Stand up day at Jaws

[headmount]

Well today kinda made Jaws history as the tow guys had to hang back and the SUP guys took over.  VERY high caliber riders, among them Kai Lenny catching some incredible bombs.  Horrible camera conditions.  Cloudy and rainy in the morning when the waves were biggest.  Slight wind but doable.  I have a vid of Jan 2 which had blue skies, glassy waves and volcanic haze.  Shot from the point with only 120mm so not close up but Robbie, Chuck, Conner were out ripping it up.  Our first good swell with decent conditions this year.  Today was of course huge but not A-plus conditions at Jaws.

[soulpaddler]

What a time for this post.  I just finished watching Riding Giants and was wondering if that place would ever be SUPable.  Apparently it is.  Bummer about the footage, but thanks for sharing.

[headmount]

I've seen some mean wipeouts from tow-in guys in the past but today the level of commitment and vulnerability of these guys dropping in on SUPs was simply inspiring.  You can really see how much of an advantage it is to have a 30mph entry into a wave like that with the ski.  With SUPs the best guys are only getting maybe a third of that speed at the most when they attempt to catch it.  That means that penetrating the water speed coming up the face is a much more daunting task ... while the wave goes vertical and finally pitches.  To give you an idea, it takes about 4 seconds for the the lip to land once it pitches.  The concussion is awesome. 

Saw some innovative boards especially made for this task.

[OUTSIDEWAVE]

pics

[Weasels wake]

pics

Exactly, you can't go telling stories like this w/o posting pics, there should be a law!
Without pics,,,,,,,, it didn't happen,,,,,,,,, even if the pics are shitty, we'll take them.

[headmount]

I went out on a ski with my pal and just enjoyed the show which is hard to do when you're amped up with a camera.  The weather was absolutely no good for my camera which as I zoom goes from a rather sharp lens at wide angle, to a very narrow aperture when zoomed.  But no worries.  There were tons of photo hogs out there.. some with very sophisticated equipment... sharp teles.  It's a lot of work to do it this stuff and with shitty results, it's just not gratifying.  But see in other post of my Jaws warm up vid.  Shot with 120mm zoomed but a sunny day so reasonable results.

[PonoBill]

I was going to go up to the overlook and shoot with the big lens adapted to my Sony, but the crowd looked like a circus, so I blew it off and went to Kanaha to get my ass kicked.

[headmount]

Well here's a sequence from someone from the cliff...

[StuBro]

Look at that guy in the impact zone with the red board.  I sure hope there was a ski to drag him out of there.

[headmount]

Excuse me if I led to the wrong impression that guys used blades to paddle in.  The wind made it too hard for that.  These were prone paddlers. But among them many well know SUP paddlers.

[tautologies]

Holy smokes just saw some pics on McNamara wipe on one of those wave surf jets at Jaws.

So gnarly pics...if you have a facebook check out Pure Digital Maui for the pics...there were posted there by Pure Digital Maui

[Old School 213]

Wow.. Just wow... Between these pics and those of Bill's brontosaurus steaks it's going to be a bad day for corporate productivity.

[RainWaves]

 Looking at the guy on the inside on the yellow board in Headmounts 3rd picture down, the words "curtain call" comes to mind.    Ouch!

[parker]

Here's the link tautologies was talking about.

72 more pics:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.339174786112602.94382.207749619255120&type=1

[Menlo SUPr]

I was going to go up to the overlook and shoot with the big lens adapted to my Sony, but the crowd looked like a circus, so I blew it off and went to Kanaha to get my ass kicked.

A circus on the overlook or in the water? Probably both, I imagine.