I am sitting on steep ground overlooking a nicely shaped right-hander rolling in shallow pristine waters over a slab punctuated by sea urchins and corals. Around me a bunch of local kids approximately eight or nine years old are screaming for every wave coming in and talking to me in Portuguese, commenting on how they could have caught that wave as any surf dude from any other place on Earth would do. I suddenly realised then that I just happened to arrive in one of the liveliest surf communities I ever been to in my life.
A former big-wave surfer, King has dreamed of riding this anomaly since it was unveiled to the world in a 2009 SURFING magazine article. At first he simply wanted to tackle it on a surfboard, but King later hatched an audacious plan: He was going to ride the wave on a SUP.
King was always a versatile waterman, riding shortboards and longboards in-between his big wave exploits. It was inevitable he would try standup paddling and as soon as he picked up a paddle, he was hooked. The South African quickly became one of his country’s top competitors, winning the trials at the Huntington Beach Pro in 2014 and charging waves like Sapinus in Tahiti. At the same time he became obsessed with the idea of challenging the endless Namibian barrel on a standup paddleboard. But even the heavy Tahitian reef passes are a more predictable challenge than the malevolent walls of Skeleton Bay.
All the surfers King spoke to told him it wasn’t possible. The wave lurches abruptly from deep water onto extremely shallow sand that’s packed hard as concrete. The sudden change in depth forces the wave to turn in on itself, contorting wildly as is explodes down the beach at a relentless pace for hundreds of meters. Which is why nobody had bothered to attempt the feat. King remained determined he could do it.
