UPDATE: Joel Parkinson won Pipe Masters and his first ASP World Title on Friday, December 14.

THE PEDIGREE: Professional surfing came of age in the 1970s, and no other event measured up to the Pipe Masters. “The other pro tour events all seemed optional by comparison,” says surf historian . “Dudes got hurt. You couldn’t look away. It was, and still is, the surf contest all other surf contests want to be.”

THE SWELL: Pipeline breaks best on a west swell, which is most prominent October to March. Local knowledge is key: while some Pipeline waves hit the reef at just the right angle, creating flawless semi-truck-size barrels, others slam headlong into the shallow, razor-sharp reef.

THE TOLL: Pipeline is widely considered the deadliest wave in the world, having killed at least five surfers in the past decade, including Tahitian big-wave pro Malik Joyeux in 2005.

THE BEACH: During the Masters, some 5,000 people roam the short stretch of sand fronting Pipeline, only 50 yards offshore.

THE MEDIA: It’s not uncommon to see two or three dozen photographers bobbing in the channel and dozens more onshore, with jet skis swirling in the water. This year the event will be broadcast live at .

LOCALISM: At the Pipe Masters, 10 wild-card entries are reserved for Hawaiians—a rule enacted in 2004 after locals complained about the event taking over their wave. At other times of the year, a hard-partying crew of surfers known as Da Hui “protect” the lineup. (Plug “Da Hui surf fights” into for examples.)

THE PARTIES: Pros typically stay in one of a dozen beach houses owned or rented by surf companies, and the festivities can get out of hand. Last year, tension from the lineup carried over into the Billabong house, where company executives reportedly became involved in a conflict with Eddie Rothman, leader of Da Hui, and his son Makua.

THE SHOWDOWN: Pipeline is Pipeline because of the epic rivalries. It’s the final event of the year for the ASP world title and the , which means both titles can come down to a single ride. And nothing stokes the huge crowd like a showdown between a local favorite and an outsider. The greatest rivalry was the one between Kelly Slater and the late Hawaiian icon Andy Irons from 2003 to 2006. Slater has won the event six times, but during those years Irons won three Pipe Masters. Slater is once again a favorite, and if he and 20-year-old Hawaiian John John Florence, who started surfing Pipeline at age eight and won last year’s Vans Triple Crown, make it to the final, it’s a fair bet the locals will be having flashbacks from the Irons-Slater heyday.

The post Breaking Down Pipe Masters appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I’M SITTING AT one end of a 15-foot-long conference table inside Billabong’s U.S. headquarters—a glass-and-steel building in a nondescript office park in Irvine, California, off Interstate 5. It’s late June, and I’ve been summoned here by the surf manufacturer’s CEO, Paul Naude, and his VP of marketing, Graham Stapelberg, both of them South Africans. They have brought highlighted printouts of a story I wrote for °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s January issue, “Last Drop,” about the death of Andy Irons, a three-time world surfing champion and Billabong’s top sponsored athlete. It’s clear they mean for me to speak first, to explain myself.

Billabong's Paul Naude

Billabong’s Paul Naude

Billabong's Graham Stapelberg

Billabong’s Graham Stapelberg

Andy & Lyndie Irons

Irons and wife Lyndie in 2010

Andy & Bruce Irons

Andy (left) and Bruce Irons in 2009

Irons at Teahupoo 2010

Irons celebrates his victory at Teahupoo last September

Carlos “Bam Bam” Del Olmo

Miami's Setai Hotel

Miami’s Setai Hotel

Bruce Irons paddle-out

Bruce Irons, Andy’s brother, at a paddle-out memorial ceremony for Andy in Oahu’s Waimea Bay

Things are a little tense because, in late November, only weeks after his November 2 death in a Dallas airport hotel room, I wrote about Irons’s history of drug and alcohol abuse, which nearly killed him on at least one occasion. At the time, the family was standing by its initial press release that Irons had “reportedly been battling” the tropical disease dengue fever when he died, and neither they nor Billabong were talking—though one Billabong rep sent an e-mail saying he couldn’t comment but that we could “count on” Irons having died of dengue.

For writing that story, and especially for recounting that 1999 near-death binge-drinking episode in Indonesia, I was threatened by numerous people within the surf industry and accused of spitting on Irons’s grave. Then on June 10, a week prior to my sit-down at Billabong, after multiple legal challenges from Irons’s family, a Texas medical examiner had finally released a toxicology report detailing what killed Irons.

The report should have cleared up any lingering mystery, but that’s not what happened. Tarrant County medical examiner Nizam Peerwani wrote that he’d found evidence of cocaine, methamphetamine, methadone, a generic form of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax, and marijuana in Irons’s system, and the original police report noted that a bottle of sleeping pills was on a table in the hotel room. But he also concluded that Irons had a severely clogged artery and ruled that “the primary and the underlying cause of death is ischemic heart disease.”

What about all those pharmaceuticals? “Drugs,” the report continued, “particularly methadone and cocaine, are other significant factors contributing to death.”

It was the kind of wording you could interpret to suit your biases or needs, which some have done. Members of Irons’s family, surf journalists, and the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP)—who presumably didn’t want the public to believe that Irons died of a drug overdose—viewed the report as vindication. A statement released by the Irons family in June read, “Traveling while sick and suffering from an undiagnosed heart condition was more than even Andy could overcome.” Bruce Irons, Andy’s brother and also a pro surfer, recently told ESPN, “When we got the results that it was the artery I went and did a test, and my arteries are fine. Now I know and understand deep down inside that it was brother’s time to go.” Editors at the website Surfline tweeted, “Andy Irons died of sudden cardiac arrest due to a blocked artery. His heart was full of passion for life & surfing.” After the results came out, ASP officials agreed to an interview but later backed out, and PR director Dave Prodan sent me this e-mail: “The ASP has no further comment at this time, aside from: The loss of Andy Irons from the sporting world has been devastating, but we feel fortunate enough to have witnessed his incredible accomplishments and unbridled passion for the sport of surfing.”

NAUDE AND STAPELBERG have put a lot of money and clout into maintaining Irons’s legacy—for example, by renaming the prestigious Pipeline Masters Hawaiian surf contest the Billabong Pipe Masters In Memory of Andy Irons and establishing a line of products called AI Forever. But they’ve been silent when it comes to discussing his drug problems. Immediately after the toxicology report came out, both Naude and one of Irons’s uncles told me that the results represented an “inconvenient truth” for journalists like me, the implication being that I was rooting for a clear finding of death by overdose.

I wasn’t: all along I was trying to explain what happened to Irons despite a massive stonewalling effort orchestrated by members of the surf media, the ASP, his sponsors and managers at Wasserman Media Group, and his family. Then, in June, Stapelberg said they would speak to me, to “set the record straight,” but only if I met with them face-to-face.

Now, with my tape recorder off, their list of grievances turns out to be fairly short. When I cold-called Naude during my initial round of reporting back in November, he says, I told him I was writing a celebration of Irons’s life, though it turned into more of an exposĂ©. (Fair enough; I’d been assigned a short obituary.) And they’re angry that I attributed the November 2 dengue press release posted on Billabong’s website to the company rather than to the Irons family. But that’s about it.

When I finally turn on my recorder, I start the interview with a few softballs before asking, “When did it become apparent that Irons’s recreational drug use was problematic?”

To their credit, Naude and Stapelberg don’t blink. It’s clear that they’re aware that Irons’s death has made many people in surfing reconsider the code of silence that has prevailed when it comes to drug abuse in the sport’s professional ranks. Nobody questions that Irons was a good person, a tremendous athlete, and an icon around the world. But if his death is going to mean anything other than rah-rah about what a great guy he was, the time to start discussing it honestly is now.

“It was the end of December 2006,” Stapelberg begins. “Andy started to have some major mood swings and just wanted to be on his own a lot. It was June 2007 when he went into rehab.”

ONE THING THAT is clearer now—thanks to Naude, Stapelberg, and several other people who previously refused to be interviewed—is the chain of events leading up to Irons’s death in Dallas.

His final days began routinely enough. He landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the evening of October 27, 2010, in advance of the Rip Curl Search surf contest. Irons did an autograph-signing session for Billabong in San Juan, then was taken by Billabong team manager Blake Pettit, one of his handlers, to his hotel room at the Villa Tropical Oceanfront Apartments in Isabela, on the island’s west coast.

By this point in his life, Irons’s drug problem had alternately gotten better, worse, and much worse, but it’s not fair to assume that he arrived in Puerto Rico strung out. Most people close to him, including his uncle Mark TachĂ©, who lives in Aspen, Colorado, say he was sick with flu-like symptoms before he got to Puerto Rico. Few people saw him between October 28 and 30. TachĂ© says he was bedridden.

When I asked Stapelberg and Naude whether Irons had actually been on a drug binge, as several people have suggested to me, Stapelberg told me, “I don’t know. I have no proof either way.”

Irons missed his first-round heat on Saturday, October 30, with no explanation; then, on October 31, he called Renato Hickel, the ASP’s World Tour manager, to say he was “too sick” to compete. Hickel sent doctors to Irons’s room. Back in California, Stapelberg—who was briefed by Pettit and Hickel—says they recommended that Irons go to the hospital, but he refused. Instead, the doctors administered an IV in his room. “He instantly started to feel better,” says Stapelberg. When they told Irons they needed to do a blood test to diagnose him, Irons freaked out. “He said, ‘I’m over it,’ ” says Stapelberg. “‘I’m fucking over doctors. I’m over this event. Get me out of here.’ ”

Did Irons think the ASP doctors were going to drug-test him? “Who knows?” says Stapelberg. “You can only make those assumptions. Yeah, maybe that was a reason.”

Irons signed a release acknowledging that he was declining treatment, called his wife, Lyndie—who was at their home in Kauai and eight months pregnant with the couple’s first child—and booked the next flight back to the island. It included an overnight layover in Miami and a stop in Dallas. Billabong team rider Alejandro Moreda drove him to the airport.

IF IRONS FEARED a drug test, he probably needn’t have. In the wake of his death, the ASP has issued boilerplate language and dodged questions about its testing policies, at some points contradicting itself about whether such a policy even exists. According to its own handbook, the ASP doesn’t conduct drug testing but does allow host nations to test athletes for banned substances—including recreational drugs. That’s how Brazilian surfer Neco Padaratz tested positive for steroids at a French contest in 2004. (French authorities were cracking down on all sports after the numerous scandals in pro cycling.)

In response to specific questions about Irons’s drug use, the ASP’s international media director, Dave Prodan, sent me the following statement: “By working closely with WADA”—the World Anti-Doping Agency—“the ASP Anti-Doping Policy is always developing to ensure that the sport of professional surfing maintains the clean image it enjoys today.” Prodan also said that the ASP had “no verifiable knowledge” of Irons’s drug use. This despite the fact that Stapelberg, who sits on the organization’s six-member board, acknowledges driving Irons to rehab in 2007.

Former ASP employees are more forthcoming. “There was zero drug testing, period, done by the ASP,” says Melissa Buckley, the organization’s media director from 2005 to 2009. “There were just too many guys that wouldn’t pass.”

It’s not that the presence of recreational drugs in a counterculture sport like surfing should surprise anybody. The problem is that, these days, pro surfing wants to be seen as a legitimate competitive event that has the same marketing potential as, say, professional golf. This year the organization will hold high-profile competitions at breaks near Rio De Janeiro, New York City, and San Francisco as part of its newly rebranded Dream Tour. The New York event will be held on Long Island, will be sponsored by Quiksilver, and will involve surfing’s first million-dollar purse.

If drug use is as widespread in the lineup as Buckley and other surfing insiders say it is, mainstream acceptance might be a lot to expect. If the ASP’s officials want a general audience, they’ll have to come to terms with the increased scrutiny that accompanies that growth. “We always said, What if something like this happens,” Buckley recalls. “What if somebody dies?”

IRONS ARRIVED IN MIAMI late on Halloween night. Carlos “Bam Bam” Del Olmo, a 45-year-old pro surfer and sometime actor who’d known Irons since he was 13, got a call at 11:58. Irons was at Mango’s, a nightclub on Ocean Drive, and he wanted to have some fun. “When I got there, he was typical Andy,” says Del Olmo. “Happy. He gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek, super stoked.’”

Irons didn’t appear sick, and his flight to Dallas didn’t leave until 6:30 a.m. “He just wanted to have a good time,” says Del Olmo. “He asked me if we could get some coke. I was like, Dude, you’re in fucking Miami.” Irons then asked whether Del Olmo knew how to get another more serious drug, though Del Olmo wouldn’t say what it was. “I was not prepared to hear what came out of Andy’s mouth,” he says. “I shut him down immediately.”

The two went to a party at the Setai, a hotel on Collins Avenue. Irons was worried about being seen. One of Del Olmo’s friends was dressed as a cameraman for Halloween, and when Irons saw him he bolted. “I had to chase him from the Setai to the W Hotel, like a block and a half,” Del Olmo says. “He said, ‘The fucking guy was trying to film me, bro. Nobody can know I’m here.’ ”

Irons calmed down and returned to the Setai, where he had some drinks and snorted a small amount of cocaine. Del Olmo says it was no big deal. “If somebody can die from doing a gram of coke with eight guys in a bathroom stall… That just doesn’t happen,” he says. “That was the extent of the drug use that night in Miami.”

According to Del Olmo, Irons was generally upbeat that night. “All he was talking about was going home and watching his baby be born.”

Nonetheless, when Irons’s cab arrived at 4:30 a.m., Del Olmo was worried enough that he tried to protect Irons from himself. “I gave the Jamaican cab driver $80,” Del Olmo says. “The cab ride was $30. I gave him a $50 tip and I said to him, ‘Yo, brother, that’s Andy Irons, three-time world champion from Hawaii, in the back seat of your car. I don’t give a fuck if he wants to stop at 7-Eleven for water, you don’t stop. When you get to the airport, you walk him in to the American Airlines desk, and you make sure he gets on that plane. You got that?”

IRONS’S NIGHT IN Miami didn’t strike his friends as out of the ordinary, and neither did the way Del Olmo attempted to look after him: it was seen as a private matter. As Stapelberg said, it was in 2007 that Irons first checked into rehab. He’d won his ASP world championships three years in a row, from 2002 to 2004, but placed second to eventual ten-time champ Kelly Slater in 2005 and 2006.

“He found it a little harder to win,” says Kamalei Alexander, a Kauai local and one of Irons’s closest friends. “Maybe those losses he was taking harder, and maybe he was compensating with drugs.”

According to the family, there was another factor: Irons had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 18. As his family maintained in the first statement it issued after the release of the toxicology report, “Andy was in some denial about the severity of his chemical imbalance and tended to blame his mood swings on himself and his own weaknesses, choosing to self-medicate with recreational drugs.”

TachĂ©, Irons’s uncle, told me, “He thought he could hold his own and will it away.”

In June 2007, Billabong representatives got word that Irons had been on what Stapelberg calls “a bender” while at the ASP event Irons won in Arica, Chile. Stapelberg picked up Irons at the airport in Los Angeles and drove him directly to Promises, the prominent celebrity rehab facility in Malibu.

“I was asked personally by his dad,” says Stapelberg, “because they couldn’t deal with it from Hawaii.” Billabong advanced Irons $75,000 for the program, and Irons later paid the money back.

Irons didn’t stay in rehab long. He left after about ten days to surf in a contest at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. Billabong agreed to let him go as long as he was accompanied by a sober companion—a professional minder—to make sure he didn’t stray, but the companion “wore thin” on Irons within a week, according to Stapelberg. When the contest ended, Irons refused to return to rehab. “He said, ‘Look, I’ve got this one,’ ” recalls Naude.

But in November of that year, after Irons married Lyndie, he relapsed. “It was evident … that things weren’t good again,” says Stapelberg. Billabong sent Irons back to Promises and again advanced the $75,000.

What, specifically, were his addictions? “His biggest vice at the time was prescription painkillers, it was OxyContin,” says a mentor Irons met at Promises, who contacted me and agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. According to the mentor, Irons was reluctant at first, but by the end of rehab he was engaging with the therapy. “You got the sense that he was absorbing it,” the mentor says.

While in Malibu, Irons was allowed to train and was attempting to combine the 12-step spiritual principles of Alcoholics Anonymous with his love for surfing.

This time, Irons completed the program and, afterward, wanted to publicly address his addiction. “He felt that he owed it to his fans and the surf community,” says Stapelberg.

But he never talked, and five different writers and editors at three different surf publications say that’s because they were worried that Billabong would pull their advertisements. I was a senior editor at Surfer at the time, and we received word that Irons was going to do a tell-all, then, mysteriously, that he wasn’t.

Naude and Stapelberg vigorously deny using their leverage to silence the surf press, and Naude calls the insinuation “typical speculation.”

Irons made the decision on his own, Naude contends. “We said to him, ‘It’s a private matter at this stage…. If you choose to keep it private, that’s your decision. If you choose to go public because you think it’ll make you feel better, then go public.’ ”

BY SEPTEMBER 2008, Irons was off the ASP World Tour again, having withdrawn from a contest in France. He applied for and was granted a sabbatical for the entire 2009 season. Billabong set him and Lyndie up in a house in Angourie, Australia, where they could maintain a low profile away from the temptations—“rich people and druggies,” according to close friend Alexander—that he’d be confronted with in Kauai.

One reason Billabong might have been willing to go to such lengths was that Irons had become the face of their global brand. Far from its niche beginnings in the 1970s as a boardshorts company, Billabong is now a publicly traded $1.5 billion conglomerate and owns a dozen other action-sports brands, including Element, Von Zipper, Nixon, DaKine, and RVCA, as well as a slew of retail outlets.

Billabong’s not alone atop the industry, of course. Quiksilver, also publicly traded, is worth more than $850 million, while Volcom—“Youth Against Establishment” is their motto—was sold in May for $607.5 million to French holding company PPR.

Billabong made $155 million in profit last year. Irons, who is pictured surfing a tropical blue wave on the cover of the company’s 2009–2010 annual report, was an uncomfortable pitchman. In rehab, he grappled with “how he has to be a spokesperson and an image and a brand,” says the mentor who knew him there.

“He hated being interviewed, hated having to give a speech,” says Naude, who recognized that, by then, Irons’s value to Billabong didn’t depend on him winning or even competing at ASP events. Contrary to reports that Irons only returned to competition in 2010 because Billabong forced him to, Naude says he “made it abundantly clear” to Irons that he had a contract whether or not he competed.

Irons surfed as a wild-card entry at the ASP World Tour event in Tahiti in May 2009 and made trouble for himself; several of Irons’s housemates approached Stapelberg at the event, telling him that Irons “partied last night” and was “being a disruption.”

“That was the only time I ever lost it with Andy,” says Stapelberg. “I said, ‘Hey, Andy, it’s not about me and you anymore; it’s about your own personal life.’ We almost came to blows.”

Irons’s 2010 comeback started poorly the following February in Australia, where he lost early. He surfed well in Brazil and at an event in Southern California in April. “He looked like the Andy of old,” says Stapelberg. But in June, as I reported in “Last Drop,” he had a drug-related flare-up at the surf-resort island of Tavarua, in Fiji. In that incident, he tried to start a fistfight with another surfer during the trip and ultimately had to be restrained and sedated.

Stapelberg says Billabong fined Irons after that incident but declined to disclose how much, other than to say, “He didn’t enjoy the fine.”

Billabong thought about cutting Irons. “Did it cross my mind? Absolutely,” says Stapelberg. “But did we ever say, ‘If this happens one more time, you’re done’? No.”

Irons’s triumph came in September 2010, when he won the ASP World Tour event at Teahupoo, Tahiti, his first since that 2007 win in Chile. Despite having such a tumultuous year, he was still the seventh-ranked surfer in the world. He was eliminated early at the next event, held at Trestles, south of Los Angeles, then went to Europe, where he didn’t make it past the second round at two events.

The momentum from Teahupoo was gone by the time Irons arrived in Puerto Rico. Slater was set to win his tenth world title, and the event would be a coronation.

IRONS MADE THE 6:30 A.M. FLIGHT to Dallas–Fort Worth. He landed at 8:35 a.m., but instead of going on to his connecting flight he checked into the airport’s Grand Hyatt Hotel at 8:47. It wasn’t until the next morning, November 2, that hotel employees discovered him dead. Peerwani, the medical examiner, performed the autopsy the following day.

Ordinarily, a Texas medical examiner’s report is released to the public in 60 to 90 days. But the Irons family—accustomed to dealing privately with Andy’s substance-abuse issues—wasn’t prepared to cope with what might be in the report. Billabong, the ASP, and the surf media followed the Ironses’ lead. Meanwhile, the rest of the world wanted to know how he died. Irons may have toiled in a niche sport, but he was widely famous: his name was the most searched term on Google both after his death and after the report was finally released.

The family hired a lawyer and filed for an injunction, which was granted on December 21, two weeks after Lyndie gave birth to a boy, Andrew Axel Irons.

“It was too much of a risk for the final stages of Lyndie’s pregnancy,” says TachĂ©, referring to the potential shock and scrutiny that might have resulted from the examiner’s report. The injunction was intended to tamp down public interest, but it had the opposite effect. Still, says TachĂ©, “Our primary decision was to protect Lyndie.”

After the Ironses’ lawyers filed a second injunction on May 19, the report was released directly to the family on May 20—a move that several legal experts I spoke with say is highly unusual on the part of the court. What happened next is in large part what led to the confusion and differing interpretations of the autopsy.

Rather than release the report—it was going to become public eventually—the family hired its own pathologist, Vincent Di Maio, M.D., of San Antonio, Texas, to review it. The family then issued a press release containing Di Maio’s opinion and sent the toxicology report to The New York Times.

The °ŐŸ±łŸ±đČő’s headline read “Surfer Died of Heart Attack and Drugs,” but other news outlets, including the took the family’s press release at face value.

“Mr. Irons died of a heart attack due to … hardening of the arteries,” Di Maio wrote for the family, adding that “there were no other contributing factors to his death.” When contacted by my editor at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, Di Maio doubled down, going so far as to dispute that cocaine was found in Irons’s system, though it’s clearly marked on the medical examiner’s report.

Di Maio has previously given contrarian opinions in high-profile cases. In his testimony at the 2008 murder trial of record producer Phil Spector, who was ultimately convicted, Di Maio argued that Lana Clarkson, an actress whom Spector had met in a bar the night she was killed, had in fact shot herself in the face. Di Maio, who was hired by Spector, says he’s paid between $200 and $400 per hour for his services but that his fees don’t affect his judgment. The prosecutor in that case, deputy district attorney Alan Jackson, disagreed and repeatedly attacked Di Maio as a shill, asking him: “Are you not shading your testimony to benefit one side?”

Still, without exception, the news stories that followed the release of the report lacked the analysis of an independent expert. That’s helpful to have, because understanding a medical examiner’s report often requires reading between the lines. When Elvis Presley died of an overdose in 1977, the coroner listed cardiac arrhythmia as the cause of death, which means only that he had an irregular heartbeat. According to Bruce Goldberger, director of toxicology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, “You always like to give the benefit of the doubt to the decedent.”

Goldberger reviewed a copy of Peerwani’s report and noted that the high levels of Xanax and Methadone alone could have been lethal. Although Goldberger says it’s possible for a young, otherwise healthy male with a clogged artery to die suddenly, he says that even without a heart condition, Irons had lethal levels of drugs in his system. “There’s no way that you can remove this acute-mixed-drug-ingestion finding from the cause of death,” he said. “If you removed the natural-disease findings from Mr. Irons, you would be left with sufficient toxicology to cause [his] death.”

BRUCE IRONS WAS sound asleep at home in Kauai the morning of November 2 when he heard Lyndie screaming at the door.

“I came out of a dead sleep and … I instantly knew it,” he recently told the Australian surf magazine Stab. “Right away I had the feeling I knew how he died.” Bruce went on to recount the 1999 incident in Indonesia that I first reported in “Last Drop,” in which a combination of binge drinking and sleep apnea had stopped Andy’s heart for several minutes. “He’d snore so hard … he’d stop breathing,” Bruce recalled. “If there’s no one there to kick you…”

Whether it was a cocktail of drugs, alcohol, and sleep apnea that stopped his breathing and then his heart, or whether hardening of the arteries—which is hereditary but can be accelerated by prolonged cocaine use—caught up with him, one thing is clear: Irons’s hard-charging lifestyle put him at risk.

Most surf writers have closed ranks and argued that how Irons died is irrelevant; we should be focusing on how he lived. But that’s not exactly true. Trivializing his problems, as Surfing contributing writer Chas Smith did when he wrote in an online essay that people who want to know the truth “can continue to go to hell,” is an attempt both to fabricate his legacy and to absolve the people around him of any responsibility.

“The sport itself has to have drug testing in it,” says Australia’s two-time world champion Tom Carroll, who’s also a recovering addict. “We have to put in place measures that help people who are in trouble.”

Smith, in his essay, also made what is perhaps the most telling point about the saga, writing himself into the Irons clan as he went: “The family kept, and keeps, his failures behind a closed door precisely because we are a family.”

No doubt, Irons was ultimately responsible for his own actions, but it was behind the industry’s closed doors that he was unable to escape addiction—where friends and acquaintances who supplied him with drugs followed him across six continents, where even his home island of Kauai wasn’t safe for him, where his sponsors and his sport’s governing body were willing to handle his problems as a “private matter.”

If Irons’s family—his actual family—wants to believe that he died of a heart attack, that’s understandable. If his enablers and handlers want to advance that point of view, it strikes me as self-serving.

Once the surf world comes to grips with what actually happened, maybe then Irons’s legacy can begin to take the shape he’d hoped it would: “More than anything,” he told Surfing in 2005, “I just want to be remembered as someone who passionately loved surfing.”

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Correspondent Brad Melekian is a former editor at Surfer magazine. He’s currently working on a book about Andy Irons and surf culture.

The post Crashing Down appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Watch a video of Jordy Smith surfing.

Jordy Smith

In the barrel at Tahiti's Teahupoo

Jordy Smith

Smith at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, in 2009

JORDY SMITH shouldn’t be here.

We’re paddling out at Newport Beach, in Orange County, on an unseasonably cold morning in early September. The first waves of a coming south swell are uninspiring two-footers. Smith, ranked number one on the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) World Tour, should be 30 minutes south, at Trestles. Not only are the waves better there; it’s the site for the next World Tour event, which starts tomorrow.

Instead, the lanky 22-year-old South African is here, hiding out—or at least trying to. Wrapped in a teal wetsuit with a flop of brown hair, he looks like one of the local kids in the lineup. Then he drops onto a set wave, cuts back up the face, launches a giant aerial 180, lands backwards at full speed, whips around, tears down the line, and … casually steps off his board in knee-deep water. The others surfers gawk in silence. It’s as if LeBron had sneaked into a pickup game.

I ask Smith if he thought about practicing at Trestles today.

“Nah,” he laughs, “too much of a scene down there.”

Such indifference is characteristic of Smith, who’s cocky enough to believe that talent alone will soon make him a world champion. The thing is, he’s probably right. Armed with an arsenal of explosive, halfpipe-inspired aerial maneuvers, Smith is the head of a new class of surfers who are concerned more with what happens above a wave than on it. While Kelly Slater introduced aerials to competitive surfing 20 years ago, Smith is now pushing the sport higher, launching snowboard-like big-air tricks with twists, spins, and flips. And he’s literally changing the rules. This year, to keep up with advances made by Smith and fellow young guns like American Dane Reynolds, the ASP rewrote its judging criteria.

“Jordy and Dane made airs functional,” says Brendon Thomas, editor of Surfer. “Nobody had done that before.”

Nor has anyone arrived on the pro scene with Smith’s combination of skill and bravado. During his rookie year on the World Tour, in 2008, Smith boasted that he could win the overall title. (He ended up finishing 26th.) He also granted an infamous interview to Australian surf tabloid Stab, in which he described his sexual exploits with older women in gruesome detail. Other pros were not impressed. “Everybody on the tour that year wanted to crush me,” Smith says now. “I guess they proved their point.”

Indeed, it was a rocky start to a much-anticipated career. Smith had grown up in a rough part of Durban, where he learned to surf with his dad, a board shaper. Smith’s friends, like fellow South African pro Damien Fahrenfort, recall sleepovers interrupted by the broken glass of robberies next door. The family had little money and held garage sales to finance travel to regional contests. Smith remembers a six-to-eight-month period when his family survived on a powdered calorie drink called ProNutro.

His first big break came in 2006, when, at 18, he scored a wild-card berth in a World Tour event at Jeffreys Bay, ten hours south of Durban, and made it all the way to the semifinals. That December, he earned a spot in the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, the three-event showdown in Hawaii that caps the ASP World Tour, pulling off a stunning second-place finish at Sunset Beach. The next year, Smith joined the World Qualifying Series—the ASP’s minor leagues—and amassed more points than anyone in history.

On track to make the World Tour, Smith got into a contract dispute with then-sponsor Billabong. His tactic: tear their stickers off his boards, self-finance his travel to events, and let the industry know he was looking for a new label. The marketers responded. In a sport where brands aggressively court only a handful of big names, the attention paid to Smith “was completely unprecedented,” says veteran surf journalist Matt Warshaw, author of The History of Surfing. The last time there was this much hype about a rookie was 1991—when Slater joined the tour.

Nike flew Smith on a private plane to Portland to meet with founder Phil Knight, then had Tiger Woods call with a sales pitch. Industry heavyweights hosted lavish dinners and put Smith’s family up at the Ritz. The process was surreal. “I think about it now and I’m like, What the hell was that?” he says. Ultimately, Smith signed a seven-figure annual deal with wetsuit company O’Neill. “We were looking for a franchise player,” says their director of sports marketing, Garth Tarlow. Among Smith’s first purchases with his newfound cash was a new home for his parents in Durban.

When the 2008 tour started, Smith was ready to talk trash but unprepared for elite-level competition. The contests were held at intimidating spots he’d never surfed, like Tahiti’s Teahupoo. He didn’t even know where to sit in the lineup. Still, his sponsors stuck with their new star, even going along with the Lothario image projected in the Stab article. One sponsor, shoe brand DVS, produced a magazine ad with Smith in front of a quiver of boards painted with busty women. The tagline: RIDDEN HARD AND PUT AWAY WET.

Even as he lost contests, placing 26th in 2008 and 11th in 2009, Smith’s talent was on display. Video clips circulated of him working remarkable moves into his rides—huge airs and spinning flips where he steps off the board midflight. Problem was, judges couldn’t score them. Pressure mounted on the ASP to adapt, peaking when Slater, who could see that a shake-up would make the sport relevant to a wider audience, threatened to help start a new tour. Before the 2010 season, the ASP made sweeping changes to emphasize “innovative, progressive maneuvers.”

Smith returned eager. He trimmed the baby fat off his bulky six-two frame and stopped worrying about what works for the judges. “When I go freesurfing, I have my best waves,” he says. “I wanted to take that same approach to contests.”

The strategy paid off. In July, he won his first World Tour event, at Jeffreys Bay, and has finished in the quarterfinals or better at six out of seven contests. He’s also learned to tone down the chest thumping. On the tour, he travels with his dad and an entourage of trusted old friends from Durban, and his home base is a room he rents from O’Neill’s Garth Tarlow in Newport.

“Jordy has matured so much in one year,” says Thomas, the Surfer editor. “You can see the difference in how he speaks and acts.”

Still, it’ll probably be another year or two before you see him lifting the ASP trophy. After we surfed Newport, Smith cruised through heats at Trestles, linking big airs and powerful turns. But he broke two boards, then wiped out in the quarterfinals. Slater, who’d been behind Smith in the ASP rankings, pounced, winning the contest and moving into first place overall as he vies for his tenth world title.

Smith was disappointed, but he hasn’t abandoned his attitude. As he puts it: “Wax your board and go out and do huge airs.”

The post Air Jordy appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

WHEN THREE-TIME world surfing champion Andy Irons was found dead on Tuesday, November 2, in a Dallas hotel room, the news reverberated far beyond the sport’s core of devoted fans and followers. The second was the date of crucial midterm elections throughout the United States, but the most frequent Google search that day was for a person who had nothing to do with politics: Andy Irons. His passing was covered by hundreds of media outlets all over the planet, a clear measure of the impact Irons had during his amazing athletic career.

Andy Irons and Lyndie Irons

Andy and wife, Lyndie, at Tavarua in May 2009

Andy Irons, Cloudbreak

Irons at Tavarua's Cloudbreak in 2008

It wasn’t as clear what had killed him. Two days before his death, Irons, 32, had withdrawn from pro surfing’s World Tour contest near Isabela, Puerto Rico, electing to fly home to Kauai, Hawaii, to be with his wife, Lyndie, who was eight months pregnant with their first child—a boy. During a layover at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport on the morning of November 1, Irons skipped his connecting flight to Honolulu and instead checked in to DFW’s Grand Hyatt hotel, crashing in his room. He didn’t respond to wake-up calls the next morning, and Hyatt employees, worried that something was wrong, entered the room and discovered his lifeless body in bed.

Irons’s family, together with his primary sponsor, Billabong, quickly released a statement saying that the surfer had “reportedly been battling with dengue fever,” a mosquito-borne disease they said he’d picked up at the Association of Surfing Professionals’ October stop in Peniche, Portugal. From the outset, though, the dengue-fever explanation seemed unlikely as the sole culprit. Several surfers came down with the flu after Portugal, but no medical evidence was presented that Irons had dengue, which is fatal to only 1 percent of the people it afflicts. “I’ve had dengue fever,” says one professional surfer who knew Irons. “You don’t die from it unless you’re in a Third World country.”

What killed Irons is still unknown, and in the aftermath of his death, there was nothing to go on other than hints that he’d been taking prescription medications in his final hours. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner performed an autopsy on November 3 but didn’t state a cause of death, pending a toxicology report that isn’t expected until early December. When police searched Irons’s hotel room, they found two prescription bottles labeled as the generic forms of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax and the sleep aid Ambien. And a report in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser quoted a medical examiner as saying that the prescription drug methadone—used to treat addiction to heroin and opiate-based pharmaceuticals like OxyContin, and given more rarely for pain—had also been found inside the Ambien bottle. A spokesperson for the examiner’s office denied this comment, but the Star-Advertiser stood by its report.

NONE OF THESE FACTS add up to anything definite, and the cause of Irons’s death won’t be known until medical officials issue their findings. But this much is now clear: Irons had battled with alcohol- and drug-abuse issues throughout his adult life, and on at least one occasion nearly died as a result, during a 1999 binge-drinking episode in Indonesia. As șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű has learned through interviews with dozens of friends, colleagues, and surf-industry professionals who were close to Irons, his problems were common knowledge in the insular world of pro surfing, but they were kept under wraps by an unspoken but understood code of public silence. After Irons’s death, several of these people decided it was time for the surf world to face facts. Still, fearing reprisal, a few sources requested anonymity.

Many people confirmed Irons’s drug and alcohol abuse, though when it came to narcotics, nobody could say precisely what he took or how often. Most sources described a mix of prescription and recreational drugs, noting that, while they never saw him consume them, their effects were obvious. But if Irons practiced discretion, he ignored moderation. On July 24, 1999, he nearly drank himself to death at the Bumi Minang hotel, in Padang, Indonesia.

“He basically died on us, more than once,” said Art Brewer, the 59-year-old elder statesman of surf photography, who traveled with Irons and a half-dozen pros on the 1999 trip to the Mentawais, an Indonesian island chain. Twelve days after Irons’s death, Brewer agreed to meet at his studio in Dana Point, California, to tell his story publicly for the first time. From the outset of this interview, he was careful to point out that he didn’t see Irons ingest anything other than alcohol. But whatever was in his system, Irons had consumed too much of it, lapsing into a state of unconsciousness during which he appeared to stop breathing or have a pulse for a three-minute period.

“It was Andy’s 21st birthday,” said Brewer, who has known Irons’s family for 40 years. Irons and the surfing crew had returned to port in Padang from the Mentawais, and Andy “started out drinking. I saw half a quart of Jack Daniel’s that had been drunk.” Brewer drifted off to his room, but at 10 P.M. he was roused by a surfer who said he had to come quickly: Irons was in trouble. “I went to the room,” said Brewer, “and Andy was blue.”

Brewer was told that Irons had consumed a second fifth of Jack Daniel’s, passed out, and stopped breathing. “So they stripped him down and threw him into a cold shower. They threw ice on him. He wasn’t responding, and he was getting bluer and bluer.”

One of the surfers administered CPR, which got Irons breathing again, and the group took him to a small local hospital, where he was given oxygen. “Then he went flatline,” said Brewer. “He just dropped on us again. I think this happened three to five times total.” The first hospital wasn’t equipped to provide critical care, so the group took him to another, which was also improperly equipped, before landing at a facility that could treat him.

“They got him into ICU,” said Brewer. “He’d gone flatline again. They paddled him. He came back up and, somewhere in between that and when we were outside the ICU, he went into a coma. And then one of his lungs collapsed. It was shocking.”

For six hours, Brewer and some of the surfers waited outside the ICU. “Finally, at three or four in the morning,” he said, “Andy comes around, they get his lung reinflated, and he comes out of a coma.” The next day, Brewer was able to convince doctors to release Irons so the group could make their scheduled flight to Singapore—where he received additional treatment—and then home.

Unfortunately, the experience didn’t seem to change Irons’s behavior. A week later, Brewer said, at a party in the L.A. area held by Surfer magazine to celebrate its annual readers’ poll, Irons went over the top with his drinking again. “What really pissed me off is that he was so fucked up at the Surfer Poll Awards,” he said. “I couldn’t believe he hadn’t mellowed out. It made me wonder how he could go that hard and have a near-death experience—or a death experience—and then come back and push the envelope again.”

The Indonesia crew never told their story, but in the wake of Irons’s death, Brewer and others felt the time had come. “I’m honorable as far as keeping my mouth shut about things that are basically none of my business,” said Brewer, who got a blessing from Andy’s brother, Bruce, another top professional surfer, to discuss the episode. “But this one came so close to me. I could have lost one of my friends’ children. Then who’s at fault?”

ANDY IRONS GREW UP in Hanalei, Kauai, the north-shore town populated by locals and the people who run Kauai’s tourism industry. His father, Phil, a carpenter and surfer and one of nine children, had moved to Hawaii from California in 1970. Andy and Bruce, who is 16 months younger than Andy, spent most of their childhood competing with friends and cousins for the island’s perfect waves.

Both brothers eventually surfed professionally, but it was Andy who broke out in 1996, winning the HIC Pipeline Pro, on nearby Oahu, at age 17. A few months later, still relatively unknown, Irons showed that it wasn’t a fluke by winning another pro event—this time at Tahiti’s deadly Teahupoo.

Irons was obviously a major talent, and over the years he earned a loyal following for his go-big style. He was the most fearless surfer at some of the world’s heaviest breaks, often riding deep inside the tube at dangerous spots like Pipeline and Teahupoo. But he was still skilled enough at riding small waves to win at every stop on the World Tour. No other surfer offered such a complete package—except Kelly Slater, holder of a record ten surfing world championships.

But by the time Irons joined the elite ranks of the ASP World Tour, in 1998, he had also developed a reputation for wild behavior off the water. The tour, a judged ten-event global road trip for the sport’s best competitors, includes plenty of downtime, and Irons made the most of it. He also finished 34th and barely requalified after the 1999 season.

“Rumor was that he was riding the party train too hard,” says Matt Warshaw, author of The History of Surfing, an exhaustive chronicle about the sport. Where college freshmen had frat parties, Andy had money to burn and groupies at every stop. As World Tour competitor Taj Burrow put it in a recent promotional video for Billabong: “Everywhere we go, it’s their biggest night of the year. You can’t help but get involved.”

Off the tour, Irons ran with the Wolf Pack, a fearsome group of Kauai surfers who enforced localism at their home breaks—often with their fists. “Early on, Andy didn’t have handlers,” says Chris Mauro, a former editor of Surfer. “He had his crew.”

By the 2001 World Tour, Irons had signed a sponsorship deal with Australian clothing company Billabong for a reported $650,000 per year. Far from mellowing, he achieved antihero status, and many fans loved him for it. “Andy was loud and in your face,” says former World Tour surfer Shea Lopez, a close friend. “He was the rock star of surfing.”

Like other hard-charging celebrities, Irons didn’t necessarily see himself growing old. “He wanted to die young,” surfer Koby Abberton recently told Australia’s Stab magazine. “He knew it. Everyone knew it.”

In 2002, when Kelly Slater returned to competition after a three-year hiatus, the assumption was that he would mop up. Far from it. Irons beat Slater and claimed the world title that year. Then he did it again in 2003 and 2004. “Andy Irons was the only worthy rival to the greatest surfer who’s ever set foot on a board,” says Warshaw.

Until a surfer other than Irons or Slater won—in 2007, the year Mick Fanning took the crown—that rivalry was heated and often extended beyond the waves. It also divided the surf world. You were either for Slater, the clean-living, Chomsky-quoting role model who competed in a white wetsuit, or you were for Irons, the cocky upstart who wore black and loved to talk trash.

“That time was a real pressure cooker for both of us,” Slater now says of those days. “I felt like it was going to break me. I don’t know what that was like for Andy.”

“Andy really dreaded it after a while,” says John Irons, Andy’s Hanalei-based uncle. “He called it ‘the circus.’ Everywhere he’d go, people were hounding him. Everybody wanted something.”

Still, Irons often gave. “We went on a trip to Cabo a couple years ago,” recalls surf writer Jake Howard, of ESPN.com. “Kids came up and started asking him for stuff. He didn’t have anything, so he literally gave one kid the shirt off his back.”

Despite his abrasive public image, Irons was no prima donna. “Andy was a world champ, but he was one of us,” says Lopez. “He would pile in the back of a Ford Ranger that had no seat, with three other guys.”

For Irons, the world tour seemed to offer redemption. “It was so positive,” says Brewer. “I just wonder where it went wrong again.”

OUTWARDLY, THINGS BEGAN to break down during the 2005 season, when Slater won his seventh title. Irons still put up a fight, finishing second in 2005 and 2006, but signs had emerged that the pressure was getting to him, and his temper became legendary. After losing to friends at poker on a 2005 boat trip, he threw a laptop into the Pacific. During surf competitions, he raged through the competitors’ areas after poor heats, at least once smashing his surfboard.

In late 2007, Irons was out of the running for the world title, which would wrap up in December, and rumors of his substance abuse were swirling inside the surf industry and on Internet discussion forums. “It became the elephant in the room,” said Brewer. “Hearsay was that it was OxyContin.”

In other sports, narcotics—and performance enhancers—would show up in tests. But the ASP doesn’t conduct drug testing. The organization does allow event sponsors and governing bodies for host countries to conduct them, but it wouldn’t comment on whether Irons was ever officially tested.

In November 2007, Irons and his longtime girlfriend, Lyndie Dupuis, got married on Kauai. Around that time, editors at various surf magazines got word that Irons had been in rehab and wanted to come clean publicly. But if a disclosure was planned, Irons never followed through.

“There was certainly internal knowledge that wasn’t made public,” says Evan Slater, former editor of Surfer and Surfing magazines. “In our world, you sort of look the other way, because it’s a tight community.”

Many industry insiders suggest it was the sponsors who scuttled Irons’s plan to go public. After the near-death incident in Indonesia, Brewer said, one of Irons’s then-sponsors asked him point-blank to keep quiet. “I was asked not to say anything to anybody,” said Brewer. “I said to them, ‘Well, are you going to keep an eye on the guy?’ Maybe because of the amount of money he was making for that company—and from that company—it became an oversight, and nobody looked into it. Nobody cared.”

One official with a former sponsor, who asked not to be named, acknowledges that his company was aware of Irons’s substance abuse. “It was pretty apparent,” he says. But he denies hiding it. “Do we advertise certain parts of our athletes’ behavior? No. But do we actually cover it up? No.” Billabong CEO Paul Naude declined to comment on whether his company knew of Irons’s drug use.

Andy’s father, Phil Irons, reached by cell phone on Kauai, wouldn’t talk about it, either. “Those are problems that a lot of people go through,” he said. “They’re nothing to be brought up. Ever.”

If Irons did decide to keep quiet, the decision seems puzzling in some ways. Other surfers have come clean in the past and actually boosted their public image as a result. Big-wave riders Peter Mel and Darryl “Flea” Virostko recently opened up about their use of methamphetamines. And Irons’s own mentor, Billabong team rider Mark Occhilupo, bared his soul about kicking a cocaine habit before mounting a comeback in 1997.

Acquaintances say Irons did make private admissions. “He definitely came clean with his friends,” says a source close to Irons. “He was totally open with me to the point where he said, ‘Me and every housewife in America.’ Then he was like, ‘Fuck, the crazy thing is that people think things are way worse than they are.’ He’d read the chat rooms.”

Whatever treatment Andy received, John Irons says it helped. “Did it change his life? Yes. He was amped to get back on the tour. He was refocused and ready to go.”

Kelly Slater recalls a conversation with Irons from around 2007. “A couple of years ago, he had an awakening in his life about things,” says Slater. “We had one real deep talk. He said how excited he was to be feeling everything—to be feeling his emotions and understanding them. For him, that was a new lease on his life.”

BUT IF IRONS WAS ON an uptick in 2007, it didn’t last. His erratic behavior returned in September 2008, when he went missing during a World Tour contest in France. He surfed badly in one heat and then failed to show up for the next. He finished the year 13th overall but decided not to compete in 2009. “We encouraged Andy to take a year off,” says Billa­bong’s Naude, “because he had lost the desire to be on the tour.”

Irons told friends that he’d almost been dropped by Billabong. According to Mike Reola, a friend and co-founder of the clothing company Lost, Irons said that “everyone at Billabong wanted me gone when I was off tour” and that “Paul Naude was the only one who fought for me.” Irons also told friends that he took a substantial pay cut.

Asked to confirm that Irons had taken a cut, Naude said he couldn’t recall, adding that “in terms of redoing his deal, we never had any issues, so I’m assuming everyone was happy.”

This year was supposed to be the start of a comeback for Irons. Before the season started in February, he traveled to Australia to work with fitness trainer Wes Berg. But as the year began, Irons was quickly eliminated in the first four events.

Slater, who by that time had become close to Irons, says that Irons had confided in him. “He said, ‘I’m having a lot of trouble wanting to be at contests and caring about this.'” Irons told other friends he felt trapped, because he believed that surfing on tour, which he didn’t really like, was his only viable career option.

Meanwhile, his roller-coaster life continued. At the Nike 6.0 Lowers Pro surf contest— a non-tour event held last May in San Clemente, California—he surfed “as good as he’d ever surfed,” according to Shea Lopez, and tied for third. But in June, when watch company Nixon hosted an annual event on the Fijian resort island of Tavarua, Irons’s substance issues resurfaced.

Irons, who was accompanied by Lyndie, didn’t surf much during the trip, though when he did paddle out to the island’s fabled Cloudbreak, he scored the best rides of the day, tucking into the barrel for ten seconds at a time. Toward the trip’s end, Irons began exhibiting strange behavior. “He tried to fight one of his close friends over something weird,” says a guest who was there. Irons even called out the fellow surfer in the restaurant one night at dinner. Then, as the group was partying on the last night of the trip, Irons allegedly became violent.

The witness was told by others on hand that drugs were involved, but added that the scene didn’t feature the standard trappings of a recreational-drug party. “It’s not like in the old days, where there’s a room in the back with mounds of coke,” he said. “Now, people pass around pills.”

At one point, a friend went back to Irons’s room, then returned to the party, saying that Irons had tried to start a fight with him. When others went to investigate, it took two surfers—one a former Navy SEAL, who was the trip’s doctor, and the other a cage fighter—to restrain Irons, who was in a rage. Ultimately, he was sedated. “It’s hard to explain how ugly it was,” says the hotel guest. “Everyone was baffled.”

Several sources indicate that Irons cleaned himself up after the incident on Fiji. By the time the World Tour came to Tahiti in September, he was sufficiently fit and focused to storm through heats and win. He was ecstatic, saying after the event: “My whole dream was to come back and just win one contest. I’ve done that now. I want more.”

THOUGH IRONS’S FINAL DAYS are still shrouded in mystery, it’s possible to piece together the main events. He arrived in Puerto Rico on the evening of October 27, but when his three-man heat hit the water midday on October 30, he wasn’t there. After Irons failed to show, fellow competitors and members of the media immediately grew suspicious. “We’d all heard he was sick—stomach flu, fevers, something. Nobody knew what to believe,” says ESPN’s Jake Howard.

Round-one heats on the tour aren’t elimination rounds, so Irons was scheduled to surf the next day, October 31. Again he failed to show, and this time he called World Tour manager Renato Hickel to formally withdraw. Irons complained of flu-like symptoms and, as Hickel put it to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, “said he’d rather have a doctor come to see him because he was sick.”

Irons was seen by a physician at his rented apartment in Isabela, a five-minute drive from the contest site. It’s unclear what he was treated for, but it’s known that a flu had been going around among surfers. Irons was taken to the airport on Sunday evening, where he was to begin his long trip back to Hawaii.

He arrived in Miami on Sunday night. A Billabong spokesperson told an Australian reporter that Irons had spent “two days” on an IV drip in Miami, which now seems unlikely. Sunday night was Halloween, and Irons, faced with an overnight layover, left the airport and headed for South Beach, according to one person he contacted that night by phone. Irons said he was “on Ninth and Ocean,” had a “backpack and a wallet full of cash,” and wanted to have some fun. He was connected with friends and went to a party.

Irons “had a few drinks,” this person says, and at four in the morning he was placed in a cab and taken to Miami International Airport. His flight for Dallas left at 6:30 A.M.

In the days immediately following Irons’s death, it was reported that, in Dallas, an extremely ill Irons had attempted to board his connecting flight to Honolulu at 11:30 that morning but was turned away at an American Airlines gate—a claim the company denies.

“American Airlines did not refuse or deny travel at any point for Mr. Irons,” says airline spokesman Tim Smith. He says a female family member—who identified herself as Irons’s wife—called two hours before the flight left, said he was sick, and canceled his ticket, rescheduling him for the same flight the next day.

Irons’s flight to Dallas arrived at 8:35 A.M. on Monday, November 1. The Grand Hyatt at DFW is located inside Terminal D, so he was able to check in to his room by 8:47. He opened the door to Room 324 at 8:59, ate a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, drank a bottle of Evian, and downed a couple of soft drinks. He never opened the door again. The next morning, Isaac Ambriz, a security employee with the hotel, was informed by the hotel operator that Irons wasn’t answering his wake-up calls. At 9:43, Ambriz arrived at the room.

“[I] knock and announce, but there was no answer,” Ambriz said in a statement to police. “I enter the room and notice Mr. Irons in bed. I call out his name and knock on the wall several more times.” At 9:47, Ambriz called his supervisor, Crystal Montero. The two entered the room, and Montero, as she told police, “went to the right side of the bed and turned on the right bed lamp. At that moment, I noticed Mr. Irons not breathing.”

IN THEIR INVESTIGATION, airport police said that Irons had been found lying on his back with a sheet pulled to his neck, the bed’s sheets and pillows “neatly set” and with nothing “out of the ordinary.” Police noted that Irons’s prescriptions for both Xanax and Ambien had been filled on October 26, 2010, the day before Irons arrived in Puerto Rico.

Despite Irons’s history of substance abuse and reports of illness, one can only speculate about what killed him, and it may be that a tragic combination of, say, dengue fever and prescription drugs did him in. Irons had been bouncing around time zones, had gone without sleep, had been drinking in Miami, and, at least according to his wife, was ill on the inbound flight to Dallas.

Dr. Bruce Goldberger, director of toxicology at the University of Florida medical school, says combinations like this can be dangerous. “The usual doses of Ambien and Xanax are very safe, even when taken together,” he says. “But if there was an underlying medical condition like pneumonia or sleep apnea, the person would be at greater risk. Sometimes, we see deaths with perfectly healthy people when they take a small amount more of the medication than prescribed.”

Notably, Irons had been diagnosed as suffering from sleep apnea. Goldberger added that if methadone were added to the mix, the situation would be much more risky.

In the days following Irons’s death, fans all over the world held paddle-out services to celebrate his legacy, and friends were left to wonder if Irons really would have thrown it all away with something as foolish as a drug overdose. “A lot of us were pretty hopeful that having a son was going to be a major turning point in his life,” says one friend of the Irons family. “I’ve seen Andy be good and bad, but the one thing that cut through all the shit with him was that he was so excited to be a dad.”

No matter what information emerges from the medical examiner’s office, Irons’s life won’t be completely defined by a toxicology report. Instead, when his son wants to learn about his father, he’ll be told of a complex man who lived hard and fast, who relished his role in surfing but hated the fame that attended it, and who struggled mightily to overcome problems that he was never able to talk about.

No doubt he’ll be told this as well: in a life marked by turmoil, riding waves brought Andy Irons a fleeting sense of peace. Surfing, he once said, “is the closest thing you can feel to being kissed by God.”

The post Last Drop appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Fishing Mongolia’s Eg-Uur River Basin
șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Editors’ Choice
I fantasize about sight-fishing to brown trout in New Zealand, hooking salmon in Iceland, moving to Patagonia. But when I picture the fish I most want to catch, I think of a wolf. A Mongolian taimen—nicknamed “the river wolf—can reach six feet and eats, among other things, ducks. To catch one, you need to go to a place that’s wilder than any bonefishing lodge; northern Mongolia is still populated by nomadic herding communities, meaning you’ll be fishing alone. A friend of mine once rode in a jeep 18 hours alongside a freshly removed goatskin to catch a taimen. Luckily, there’s a better way. Livingston, Montana–based Sweetwater Travel runs the best operation in the country, based out of two ger camps in the Eg-Uur river basin, where guests can expect to hook at least one taimen a day, plus netloads of lenok, a feisty Mongolian trout. $5,900, one week;

Fishing Montana’s South Fork of the Flathead

Think of the South Fork of the Flathead as a little slice of Alaska tucked into Montana’s northwestern corner: a spectacularly remote river that happens to offer some of the best, easiest dry-fly fishing in the world. Guests horsepack in for two days through the grizzly-rich Bob Marshall Wilderness to the put-in, then float 30 miles of Class II and III water in four days. On the way, you’ll camp on the riverside and catch as many wild, native west–slope cutthroats as you wish, as well as a few bull trout. (The South Fork is one of the few places where targeting the threatened, 30-inch beasts is legal.) Go with the guides at Spotted Bear Ranch, near the takeout at Meadow Creek Gorge—they offer a post-float hot shower and cookout at the lodge. $4,600;

Paddling Chilean Patagonia

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Editors’ Choice

In the fingertips of Patagonia’s Southern Ice Cap, you might as well be in another century. There are no people, no cruise ships, no nothing. Just pick a narrow fjord that’s guarded by a reef or shallow pass, then it’s just you and all that ice piled up on top of the southern Andes. You can see the entire life cycle of a glacier, from peak to calving, all within the span of a mile. Those famous trans-ice-cap crossings by Børge Ousland and the other crazy Norwegians? They happened right above you. Fly to Punta Arenas and meet up with Indomita Patagonia. They’ll provide kayaks, food, and a fishing vessel to base out of on a weeklong tour of the area’s fjords. From $2,220;

Paddling Southeast Alaska

Not because of the grizzlies. Or the humpbacks. Or the bald eagles. Or the otters (though they really are very chatty and fun). But because it’s quite likely you’ll see all of the above within the span of an hour. Whiplash could be one of your biggest dangers in Alaska’s panhandle. That and pruney hands, especially in the southeastern region, which receives about four times the annual rainfall of Seattle. But that’s why you’re snugged into a kayak. Fly into Ketchikan and get boats and a water shuttle into Misty Fjords National Monument from Southeast Sea Kayaks. You’ll be protected from open-ocean swells while paddling along 3,000-foot granite cliffs, then sleeping in Forest Service cabins. Rentals from $45 per day;

Rafting Uganda’s White Nile

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Editors’ Choice

Bujagali Falls, near where the Nile drains Lake Victoria, is the most accessible extreme whitewater in Africa—which is to say it’s the best whitewater in the world. The White Nile beats the Zambezi’s six-month season (it’s open year-round) and the Colorado’s dam-controlled volume (the average flow is seven times bigger). Float it on a two-day trip, during which you’ll take on freight-car-size holes and nine Class V rapids. Nile River Explorers, the area’s veteran rafting company, offers a two-day, 34-mile trip from the put-in below Lake Victoria to the take-out at Hairy Lemon Island. It’s split up with a night in safari-style tents at a riverside camp. Book now: Next year, Uganda hopes to finish building a 90-foot dam below Bujagali, which would swamp some of the biggest rapids. $250, including a night for two in a safari tent;

Rafting Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon

The Grand Canyon is a worthy river trip, though the water is a little cold and turbid. Plus you can’t catch any fish. And you’d better like the color of mud. Which is why our pick for the American river you’ve got to run before you die is Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon. The water’s so clear you can eyeball straggling steelhead at a hundred yards. Native cutthroat trout will hit just about any dry fly in your box. The rapids ain’t bad, either. There are some 100 of them on the 100-mile float, with more than a dozen that rate Class IV. And at night, there are the hot springs. Half a dozen camps have them—the clear, fresh-smelling kind. Six-day trips with Idaho-based Row șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs, $1,765;

Surfing Tavarua, Fiji

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Editors’ Choice

Why is Tavarua Island, in Fiji, the ultimate surf getaway? Because it’s an isolated spot containing world-class waves that you can rent for yourself. Sure, the Mentawai Islands had a good run, but new boat outfitters and land camps have made the place a circus. Tavarua’s a short boat shuttle from Nadi airport, on Fiji’s Viti Levu island. Once you set down, you’ve got seven days of perfect waves and zero crowds; Tavarua is limited to 36 guests per week. World-class lefts are found on the island’s south side at Cloudbreak—accessible four times per day by boat—and just outside your bedroom at Restaurants. If you bring the family, you can slide gentle peelers at the mellower Kiddieland. Plus, when the surfing’s done, you can run a tab at the bar. $3,995 per person for seven days, including flights from L.A.;

Surfing Baja, Mexico

Oahu’s North Shore is incredible, if a spectacle, and SoCal’s beaches are convenient. But if you’re looking for the best surf in the Western Hemisphere, head for the border. Since the sixties, Mexico’s Baja Peninsula has embodied the classic surf experience—pulling your 4×4 up on the sand and pitching camp for a week of empty barrels and cheap cervezas. And here’s the thing: With many SoCal weekend warriors scared off by reports of drug-related violence near the border, the region’s lineups are now relatively vacant. So if you’re smart about it, you can surf Baja as it was in the sixties. Go with a buddy who knows the region, drive only during the day, and travel a few hours south of the border—once you pass Ensenada, you’re set. Then make for the mile-long, crescent-shaped Punta Cabras beach and surf away. The nearest town is Erendira, six miles south, where you’ll find cold beer and Coyote Cal’s hostel ($15–$60 per night; ) if you don’t feel like camping.

Diving Raja Ampat, Indonesia

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Editors’ Choice

There’s an archipelago in the Coral Triangle so dense with sea life it’s often called “the epicenter of marine biodiversity,” a place where a scientist once discovered 283 new species during a single dive. Welcome to Raja Ampat, a cluster of 600 islands off the northwestern tip of New Guinea and one of the least fished, least populated, least bleached scuba destinations on the planet. You’ll find pygmy sea horses, elusive walking sharks, technicolor nudibranchs, and some 1,200 species of fish. Raja Ampat is blessed with more than 600 species of coral; the Caribbean has fewer than 70. If diving is your sole prerogative, go with the Seven Seas liveaboard (from $374 per person per night; ). For a more relaxed experience, book a week at Misool Eco Resort’s private island and take day trips to their 164-square-mile reef. Seven nights, from $2,035;

Diving Saba, Dutch Antilles

A hawksbill off Saba

A hawksbill off Saba

Too many Caribbean dive destinations are marred by ailing reef systems, corny resorts, and crowded boats. And to reach big-fish spots like Costa Rica’s Cocos Island, expect hundreds of miles on a liveaboard (i.e., lots of strangers). So if you want a serene tropical getaway that happens to offer superlative diving, head to quirky little Saba, a five-square-mile, 2,900-foot dormant volcano in the Dutch Antilles. Landing in a Twin Otter on Saba’s tiny, cliff-perched runway is an adventure in its own right, and you’ll find deals on lodges like the Hummingbird Villa ($375 per day for two; ), with its private pool. Then there’s the diving. Saba’s fish-rich marine park was established in 1987 as a preventive measure, not a Band-Aid, so encounters with turtles, sharks, eels, rays, and macro life are common. Be sure to hit Diamond Rock and Eye of the Needle for lava-sculpted formations, then arrange a night dive at Ladder Bay, a sharky spot near shore. Day trips with Sea Saba, $150;

Explore Russia’s Lake Baikal

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Editors’ Choice

With its desert-plateau-meets-big-mountains scenery, Lake Titicaca is probably as interesting as its name is memorable. And ever since I learned the hypersaline Dead Sea (which, of course, is a lake) was the lowest point on the surface of the earth, I’ve always wanted to float in it. But neither one has cast a spell on me quite like Russia’s Lake Baikal. Whenever I scan a map of Siberia (more often than you might think), my eyes always end up on this blue blotch. Because it’s so far away from, well, everything, the vast majority of the plant and animal species found there are endemic. Then there’s the unexplored mountain ranges and cave dwellings and the “Siberian Riviera,” a stretch of coastline marked by trees with otherworldly exposed roots that reach five feet in height. You can see all this on KE șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s 14-day exploratory trip, which concludes with a three-day trek in the nearby Khamar-Daban mountains. $3,845; July 9–22, August 20–September 2;

Explore Lake Superior

Lake Superior

Lake Superior's choppy east coast

Sail Turkey’s Lycian Coast

It’s not quite as stunning to look at as the Seychelles. The marine wildlife isn’t as impressive as what you’ll find off Tonga. But you want more on a sailing adventure than pretty views and leaping dolphins. You need to get off the boat. Frequently. “Think about taking a road trip in the Southwest,” says Anthony Sandberg, founder and owner of Berkeley-based OCSC Sailing, which offers trips across the planet. “You don’t just sit in the car.” Go ashore in southern Turkey and you’ll be walking into Byzantine churches, chatting with rug makers, and forking into plates of aubergine. And the sailing? About perfect if you hit the ideal weather windows in spring and fall: soft morning breezes, then blowing a steady 15 knots from the northwest in the afternoon. On a two-week OCSC “flotilla” trip—eight to 12 catamarans and single-hull ships following the same rough itinerary, so you have backup if you need it—you start in Orhaniye and cruise east for some 250 miles, wrapping the Datça Peninsula and hugging the crenulated, cliff-lined coast to the forest-backed port of Göcek. From $1,500 per person;

Sail the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands

The BVIs are packed with rookies, while the Caribbean’s most southern islands, the Windwards, offer minimal land infrastructure and long, trickier crossings. Want a low-maintenance tropical sail that still delivers the rush of navigating open water? Head for St. Martin and the surrounding Leeward Islands, including Statia, St. Kitts, Nevis, and nearby Anguilla and St. Barts. Expect moderate, steady easterly trade winds, gentle currents, and water so transparent that spotting hazards is easy. Map a route from St. Martin, then charter a catamaran or hire one with a skipper from St. Martin–based Moorings. The beauty of this area is its mix of on-land activities (from remote bouldering to gourmet dining) and short-to-midrange crossings—meaning you can literally go where the wind takes you. On a two-week trip, you can snorkel off tiny Ile Fourche, eat steak frites on St. Barts, hike through cloudforests on Nevis, and sip three-dollar beers on St. Kitts’ empty beaches. Charters from $650 per day;

Expedition Cruising

Heli-Fly-Fish Patagonia
On any given day on this weeklong trip with Orvis Travel, you’ll be casting a seven-weight rod in crystal trout streams where you might be the first visitor. The 28-passenger MV Atmosphere sails from Puerto Montt, Chile, shuttling in and out of remote fjords. Expect glaciers, blue whales breaching near your 30-foot Zodiac, and impromptu daily helicopter flights to wherever the fish—big, sea-run brown trout—are biting. February 26­March 5, 2011; from $9,850 per person;

See Antarctica’s Really Wild Side
Most Antarctica cruises sail from South America, for the shorter crossing, but trips from Down Under, landing in East Antarctica, can take in wildlife-profuse subantarctic islands on the way down. Orion Expedition Cruises‘ 19-day Commonwealth Bay voyage allows ample time to explore sanctuaries like Macquarie Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site teeming with elephant seals, albatrosses, and four species of penguins. Once on the continent, you’ll go ashore for four days exploring Commonwealth Bay, discovered by Sir Douglas Mawson on his 1911–14 Aurora voyage, and set foot in his seldom visited hut. December 28–January 15; from US$16,460 per person;

“Un-Cruise” Alaska’s Inner Passage
Southeast Alaska sees its share of behemoth cruise ships, but you can leave them all in your wake and anchor in calm, grizzly-frequented bays on InnerSea Discoveries‘ eight-day Juneau-to-Ketchikan trips. On this multisport cruise, you’ll be off the boat daily, kayaking in the shadow of immense glaciers, watching pods of humpbacks feed, and spelunking in ice caves. The company, targeted to a younger crowd without unlimited budgets, launches in May 2011. Thirty-two departures, May–September; from $1,795 per person;

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It was at Pipeline in 2002. Typical December day there—solid six-foot swell, hundreds of people on the beach, and too many guys in the water. I was on the beach when I saw this guy cut Braden Dias off. He could have killed him. Braden and I are good friends, both Hawaiians. I didn’t even wait for the guy to come in before I started running down the beach. I just kind of lost it. He didn’t want to fight. He kept saying, “No, no, no.” But I hit him three times. I didn’t know the guy. I heard that he was some kind of fighter from Brazil. He was bigger than me. But it wasn’t really a fight. You can see that in the video—it’s online somewhere.

Greg Long has stopped again, waiting for me to catch up. It’s late February, and the lean, tousle-haired surfer is jogging in place on the beach at Trestles, the world-famous break where he grew up, an hour south of Los Angeles. He’s wearing a hooded wetsuit, carrying a pair of swim goggles, and indulging himself in a bit of schadenfreude as he flogs me up the beach. I’m spent, and we’re less than an hour into his daily regimen. So far, we’ve sprinted four miles in soft sand and returned swimming along the shoreline, while overhead waves crashed on top of us. His goal, he tells me, is to simulate the violence of a big-wave beatdown. When I finally catch up, he’s laughing.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

I nod.

“Want me to hang with you?”

“No,” I cough. “Do your thing.”

Long’s thing is a relentless, year-round quest to find and ride the planet’s biggest waves. And, at 25, he’s extremely good at it. In January, at Cortes Bank, an open-ocean break 105 miles west of San Diego, he and his tow-in-surfing crew caught what were likely the tallest waves ever ridden: at least 80 feet. A week later, just south of San Francisco, Long won the iconic Maverick’s Surf Contest by paddling into 20-foot barrels. He’s had his board chomped from beneath him by a ten-foot tiger shark off Oahu and been held underwater for several minutes while multiple waves pummeled him. And after the winter swells go quiet in the Pacific, he switches hemispheres. In July 2006, at Dungeons, in South Africa, he rode a 65-footer and collected the 2007 Billabong XXL Biggest Wave award, along with $15,000 that he split with his jet-ski driver.

That’s a decent paycheck, until you compare it with the millions that World Tour surfers like Kelly Slater and the Irons brothers make. Big-wave surfers operate under the radar, eschewing serious money for lifestyle. There is, of course, an exception: 44-year-old Laird Hamilton. Yet Long’s recent dominance has been so complete that even his status seems within reach.

But while Hamilton got rich and famous by ignoring all contests and instead having his picture taken towing into monster waves, Long is sponsorless. “They’re on different planets,” says Evan Slater, the editor of Surfing magazine. “Laird is a superhero. Greg is a classic surfer—understated and personable. But he could be the undisputed king of big waves.”

First, Long needs a job. From 2001 to 2006, he made a modest five-figure salary as a team rider for Ocean Pacific. But when OP was sold in November 2006, the new bosses dumped their sponsorship program—and Long with it.

So he’s still living at home with his parents. Long’s father, Steve, is a lifeguard at San Onofre State Beach—where Trestles is located—a job that comes with coveted employee housing. It’s where Greg and his brother, Rusty, also a well-known big-wave rider, were raised.

Since OP dropped him, Long’s had to fund his big-wave missions with savings and contest winnings. He even buys and barters for his own boards, including the nine-foot-six Chris Christenson he used at Maverick’s. And yet, before the last heat, the six finalists agreed to split the prize money evenly. “As far as I’m concerned, that $30,000 was the devil sitting in the lineup,” says Long.

It’s not that he’s radically anticapitalist. Long just thinks surfers should be intrinsically motivated. Take, for example, the Cortes mission: While the rest of California suffered a storm that knocked down trees, cut off electricity, and closed roads, Long, Brad Gerlach, Grant Baker, Mike Parsons, and Rob Brown braved 20-foot swells on the hundred-mile journey out to sea. With room for only one of the team’s two jet skis on board the expedition’s 36-foot catamaran, Long took turns driving the other ski all the way to the bank.

“It probably wasn’t the safest thing,” he says. “But if somebody else had caught those waves, I’d have cried.”

Two days ago, Long packed up his gear at the end of the North Pacific’s big-wave season. “The jet stream’s split,” he told me as I helped him wheel his jet skis under an awning at his parents’ house. Greg wasn’t the only Long packing up. After 33 years as a lifeguard, his dad has retired and is moving to Oregon.

“This is a new chapter for me,” says Greg. “When I come home next fall, I’ll probably be living in my van until I can find a new place to stay.” Or not. In April, he was close to signing a lucrative multi-year deal with Hurley.

“I thought about going back to school and calling it quits,” says Long. “Then there’s the side of me that says, ‘Go chase every big swell you can, and have the time of your life. It’s going to come around.’ ”

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Swooping through your first full-rail turn on a Hess surfboard requires a suspension of disbelief. This thing is made of wood? Hand-constructed from sustainably harvested poplar, cork, and amapola by San Francisco shaper Daniel Hess, it’s a piece of art as much as a performance wave-rider. Unlike the clunky wooden boards of the past and their modern-day retro-chic knockoffs, this six-foot quad-fin incorporates the latest in surfboard technology: a wood perimeter stringer for strength and controlled flex patterns, and a durable EPS foam core. Laminated with tough—and less toxic—epoxy resin, Hess’s designs are a full step toward the elusive “green” surfboard and will outlast their foam-and-fiberglass counterparts. Prepare to be on your game, though. With a ride this cool, you’re going to attract attention in the lineup, so make sure your surfing is more Kelly than kook. $1,300;

Hess Surfboard

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WHEN I IMAGINE A GOOD DAY SURFING, I think waves, one after another, churning left across a bay. (Hey, it’s my fantasy, and I’m a goofy-foot.) When I think of a perfect day, it’s pretty much the same, only you’re not there.

Illustration

LOOSE LIPS SINK TRIPS: Let's keep this spot to ourselves

This may sound selfish, but trust me: Exclusivity can feel downright sweet in practice. As much as I want to, I don’t even feel guilty about it. The way I see it, if you’ve done the legwork to find a secret spot—a fishing hole, backcountry powder stash, climbing crag, or surf break—you owe it to yourself and the explorers who may follow to shut the hell up.

Why? Moab, for starters. Sure, the mountain biking is still incredible—as long as you don’t mind the crowds. But when those 5,000-plus riders and spectators descend on the place every year for the 24 Hours of Moab, there’s some dude kicking himself for not keeping those trails under wraps. Then there are the endless lines in the Wasatch. I’m not talking chutes; I’m talking queues. Ever since Andrew McLean wrote The Chuting Gallery, gifting the entire ski world with instructions to Utah’s best nearby backcountry stashes, the Wasatch has become like Huntington Beach in the summer. But at least the Wasatch is still unregulated. In the 1990s, climbers so overran the boulders of Hueco Tanks, in Texas, that the bureaucrats stepped in. Now you need a reservation and a guide just to get on some rock.

As for surfing, truly good waves are a limited resource, and it hasn’t helped that the sport’s popularity has doubled in the U.S. in less than 20 years. But even with two million Americans combing the beaches and Web for new spots, it’s easier to keep a break hidden than you might think. For 15 years, surfer Jeff Clark had Maverick’s, the now iconic break outside Half Moon Bay, California, all to himself. These days the wave is shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best surfers on every suitable swell. But if one guy could have his own 20-plus-foot monster off the coast of the country’s most populous state—and he wasn’t even trying to keep it a secret—imagine the possibilities. You might be able to hand your secret little point break off to your kids before the masses ever caught wind. “The places that take a little bit of doing to get there—I’m not up for making road maps to them,” says Clark. “Leave them for those people who have the energy to search them out. Don’t blow it up in the newspaper every time you want to make a dollar.”

OK, that one stings a bit. I once wrote a feature for Surfer magazine on an untapped Fijian island that now has surf charters. And every time șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű dishes on some great new adventure locale, it offers its two million readers a small piece of paradise while ruining the whole thing for the pioneers. [Editor’s note: Our bad.] Still, I understand that it isn’t easy to stop bragging after you’ve found nirvana.

“I’ve done the wrong thing before,” admits pro surfer Dan Malloy, who’s made a living out of being photographed at hard-to-reach waves. “But just saying that it’s your job doesn’t make it OK. If anything, I feel like more of a sellout if I’m showing up with six surfers and a photographer at some guy’s place and saying, ‘Look, buddy, but it’s my job.'”

So here’s my proposal. I won’t tell you where I’ve been, and I won’t ask where you’ve been. Especially if you’re a surfer. Considering all the factors that have to line up for a perfect break—swell direction, bottom contour, tide, wind, weather, temperature—it’s a wonder anybody ever gets one. But they’re still out there. Here’s hoping you find yours. And here’s hoping I never hear about it.

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SPEARFISHING
“It’s amazing what the ocean can provide,” says Keaulana. “It’s our supermarket.” And the waterman’s preferred shopping method is spearfishing, a term that covers everything from skin diving with a sharpened stick to scuba diving with a trigger-activated harpoon.

GEAR: The most popular tool is a Hawaiian sling, a sort of elongated bow and arrow designed for underwater use ($40; ).

GET STARTED: Find partners and shop information at .

WATCH IT: Fort Bragg, California, will host this year’s U.S. National Spearfishing Championships on August 9 ().

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PADDLEBOARDING
Great for building endurance and upper-body strength, paddleboarding involves lying prone or kneeling on a canoe-length board and stroking with your hands until your lats burn. “No cell phones, no babies crying,” says Jamie Mitchell, five-time winner of the Quiksilveredition Molokai to Oahu, the sport’s premier race. “Just you and the ocean.”

GEAR: The boards look like ocean kayaks without sides and range from 12 to 18-plus feet shorter for maneuverability, longer for distance. The 14-footer from Joe Bark is a great all-around board ($1,700; ).

GET STARTED: Go to or to find events around the country.

WATCH IT: The 32-mile Molokai to Oahu race takes place July 29 ().

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BODYSURFING
“You pretty much never have a bad time when you go bodysurfing,” says pro surfer Dan Malloy. “Just throw on your trunks and jump in the water.” It’s also the only way to get overhead surf in two-foot waves.

GEAR: If you can swim, you can bodysurf, though fins definitely help with catching waves and with swimming back out for the next set. Try Voit’s Duck Feet ($30; ).

GET STARTED: Head out at a break where you’re comfortable with the currents and bottom contour, wait for a wave, and start swimming.

WATCH IT: The World Bodysurfing Championships take place every August in Oceanside, California ().

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OUTRIGGER CANOEING
Though the materials have changed, outrigger design a main boat hull with a parallel stabilizing arm, called an ama has remained the same since Polynesians first paddled to Hawaii 1,600 years ago. “You think of that when you’re on the water,” says Hawaii lifeguard Guy Pere. “If I throw a handline out and catch a fish, I think, Some guy probably sat in this bay hundreds of years ago doing the same thing.”

GEAR: Outriggers generally range from one- to six-person models. If you can’t talk your friends into joining you, try the one-man Hurricane OC1 ($2,950; ).

GET STARTED: Check for a list of clubs from Dallas to Hong Kong.

WATCH IT: The 31st annual Outrigger World Championships will take place on May 20 in Molokai ().

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