Surfing World Magazine

Surfing World is the oldest, deepest and most respected surfing magazine in the world. Founded in 1962, it's become a cornerstone of surfing culture both in Australia and right around the globe. It's a premium, high concept magazine, showcasing the best surf writing and photography. It's both classic and contemporary, reflecting the kaleidoscopic surfing culture of today.

Surfing World Magazine

FROM BOONINYBAH TO HUDAYRIYAT – ancient surf futurism

“I KNEW THAT MY SPIRIT HAS LEFT THE BODY, JUST REAL QUICKLY. IF THAT WAS DEATH, I WAS TALKING TO MYSELF AND SAYING, ‘SAM, DON’T WORRY. JUST TAKE THE RIDE.” – Peahi, and the beckoning of Sam Yoon • Driving back from Kalihiwai to Hanalei, Sam Yoon sees wild roses growing on the side of the road and pulls the van over. “I found one rose tree, yellow rose, in the nature,” the Korean-Australian surfer and shaper recalls. “And I just picked some roses, a beautiful yellow rose. And the fragrances… like I’ve never had. The rose had this potency, you know.” Sam is on Kauai to recover his senses. A few weeks earlier he’d almost died at Peahi in a wipeout so violent that for a short minute it switched off his nerves and senses entirely. He lost feeling, he lost movement, he lost sight, all the while being thrown around underwater as three, 30-foot waves rolled over him. It’s a miracle he survived, thanks largely to the Hawaiian crew on hand to drag him out of there. Peahi means ‘beckon’ in Hawaiian. It has been beckoning Sam for over a decade and, as he explains, it will continue to do so, despite the events of December 21. He recounts his story here…

THE FREEDOM BUS, LEAVING JONSON STREET — the Ziggy Alberts story • Late 2019, and I found myself backstage at a Ziggy Alberts gig in Melbourne. I’d known the Mudjimba surfer for a couple of years by this point; when he was home from touring, we’d catch up in Byron for coffee, to talk surf and the fate of the natural world. But I’d never actually been to one of his gigs. I knew his story: how he’d started busking on the street corner in town, just him and his guitar, and he’d gone on to build a career entirely independent of the music industry. I knew he had a following and his music had become a soundtrack to the van life movement that had become a way of life for a generation of young Australians. I knew he’d broken big earlier that year, but I wasn’t ready for what confronted me as I walked to my seat overlooking the crowd.

HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY George Greenough has a new surfboard. “It’s like you’re just… gone. You’ve become a part of the wave.” • Up in the hills behind Byron, George is working on a new board. It’s an evolution of an evolution, with roots back in the early 1970s, and as such is a portal to another realm. At 83, George has lost none of his creative fire, but with this project – as he did with his previous, the Edge board – he needed someone to champion the idea for a modern generation of surfer. Enter Andrew Kidman, who’s worked for years with George on boards that not only change the act of surfing, but they also change what surfing fundamentally is. For this story, we reunited the old Litmus partnership of Andrew Kidman and Jon Frank, who spent an afternoon discussing not only George’s surfboard, but the creative life he’s lived now for seven decades.

THE LEPRECHAUN AND THE SPACEMAN — Justin Crawford remembers Shane Herring • In the days since Shane Herring’s passing, most of the tributes have focused on a six-month period of Shane’s life in early 1992, when he was 21 years old and the best surfer in the world. But in many ways, the end of that brief period was the start of Shane’s real life. By design, in decline, he lived it quietly and out of the public eye, first for a decade in Dee Why, then up on the North Coast. Alongside him for much of that time was old Dee Why mate, Justin Crawford. Over the years as...