🏄‍♀️ The (very) worst mistake in surfing is going halfway 🥹

👋 Happy Holidays! We almost made it ’til the end of the year. This week will be our last “new” newsletter of 2025. After that, we’re keeping things light with a few Greatest Hits picks—stories you may have missed this year, but are worth your time (if you have some to spare).

We’d love to wish you Happy Holidays and a Very Surfy New Year!

🏄‍♀️ Let’s surf:

• The (very) worst mistake in surfing: going halfway 🥹

• The Wee Surf Shoppe has landed 🚀

• How do you pronounce Teahupo’o, again 🤔

• The Endless Summer: The movie we pretend we've watched 🎬

• Santa surf news 🎅

^SURFODRAMA

😱 The very worst mistake in surfing is going halfway 🥹

Surfers’ memory is short. Sometimes it works to our advantage—who wants to remember being told off in the lineup? But other times, it would be useful to retain the lessons we’ve learnt so we can build upon them.

That’s why we’d like you to remember this for 2026: hesitation is the biggest enemy in surfing.

It starts innocently enough: should I go out today or not? You’re staring at the forecast and the cams with the intensity of a—well, something very intense—and somehow you’re still unable to make a decision. So you start building a case against it. It’s too big. It’s too small. It’s too cold. There’s grocery shopping to be done and Netflix shows to be watched.

Because going out means there’s a possibility of failing. In all sorts of ways: not catching as many waves as you’d like, not landing the thing you’re working on, not standing up at all, not even getting through the white water to the green waves.

And yes—when in doubt, don’t go out. Safety first, always. But sometimes it’s worth questioning, just a little, where that doubt is actually coming from.

💪 When hesitation turns physical

Of course, there’s physical hesitation too. And this is where surfing really starts to unravel.

Physical hesitation is the half-paddle, the extra look over the shoulder, the almost-pop-up followed by sitting back down or kneeling. Let’s pray for a pop-up next time!

It’s pulling back just as the wave finally gives you a push. It’s trying to keep your options open when, in reality, surfing demands a decision. The wave does not wait while you negotiate with yourself.

☢️ Caution or hesitation?

The tricky part is that hesitation often disguises itself as caution. We tell ourselves we’re being sensible, respectful, safe. But in surfing, half-decisions are often riskier than full ones.

A committed paddle gives you speed. Speed gives you stability. Stability gives you options. Hesitation does the opposite. It slows you down, leaves you stuck in the worst part of the wave, and turns what could have been a manageable takeoff into a steeper, messier situation. Ironically, many wipeouts happen not because someone went for a wave—but because they almost did.

⛔️ Flow killer

Hesitation also kills flow. When you hesitate, all the movements required to have an awesome ride—position, paddle, pop-up, turn—disconnect. The board wobbles. Your weight shifts. Panic kicks in.

And once you panic, it’s bye-bye birdy. This is probably why experienced surfers often look “relaxed”, because they commit fully, even if they can’t guarantee a perfect result.

Of course, not every wave needs a yes. Safety first! Choosing not to go is not hesitation. The problem is the in-between space: starting, doubting—should I, maybe, possibly, better not—stopping. As corny as this may sound, surfing doesn’t reward maybes. There is no try.

And if it doesn’t work out? Congratulations—you’ve just learned something useful.

^{THE WIPEOUT WEEKLY WEE SURF SHOPPE}

🛍️ Wee Surf Shoppe has landed in the lineup!

This is a wee project we’ve been working on for a while, and it arrives just in time for your very last-minute holiday gift shopping.

We always wanted a place where you could explore useful, cute, and sometimes just simply outrageous fun surf stuffs that:

❌ wasn’t some SEO article with a list of products that actually had not-so-great reviews

✅ was equally as delightful to just scroll through to get some ideas as it was actually buying the stuff

✅ was updated regularly

And so, we give you–your curated surf therapy: Wee Surf Shoppe!

Here you will find your Surf Pantry, Surf Giftables, Surf Indulgences, and a weekly updated Top 9 (nine items fit well on desktop).

We curate the selection; you can buy the items directly from Amazon or whomever makes it. And we hope to build it into an even more useful and trustworthy way of exploring surf “stuffs” in the coming months and years!

For now, please explore, scroll, have a laugh, and we really appreciate your thoughts on all of this. ❤️ Do email us!

And yes, there’s also our own merch to buy under Da Merch. More on this next year, but if you’re tempted, use SURFGOOD code for 20% off.

👉 Go and scroll to your heart’s delight

_{P.S. We use affiliate links for Amazon products, so if you buy something after clicking on our link, The Wipeout Weekly will get a tiny cut, which will fund this newsletter. We thank you!}

^{WAVE OF THE WEEK}

🤔 How do you pronounce Teahupo’o, again?

On the southwestern coast of Tahiti, in French Polynesia, sits a tiny village at the literal end of the road.

Its name, Teahupoʻo (pronounced cho-poo), loosely translates to “wall of skulls” or “place of broken heads,” a nod to Tahitian oral history of battles and bloodshed, and perhaps a more of an accurate premonition of the wave’s reputation.

A wave that most of us will never surf. 😜

☣️ What makes Teahupoʻo so dangerous?

From shore, the break is completely invisible. You can’t hear it, there is no thunderous roar you’d expect from a big‑wave spot. Instead, you take a boat out and, there it is, looking impossible to ride.

What makes Teahupoʻo so legendary is the reef—a geologic trapdoor. Roughly fifty yards past the break, the ocean floor plunges from over 300 feet deep to a razor‑shallow living coral shelf that sits about twenty inches beneath the surface.

Swell traveling thousands of miles across the Pacific collides with that sudden depth change and folds over itself. The result is a wave that doesn’t just barrel; it mutates. Surfers often describe the lip as thick as it is tall. It forms a heaving, square barrel that appears to break below sea level, swallowing everything in front of it.

⚔️ War zone, not a wave

I love this description by surf journalist Gary Taylor: "Teahupo’o isn't a wave, it's a war zone. A freak of nature that some bastard decided to call a surf spot."

The danger isn’t primarily the height. Waves as small as three feet can be ridden at Teahupo’o. But the bigger it gets the heavier and thicker it becomes. Anything above eight feet becomes a different species. If you’re not positioned perfectly, you don’t fall into water. You fall onto reef.

It’s not uncommon to hear pros talk about being “scalped” by the coral, or losing skin to the reef, or having to be stitched without anesthesia in a local house because waiting for a hospital would take too long.

One local surfer, Briece Taerea, died in 2000 during a swell before a major contest—caught inside, driven headfirst into the coral, breaking his neck.

And Laird Hamilton caught an 18 footer and was described as “a little speck of human, charging for his life, doing what none of us ever imagined possible" as the wave poured over him "like liquid napalm.” He made the wave and then apparently just sat and wept in the channel. They called it The Millenium Wave.

🦄 From locals to legends

Tahitian locals surfed it small in the mid‑80s. Then Hawaiian bodyboarders Mike Stewart and Ben Severson were the first to ride it at full size a few years later.

In the early ’90s, pro surfers like Kelly Slater and Tom Carroll found themselves at “the end of the road”. That’s what the wave was called then.

By 1997, professional contests were being held. In 1999, it earned full World Tour status.

Then in 2011, the Code Red swell hit—so massive, the contest was paused because the event scaffolding was shaking in the wind. The world’s best surfers naturally ignored the cancellation, launched their skis, and threw themselves into the heaviest barrels ever filmed. Nathan Fletcher’s ride graced the covers of seven surf magazines.

And this you know already. In a stunning moment of Olympic irony, Teahupoʻo was chosen as the site of the 2024 Paris Olympics surfing event.

As such it set another record: it was the farthest‑away medal event from the host city in Olympic history.

^{SURFING THRU HISTORY}

☀️ The Endless Summer: The movie we all pretend we've watched

If you’ve never heard about The Endless Summer are you even a surfer? Of course, you are! 🥰

I watched The Endless Summer once, but due to my interest in surfing, unbridled enthusiasm for documentary filmmaking, and a box office–success obsession, I’ve read about the making of The Endless Summer and Bruce Brown a lot.

The plot isn’t a lot. The movie follows two surfers—Robert August and Mike Hynson—on a quest to circumnavigate the globe chasing “the perfect wave” while following the summer from hemisphere to hemisphere. They wouldn’t have gone around the globe at all if it wasn’t for the fact that the roundtrip tickets were actually cheaper. $50 cheaper at that time, if you want to be precise.

Matt Warshaw describes the stars of The Endless Summer as: the calm, dark-haired goofyfooter who had just graduated high school and was going to become a dentist (that’s Robert August), and the grass-smoking, grinning regular-footer with permanently slicked-back blond hair on the run from the U.S. Army draft board. What a pair! It’s genuinely entertaining watching them wear suits and ties at LAX.

🎥 Bruce Brown: director, cameraman, narrator, everything

As for Bruce Brown, he was 26 when he started filming The Endless Summer, his sixth surf movie, but just 19 when he made his first movie. And he had a lot riding on it—he invested $50,000 of his own savings. He was the director, cameraman, narrator, editor—you name it. No crew, and his equipment weighed less than a hundred pounds.

The movie takes you from California → Senegal → Ghana → Nigeria → South Africa (incl. Cape St. Francis) → Australia → New Zealand → Tahiti → Hawai‘i, and their trip lasted four months. They did find what they were looking for—the perfect wave at a place called Cape St. Francis in South Africa.

🎞️ Documentary? Fiction? Something in-between

There’s a debate among surfers about whether The Endless Summer is a documentary or a fictional movie. According to The History of Surfing, Bruce Brown wasn’t really interested in documenting surfing; he just wanted to present the look and feel of surfing in its best moments—and that’s what he did. Opening it up to the masses.

But if you watch the movie, you’ll notice that Bruce embellishes for dramatic effect, the discovery of the perfect wave after walking for miles over sandy dunes being a prime example. No matter. It’s entertaining and the waves are real.

The audience agreed to the tune of $20 million at the box office, despite The Endless Summer’s most chaotic distribution over the course of several years.

It’s so bizarre that The Endless Summer, being a total icon, actually bookends the surfing boom—filmed just after surfing exploded in the ’50s and watched in theaters as surfers started getting obsessed with shortboards and abandoning surfing in droves because…learning curve.

^{THE WIPEOUT WEEKLY SURF NEWS ROUNDUP}

🗞️ Santas surf, shark bites, Texas lagoons, EOS archives, and Point Breaks

🎅 Surfing Santas take over Cocoa Beach
Thousands of costumed surfers will paddle out on Christmas Eve for Florida’s most chaotic, joyful, and Santa-heavy surf tradition.

🦈 Third shark bite reported in California this year
A Northern California surfer was bitten on the hand but escaped without life-threatening injuries—sobering news, though still statistically rare.

🌊 Texas is getting a $200 million surf lagoon
A massive wavepool resort planned for McKinney aims to bring a “beach experience” inland by 2027, whether surfers like it or not.

📚 Encyclopedia of Surfing shifts to the EOS Archive
Matt Warshaw is pausing daily EOS updates to build a vast, non-commercial digital archive preserving endangered surf history.

🏄 Point Break is becoming a TV Series
The cult surf classic is being revived as a sequel series set decades later, proving Hollywood’s surf-nostalgia obsession is alive and well.

👉 Read the full news roundup

⬆️ Aaaaaaand that was the last wave of the week!
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^HOUSEKEEPING

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