The Surfer's Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick

Jared Mell is a surfer and shaper who grew up in Orange County, California, surfing Blackies and riding alt equipment—primarily longboards, but also eggs, fishes, alaias, etc. Mell's competed in many events, and landed many decent results, but they seem almost incidental to what he brings to the surf buffet. "Jared will be walking the nose backside and at the last second he'll turn switch," says A...

Paige Alms was born in British Columbia, moved to Maui when she was nine, found surfing, found surf contests, and, around the age of 15, found big waves. They would become her forte, specifically Jaws, located not far from her home in Haiku. She spent a lot of time out there, riding waves of course, but also learning the lineup. It paid off. In 2015, she knifed her way into a bomb, angled high, an...

Born and raised in Newport, Rhode Island, Sid Abruzzi came to surfing and skateboarding in the early 1960s. In 1969, 18-year-old Abbruzzi drove down to New Jersey to buy a few Rick single-fins, as surfboards were hard to come by in Rhode Island back then. He swiftly sold the boards, then sold another batch, and found a liking for this buying and selling business. In 1971, Abbruzzi opened Water Bro...

Hailing from Noosa, Australia, Harry Bryant is a frothing, underground charger who'll drive halfway across Australia to hunt for remote slabs. He's also a bonafide surf star—his blond bowl-cutted head recognizable in lineups worldwide. One window into his full throttle operation and persona is 2024's Motel Hell , a full-length surf feature that he made with director Dave Fox. It contains a storyli...

Australian-born, California-raised Rob Machado is known for many things, but perhaps most of all he's known for making it look easy. After an accomplished amateur career, Machado, a member of the New School generation, joined the world tour in 1993. He rose to second overall in 1995, the year he famously high-fived Kelly Slater in the semifinals of the Pipe Masters with the title on the line. He f...

The daughter of an American father and a Japanese mother, Shirley Rogers was born in Japan in 1953. She spent her first nine years there, then a few years in Texas. At 16, she moved with her parents to Oahu. At Campbell High School on the Westside, she took photography classes and found a passion for it. She also found surfing—the act of riding waves, the culture, and the community. In 1971, her p...

Born in 1984, Kai Neville came to surfing at age 11 on the Sunshine Coast, where his dad pushed him into his first waves. He loved it, aspired to be a pro, but soon realized he might be better off behind the camera rather than in front of it. He got a job at McDonald's, saved up for a High-8 Sony Handycam, and started creating short surf films, which led to a job making promo DVDs for Australia's...

Born in 1954, hailing from Victoria, Australia, Maurice Cole started surfing at age 12. He got good fast, and won Victorian State Titles in 1973 and 1976. However, he got busted for possession of hash oil, which, after trial, led to a little over two years in jail. That obviously stalled his competitive ascent, but also proved to be formative. He got out in 1978 and surfed vigorously around the Be...

Nathan Florence, the middle of the three Florence brothers, was born in Hawaii in 1994. Like his older brother, three-time world champion John, and younger brother, Pipe charger and ace skateboarder Ivan, Nathan grew up in a beachfront house looking out to Pipeline, and made the seamless progression from building sandcastles on the beach to getting spit out of tubes in what was ostensibly his back...

Born in 1937, Mickey Muñoz moved from New York to Los Angeles at age six, started surfing at age 10, and swiftly found Malibu's First Point. He became one of the top surfers out there, and made friends with the regulars—Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin, Miki Dora.  Muñoz eventually moved to Hawaii, where he rode Waikiki and worked restaurant jobs to get by. He soon found his way out to the North Shore, whic...

Born and raised in San Diego, Devon Howard came to surfing at age seven. He gravitated to longboarding—both the wave-riding approach and the culture. A graduate of the University of San Diego, he served as managing editor of Longboard magazine from 1999 to 2004. For the next decade or so, he worked as a freelance writer and photographer, and held marketing positions with Patagonia and Spy Optic. B...

Born in Hawaii in 1983 and raised in a beachfront home on the North Shore, with a view out to Pipeline, Jamie O'Brien started surfing at age three. As an amateur, he went on a contest trajectory—making the finals of the menehune division of the 1995 and '96 US Surfing Championships, and the finals in the 1999 and 2000 World Junior Championships. Most impressive, though, was his close relationship...

Born in Tustin, California, James Nestor spent his teens surfing and playing in a straight-edge punk band called Care Unit. After graduating high school, he moved to the Bay Area, where he studied art and literature and earned an MFA.  Nestor's professional life began as a copywriter. Soon he moved into magazine journalism. His essays and features have appeared in Outside , Scientific American , T...

Born in 1955, hailing from Durban, South Africa, Shaun Tomson won the IPS world title in 1977. He did 14 seasons on the world tour, and won 12 events, including the 1975 Pipeline Masters, in which he made giant leaps for backside tube riding. He starred in many '70s and '80s surf films, among them Free Ride , where he's seen pumping through the barrel at Backdoor and Off the Wall—an entirely new t...

Born in 1976, hailing from Narrabeen on the northern beaches of Sydney, Oscar "Ozzie" Wright burst onto the scene in the mid-1990s and swiftly ascended to global surf fame—never in contests, but nearly always doing something imaginative, like flying through the air, doing spell-casting things with the tube, or surfing remote Indo in a pair of handcrafted bat wings.   Wright appeared in a number of...

Born in Hawaii in 1961, Danny Kwock rode his first waves at Waikiki when he was ten. Surfing took a brief hiatus when he moved with his family to the San Fernando Valley, but picked up soon thereafter when they moved to Newport Beach, right at Wedge, which is where Kwock made his mark, charging big waves and becoming one of the brightest, flashiest surfers of the Echo Beach scene, wearing pink boa...

For more than two decades, Sachi Cunningham has been training her lens on women and the pioneers of big-wave surfing. After earning a BA in history from Brown University and a Masters of Journalism from UC Berkeley, Cunningham started the first video team at the LA Times , where she produced the award-winning series Chasing the Swell , which documents the first ever Big Wave World Tour. She was th...

Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1949, Randy Rarick moved with his family to Hawaii when he was five. He started surfing at age 10, under the tutelage of the Waikiki Beach Boys. He was a Hawaiian state junior champ, and made the semifinals of the 1970 World Championships in Australia.  In 1976, at age 26, Randy and 1968 world champion Fred Hemmings founded International Professional Surfing, aka th...

Hailing from the central coast of New South Wales, Australia, Ross Clarke-Jones joined the ASP world tour in 1986, at age 19. He was good in the small waves that the tour typically competed in at that time. But when the surf jacked up to 20-plus feet in the 1986 Billabong Pro at Waimea Bay, Clarke-Jones heaved himself over leadges and exited the water as one of the world's great big waves surfers—...

Surfwear tycoon Bob Hurley spent his early days around Huntington Beach, California, shaping for labels like Hot Stuff, Infinity, Wave Tools, and Lightning Bolt. After spearheading Billabong USA from 1983 to 1998, Hurley transitioned to the creation of his namesake brand, centered around an ethos of innovation that he observed in the youthful counterculture of Southern California at the time. Whil...

Born in 1970, raised in Bondi Beach, Australia, Pauline Menczer found her way to the surfboard at age 14. Actually, it was half a surfboard—a snapped hand-me-down from her brother. Four years later she won the 1988 World Amateur Champs, hopped on the ASP world tour, and finished the year ranked fifth overall. Her surfing was loose, springy, full of hurled tail. She won lots of events, and, in 1993...

Born in 1986, Chris Burkard grew up on California's Central Coast and knew from a young age that he had to get out. Photography became the avenue. Primarily self-taught, Burkard won the Follow the Light Foundation grant in 2006, and away he went, working as a senior staff photographer for  Surfline , Water magazine, and Surfer magazine, as well as freelancing for The New Yorker , National Geograph...

Born in California in 1948, Jeff Hakman's father introduced him to surfing at age eight. Four years later, the family moved to Oahu, and the year after that, at the age of 13, Hakman surfed Waimea Bay for the first time. In 1965, he was invited to the inaugural Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, held at Sunset Beach. Hakman was 17. He won. In the ensuing years, on his Dick Brewer-shaped boards, Hakman...

Born and raised on the northern beaches of Sydney, Holly Wawn's father started pushing her into waves at their local Bungan Beach when she was three. She started competing in her teens, won local events, and won the 2012 Australian Junior Titles at age 15. From 2015 to 2019, she competed full-time on the 'QS, bagged a few thirds, but came to realize that she was happiest surfing outside of the con...

From Newport, New South Wales, Australia, Derek Hynd is known for his unconventional approach to surfing and all else. Hynd was a pro surfer in the late 1970s and early '80s, making his name both for his surfing in a jersey and for the pieces he wrote for the surf mags of the era. In 1980, while competing in South Africa, he suffered a brutal injury that resulted in the loss of vision in his right...