their big food shop in Carnarvon. Once you’re there, it takes a week to settle in. There’s no buzz of machinery. You really become one with nature. There aren’t really any hotels. There’s the option of basic cabins, camping, or glamping. There’s no cell phone reception; once you’re there, you can’t tell people that the surf is going off. That’s a rarity in today’s surfing world, where news of a good swell is generally up online in five minutes.

Thanks to its remoteness—not to mention its rather inhospitable terrain—Gnaraloo remained off the radar for most surfers after its discovery in the 1960s. This obscurity diminished a bit after filmmaker Jack McCoy’s Storm Riders featured some of the area’s breaks, though none were specifically identified. (McCoy would return to Gnaraloo many times over the next two decades to create several other films, including Bunyip Dreaming and Occy: The Occumentary.) Billabong conducted several competitions there in the mid-nineties. You won’t be alone at Gnaraloo. But it’s not to be confused with Superbank (on the Gold Coast) either. During school holidays it gets a bit crowded, as you’ll have families of surfers coming up, Felicity observed. But outside of those periods, it’s not crowded.

There are a number of identified breaks around Gnaraloo, including Centers, Midgies, Turtles, and Fenceline. But if there’s a wave that defines Gnaraloo, it’s the ominously named Tombstones—a left-hand barrel whose full length reaches five hundred yards when the tide and swell are aligned . . . and one of the more dangerous waves in the world. Aussie surfer Taj Burrow described it this way to the website of Stab magazine: It’s hard to get into, it’s a gnarly drop, and obviously it doesn’t break properly until it’s six-foot-plus, so whenever it’s surfable, it’s terrifying. Red Bluff, another left-hand reef break a bit south of Gnaraloo, is preferable for Felicity. The water is a grainy blue, and there’s a red rock headland in the background, she described. It’s not as ferocious as Tombstones, which breaks faster and heavier and on a shallower reef. Tombstones is a wave of consequence; you have to know your business. There are definitely many other waves out there. If you go searching, you’ll find them.

Some surf adventures are marked by an anxious anticipation for the swell to arrive. A trip to Gnaraloo could very well result in a feeling quite the opposite, as Felicity explained: "The first time I went to Gnaraloo, my boyfriend and I surfed all day. We were pretty knackered. We were camping near Red Bluff, looking out over the break. We started our fire, and other friends started coming in from the lineup, even though the surf was still pumping. We should’ve gone back out, but we were tired, and the setting sun was beautiful. If I saw those waves on the Gold Coast, I’d be rushing out with my board. But there was something nice about watching perfect waves go unridden as the sun set.

Up in the north, you can’t help but be a bit more relaxed.

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FELICITY PALMATEER is a professional surfer raised in West Australia who now resides in Burleigh Heads, Queensland. She is a former World Surf League Championship Tour competitor, two-time Margaret River Pro trials wildcard recipient, and in 2015 the first female to surf the infamous big-wave spot Cow Bombie, near the Margaret River. As an invitee to the first-ever Women’s Big Wave Challenge at Peahi, Maui, in 2016, she broke her own record by riding what are considered the biggest waves surfed by an Aussie female. As an illustrator and painter, she has held two solo exhibitions and has numerous commercial collaborations. She is a passionate environmentalist and is an ambassador for global organizations such as the Marine Stewardship Council and SurfAid.

If You Go

Getting There: Hearty souls aiming for Gnaraloo will fly into Perth, which is served by many carriers. You’ll need a four-wheel drive vehicle to navigate the Northwest.

Best Time to Visit: While there are waves to be had year-round, May to October—the austral winter—has the most reliable surf.

Surf Shops: None—you’ll need to be completely self-sufficient once you reach Gnaraloo.

Accommodations: In Gnaraloo, there are two options: a simple cabin at The Homestead or rustic camping at 3 Mile Camp. Both are highlighted at gnaraloo.com. Camping options at Red Bluff are highlighted at quobba.com.au.

Level of Difficulty: While some breaks may be negotiable for less-seasoned surfers at low swell times, Gnaraloo is really best for very experienced surfers.

Superbank offers constant waves . . . and near-constant surfer traffic.

Australia

GOLD COAST

RECOMMENDED BY JJ Jenkins

I grew up in Sydney and learned to surf on the north side of town, began JJ Jenkins. There are some well-known surfing spots there. But when I discovered the Gold Coast, I was blown away. The water is so warm and clear, the beaches so clean, that the sand squeaks when you walk on it. And the waves are so groomed and perfect. You can get a ten-second-plus tube; I’ve seen twenty-second barrels! There are so many sand-bottom point breaks, beginning from Point Danger at the border with New South Wales (where the Tweed River enters the Pacific) and extending north. When the swell is on, they will be amongst the best, most unbelievable waves of your life. And the swells can last for days.

Gold Coast is both a city along the southern coast of Queensland and a reference to the twenty-mile strip of sand from Southport in the north to Coolangatta in the south. Many of Australia’s most famed surf spots—Snapper Rocks, Greenmount, Kirra, Currumbin, Burleigh Heads—are found here. In the late 1800s, wealthy citizens of Brisbane recognized the region’s potential as a beachside retreat, and the construction of a railway line in 1889 hastened its development. The region’s potential for surfing was recognized not long after, and as early as 1917, it was being described as a surfer’s paradise. (Some took this to heart: In 1933, one local township, Elston, was renamed Surfers Paradise.) By the 1970s, word had snuck out, and traveling surfers began arriving on the Gold Coast. Its reputation was cemented by the staging of the Stubbies Surf Classic, which inaugurated the modern world surfing tour. Beyond the waves, there were many reasons why the Gold Coast became a surfing Mecca, JJ continued. There’s great accessibility, with a good airport in town, and it’s a short drive from Brisbane and a metaphoric pot of gold for surfers venturing up the East Coast from Sydney. There’s a great infrastructure in place. There’s also the chance to surf alongside some of the greatest stars in the sport. It’s home waters for Joel Parkinson, Occy [Mark Occhilupo], and Mick Fanning, among others.

In the seventies, surfers who were drawn to the Gold Coast focused their energies on the breaks from north Kirra. Today, most set their sights on Snapper Rocks, the launching point for the infamous Superbank—a phenomenon that didn’t exist back in the Disco Era. The Superbank is the unintended result of the River Tweed Sand Bypassing project, a joint initiative of the New South Wales and Queensland state governments. Since the region was settled by Europeans in the late 1800s, the formation of a sand shoal at the Tweed’s mouth has posed navigation challenges. Periodic dredging helped keep the river mouth clear, and in the early 1960s, training walls were constructed to redirect sand pushed out by the river. This worked for a while, but eventually resulted in the creation of a new sandbar at the mouth. The Sand Bypassing project was initiated in 1994 as a more sustainable, more long-term solution to the Tweed’s sand build-up. In the first stage, more than three million cubic meters of sand were dredged and deposited east of Snapper Rocks; this sand began filtering north to form the Superbank—a heavy, hollow, and frequently barreling right-hander. When conditions are just right, take riders from Snapper Rocks, past Rainbow Bay, Greenmount Beach, and on to Kirra—a ride of more than half a mile.

Snapper Rocks and the Superbank draw lots of attention, JJ observed. You can stand ankle-deep in the water, wait for a set, and paddle as hard as you can twenty or thirty meters and you’re ready to go. Though you won’t be alone. The Superbank is extremely crowded—perhaps the most crowded surf place on the planet. That’s what the lure of perfect waves brings you. It can be dog-eat-dog out there. I grew up in a generation when a semblance of respect was enforced. Out at the Superbank, it’s hard to maintain that. At times, everyone becomes faceless and decorum is forgotten. You’ll have a world champion jump in on a newcomer, and he’ll be dropped in on by someone who probably shouldn’t be out there in the first place. The longer the swell stays on, the more courtesy sneaks into the lineup, the less aggression you experience. If it pumps for days and days, people will have had their fill . . . or can’t take any more days off from work to enjoy the waves!

How does one negotiate the scrum at Superbank? JJ offered a bit of advice. "Don’t get picky. If you see a wave you can catch, catch it. Don’t get caught up in the competitive mess. Know that you’ll win some and lose some;