Surf Stories
From 2-foot to 20-foot, the Big Wave Risk Assessment Group (BWRAG) is sparking a global movement in surf safety.
Looking for a temperature guide for Patagonia Yulex® Regulator® Wetsuits? Zip up—we’re diving deep.
Paige Alms, Moona Whyte and Kyle Thiermann travel into northern territory to put a slew of our cold-water surf gear to the test.
Un viaje a Amami Ōshima, en Japón, transporta a Gerry Lopez hacia un sentimiento familiar en una tierra distante.
Big-wave icon Greg Long, a past Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational winner, passes the baton to the next generation during 2024’s incredible event.
12 de septiembre de 2024
Conoce al hombre que trabaja por salvar Punta Conejo en México.
After a devastating wildfire, the community of West Maui continues to recover and rebuild.
For surfer Yusei Ikariyama to save his home waters, he’ll have to first unite his community.
Una amistad forjada en el mar se convierte en una poderoza alianza para la protección de rompientes.
Esta es la bitácora de un capitán sobre la mayor marejada que ha azotado los arrecifes exteriores de Oahu en los últimos años.
Un pueblo despojado de su vínculo con el océano encuentra una oportunidad de reconexión.
Cada cierto tiempo te cruzas con alguien cuyas acciones y conducta te inspiran, te maravillan. Así me pasó cuando conocí a Ramón Navarro. Yo tenía 19 años y estaba en lo que ya era la extensión de la temporada invernal en la legendaria costa norte de O‘ahu, Hawaii, con la esperanza de perfeccionar mis habilidades para…
Una mirada al interior de la pasión compartida por el surf en el Yakutat Surf Club al sureste de Alaska
Escenas desde la zona cero del mayor evento del surf en siete años.
Transformando el consumo eléctrico en un cambio positivo para las personas, el planeta y nuestra punta favorita.
La vida es mucho más que diversión en la playa, los resultados de los torneos de surf y lograr un buen cutback al correr una ola.
Un intercambio de olas y prácticas culturales indígenas en la costa del pacífico mexicano.
El camino a la iluminación comienza en la ola más letal del planeta.
Where worthless and priceless collide.
Big Mineral Mining is tearing up the coastline and restricting access to some of South Africa’s most pristine beaches and waves—and it’s getting way out of hand.
Los recientes avances en protocolos y equipamiento de seguridad, ¿hacen más peligrosos los lineups en el surf de olas grandes?
How Captain Liz Clark’s Tahitian residency opened a new chapter in her activist work.
Tapping into the beginner’s mind while teaching his daughter to surf.
Childhood friends, Hayley Talbot and Dan Ross, are determined to save a mighty river.
Building positivity, inspiration and purpose out of a racist encounter in Los Angeles.
This Great Lakes surfer never felt represented in the surf scene, so she created a new surf culture of her own.
Seasoned waterman, master woodworker and Patagonia Surf Ambassador Ben Wilkinson channels his skills toward a new environmental calling.
El coautor, Kim McCoy, relata cómo descubrió el misterio de lo que hay bajo las olas, donde el océano y la tierra se encuentran y compiten.
Ramón Navarro and Kohl Christensen bring Léa Brassy into the jaws of a Chilean monster.
Nota del Editor: Este relato fue compartido originalmente por Fletcher Chouinard en 2011, con la historia de su viaje desde California a Chile para surfear algunas de las olas más grandes que se han visto en El Buey. Sábado Kohl: “Hermano, ¡va a estar graaaaande! Nos vemos en Chile!” Domingo Kohl: “Se ve INCREÍBLE! Estoy…
How a nonprofit that takes San Francisco kids surfing expanded its work in 2020.
Una mirada a los chalecos de impacto para surf y a quienes han traído de regreso a casa.
Clyde Aikau on why the most culturally significant big-wave event in surfing will always matter.
Kohl Christensen analiza cómo surgió el BWRAG y su reciente experiencia cercana a la muerte, cortesía del arrecife de Pipeline.
Dave Rastovich and Greg Long log in and discuss the current state of surfing, its cultural and ecological impacts, and where it’s headed.
Cómo las redes de pesca desechadas terminaron en la visera de nuestros gorros.
Conoce a Annie Reickert, la surfista de 18 años oriunda de Maui que Paige Alms tomó bajo su tutela en Jaws y mucho más allá.
Levantar la voz para proteger un lugar especial antes de que desaparezca.
Si no encontraste lo que fuiste a buscar, asegúrate de disfrutar el viaje.
Kimi Werner emprende un viaje a la isla de Jeju para encontrar lecciones sobre maternidad, cultura, buceo y cómo proveer para la familia, por parte de las “mujeres del mar” surcoreanas, también conocidas como las haenyeo.
Sigue a Kimi Werner en el viaje de Lecciones de Jeju, donde aprendió sobre maternidad, cultura, buceo y la mantención de una familia junto a las madres del mar de Corea del Sur, las haenyeo. “El mundo parece no caer en cuenta de lo increíble que es la maternidad”, dice Kimi.
Captain Liz Clark’s been self-isolating aboard her sailboat Swell since 2005; here she provides her experiences and insight for navigating isolation during a pandemic.
How Belinda Baggs went from an ‘armchair’ activist to the front lines.
Greg Long, Al Mackinnon and Pete Geall’s dusty search for uncrowded perfection at Location Redacted.
There’s nothing more important than having waves a few minutes away.
While Australia burns, its government is greenlighting oil drilling in the unspoiled Great Australian Bight. But surfers and coastal communities are saying no—and uniting to keep Big Oil out.
In a nation known for its massive resource extraction, salmon farming is now bigger than all of Chile’s industries except copper mining.
At Fletcher Chouinard Designs, the focus is on durable, high-performing equipment that lets you have fun no matter what the ocean is doing. There are never enough hours in a day for Fletcher Chouinard. As a surfer, shaper, kiteboarder and new father, he was really doing the dance. Then along came foilboarding, which has made…
The Best Times Are About Friends, Not Perfection It had been four years since Liz Clark, Léa Brassy and I first spent time together, on a sailing trip through the Tuamotus. We knew we’d found something special from the moment we met, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. We’re all very individual women and…
The Trump administration wants to open almost all of America’s coastline to the oil industry, putting our beaches and oceans at serious risk. Fifty years ago, an offshore rig spilled 100,000 barrels of crude oil into California’s Santa Barbara Channel, creating a 35-mile slick that fouled the wave-rich shoreline from Goleta to Ventura. It should…
It was November 1991. I was with two friends and we were at the beginning of a three-month surf trip around the coasts of Spain and Portugal. Mundaka was our starting point. We all agreed that we would be happy just to get something better than the cold, windblown beach breaks we had left behind…
Never Town explores Australia’s remote southern coastlines—and what surfers are willing to do to keep them wild.
Six years ago, when that famous wave broke on the Third Ledge at Cloudbreak—tearing down reef, tearing through time, majestically unridden, surfers scrambling for their lives—there was one question left hanging in the air like sea mist. As the last wave washed through the lagoon and slunk back into the ocean, the water still hissing,…
A film about exploring the Great Barrier Reef and how our choices affect the most vulnerable places on Earth.
Last year I decided to truly dig in to my effort to raise awareness about epilepsy, a disease that affects 1 out of every 26 people in the United States, by using my social media and long-distance paddling skills. I worked hard to prepare for a 17-mile paddle, reached out to the Epilepsy Foundation of…
It was about an hour before dark. The spot had been a lot easier to find than I thought—five minutes from the main road and within easy viewing distance from a cliff. A few weeks earlier a friend had told me he had seen “something breaking” along this stretch of coast. This must be it,…
After an hour’s sleep, I wake to the sound of fat raindrops pelting the deck. The noise quickly escalates into a deafening torrent, and I push up off the settee and climb up the steps. Glancing at the radar screen on my way up, I see a massive squall blacking out the entire 8-mile radius…
In May 1981, I set out in a home-built Hawaiian sailing canoe from South Point on the island of Hawai‘i to my home on Kaua‘i. It was an adventure that would take me from the southern-most to the northern-most point of the Hawaiian Islands. I named my canoe Holopuni, “to sail everywhere,” and I’ve been…
Besides a lighthouse, a dirt trail and a few small structures, Isla De Todos Santos is almost completely undeveloped. The only permanent resident is the lighthouse keeper, who greeted us in Spanish as we approached after stepping ashore on a bright October morning. Those who choose to live in solitude fascinate me and I wanted…
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks—a whirlwind of events, to say the least. Seems like the world got turned over in less than a month. Natural disasters are igniting on all sides of the globe. Could it be that the planet is trying to tell us something? Is humanity in harm’s way? Nature tends…
If you were to ask me what I did on the Danube River during my 21-day solo paddle from Ingolstadt, Germany to Belgrade, Serbia, my answer is simple. I fought crime, outran bad guys in speedboats with machine guns, almost died a few times from river monsters and 20-foot waves … oh yeah, it was…
Punta de Lobos is awarded World Surfing Reserve status—an all too rare conservation success story.
About five minutes from where I live, there is a small village called Tapia de Casariego. The waves at Tapia are not world-class, but they can get very good on the right conditions. Tapia is also very significant in Spanish surfing history, being one of the birthplaces of surfing in this country. Most of the…
Robby Naish once spoke about the irony of traveling the world to compete. He spent 30 years filling passport after passport, but never really saw anything other than the beach. It’s an easy trap to fall into. With today’s high-paced society and accurate weather forecasts, traveling surfers and kite surfers often focus too much on…
It didn’t take long for Ben Wilkinson to figure out that there was freedom to be had in working for himself—and that freedom was the first requirement if he wanted to go surfing whenever the waves got huge. “I left home when I was 16,” he remembers, “which was old enough in my eyes. But…
Filmmaking. Some people follow the storyboard, some follow their gut. Keith Malloy? Ten parts gut, zero parts plan. Well, I take that back. He’s got a plan, it’s just hard to discern it behind that beard. Fortunately, he’s got some friends (and a legendary wife) who know how to organize, use cameras, record sound, scuba dive…
“MISHEEEEEEEE!” boomed Cecilia, almost crushing Michi’s large frame with a huge hug as we both walked in the door. It was 2016 and the twenty-eighth time Michi (pronounced Mickey) Mohr had come to Madeira Island. Even though he was based in Munich, he knew the waves of Madeira as well as anyone, and could more…
A crash course in crewing a sailing canoe.
Eight hours earlier, we were a canoe team without paddles. After a last-minute transport change, the Bad News Bears of outrigger racing had arrived at the start of the Moloka‘i Hoe having forgotten our most important equipment in another truck. It was a tense hour or so until our paddles finally arrived. But now, halfway…
Snowboarding began as a way of riding waves in their frozen form. There are still plenty of snow shredders who take their inspiration from surf style—and plenty of surfers who are just as stoked to get up into the mountains. Each year at Mt. Bachelor, the Gerry Lopez Big Wave Challenge celebrates the links between…
Almost a decade ago, I’d heard stories of mystical right points peeling forever without another soul in sight. What surfer addicted to logging wouldn’t crave to check it out, even though it meant ignoring travel warnings and venturing into a region suffering from civil unrest? Young, naive and most probably foolish, I set off on…
As I step into MAS Active-Leisureline, a Fair Trade Certified factory that makes Patagonia products near Colombo, Sri Lanka, the first thing that confronts my senses is the sound. Row after row of clamorous cutting and sewing machinery is being operated by a few hundred workers, all dressed in bright green uniforms and working under…
For those of you who don’t know surfing, Gerry Lopez is an icon of the sport. Since the late sixties, Gerry has made surfers from around the world hoot with hyper fascination as he dazzled them with his tube riding prowess. His flowing, effortless grace in heavy-water situations is revered by surfers worldwide. Famous for…
Gerry Lopez first surfed Uluwatu in 1974. The fabled Balinese wave was pristine, magical and empty (more on that below). Forty years later, he returned to host a yoga retreat, get a few waves between classes and help preserve Uluwatu for future generations. In this short film, Gerry uses Uluwatu and surfing as metaphors for change—and…
“The real conflict of the beach is not between sea and shore […] but between Man and Nature. On the beach, Nature has achieved a dynamic equilibrium that is alien to Man and his static sense of equilibrium. Once a line has been established, whether it be a shoreline or a property line, Man unreasonably…
Ten years after its original publication, Penguin Books has released a completely revised and expanded edition of Yvon Chouinard’s classic memoir, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, with more than 40 percent new material and featuring a new foreword by Naomi Klein, author of the bestselling book This Changes Everything. In the…
I have epilepsy. I don’t know if I was born with it. The better conclusion is I developed it from a series of concussions in high school. But truly, no doctor will say for certain. Such is the story of epilepsy. I was diagnosed on my way to my freshman year at the University of…
We are now third and fourth generation surfers. We have the confidence to leave the stereotypes behind. We’re the scroungiest dirtbags one day and then return to the urban environment as activists for change the next. Two time periods epitomize the style and sensibility of what we are working to create in the coming years.…
It’s 2002. Dan Malloy, the youngest of the Malloy brothers, is surfing in a contest at Sunset Beach on Oʻahu. He is 25 years old and upholding a foundation built by his two older brothers, which has made him the most hopeful of the Malloy clan to excel in the competitive surfing world. But it’s…
In early 2014, I spent some time exploring the coastline around southern Chile looking for waves and generally just checking out a place that I had always wanted to visit. I ended up heading as far south as Chiloe which is the first island on the coast of where Patagonia starts. It had been a…
“Just go in,” said the woman’s voice. “There’s nobody there at the moment but the house is always left open. Yours is room two, upstairs.” I was calling ahead to the small guesthouse where we had booked a room. Slightly bewildered, I looked across at my traveling buddy, Martín. “It’s cool man, aquí no roban,”…
Winter in Iceland is ridiculously unpredictable. It can be beaten by wind and swell one minute and infused with silence and solitude the next. Drawn by the appeal of its wilderness, my partner and I dreamed of traveling there for a long time. Combining both of our passions for surfing and exploring, we decided to…
In its deep summer slumber, it is hard to gauge the latent fury this place can serve up to the unsuspecting. There are, however, clues to the power of this landscape that can both give and take in equal measure. The weathered faces of naked shale give evidence to deadly drops of tonnage. The natural…
Honestly, we went to Iceland to catch big fish. It was that simple. We wanted to bask in the late Arctic sun while bringing dreamy meter-long Atlantic salmon to hand. We wanted to drink whiskey afterwards, go to bed and do it again every day we could. What surprised us wasn’t our ability to check…
When the first surfers turned up at Mundaka around the late 1960s and set their eyes upon those perfect lefthanders, they had no reason to think the waves wouldn’t be there forever. Almost half a century later, we now know that Mundaka is a very special wave, perhaps unique in the world; not just because…
Born and raised at Punta de Lobos, Ramón Navarro found his passion riding the biggest waves on the planet.
I’ve had a few pets on Swell over the last nine years—most of them made their way aboard on their own. I don’t mind the geckos that often show up in a banana stock. They hide, so I rarely get to see them, but they are harmless and make cute coughing noises in the evening.…
After my second trip to Southern Chile this past July, I have absolutely fallen in love with its simple way of life. More and more nowadays, it seems there is so much going on that it’s impossible to get ahead. Chile doesn’t know or care about that. Life there is content to just continue rolling…
There are only a few people that have truly played a pivotal role in the advancement of surfboard design, people whose contribution was so impactful that it changed surfing in massive ways forever. George Greenough would make any surf buff’s list as one of the greats, but for me I’m comfortable saying he’s flat-out the…
Until recently in our evolutionary history as a species, humans couldn’t extract resources faster than those resources were renewed. Even if we wanted to we couldn’t because Nature put a limit on the amount we could physically take. Then, sometime within the last few thousand years, we crossed a tipping point and now we are…
By Juilen Fillion, photos by Vincent Bergeron Montreal might be known for its welcoming French Canadian community, the beautiful women and the famous Poutine—French fries topped with a light brown gravy-like sauce and cheese curds—but it’s also known for a standing river wave called Habitat 67. This endless wave located on the center shore of Montreal…
Yesterday, National Geographic pulled the curtain back on the winners of their 10th annual Adventurers of the Year, “each selected for his or her remarkable achievement in exploration, adventure sports, conservation, and humanitarianism.” Four of the winners are from the Patagonia family and we couldn't be happier for them. Tommy Caldwell for completing the Fitz…
“Check out that fin,” my buddy, Dillon Joyce, said. And there it was, 50 feet off the stern, an unmistakable dorsal, weaving in a slow “S” through the water. Wasn’t the sharp triangle-shape of a whitey, and as we were five- or six-miles out from Santa Cruz Island on our long sail back to the…
When the pintle snapped I felt a moment’s disbelief and then something like panic spark down in my belly. But I tamped that feeling with a long drink of water and a pep talk, noting to myself that I was not injured, that I had plenty of food and water, and that the conditions were…
