[Roddenberry via Geekologie]

Last week we saw some big wave activity in the Pacific. Some said the storms would develop some of the biggest waves in decades.* Here’s some footage of nut jobs surfing said waves on Jaws, in Maui.

This is from the 7th of the month, when our guest blogger and surf gear experimenter Laird Hamilton was out. From his blog, he said a few newcomers were getting thrown up on to the rocks with their jetskis and boards. The waves were over 7m tall, as rated in Hawaiian terms, which means 15m tall on the face.

These videos were shot using a Canon 5D Mark II, a 70-300mm USM lens and a Zoom H4n & Redhead windscreen. Slow motion was done in Premier CS4, but I can imagine how much better this’ll would have looked if the 5D’s 60FPS firmware was used. [vimeo via nick bilton]

*They turned out to be overhyped a bit, but the waves were big enough to hold the Eddie Aikau contest in Waimea Bay, which has only been held seven times in 25 years.

The H20 Audio Capture Case is specifically designed for the current-gen iPod Nano, allowing full use of the video camera up to 3.6m underwater. Seems pretty cool – you can listen to the latest NPR Planet Money podcast while you catch some waves (that’s what surfers like, right?) and then when you fall, you can take a video of the pretty fish while you grope your way to the surface. They’ll be available next week for $US80, which is fairly reasonable, but they don’t include waterproof headphones – you’ll have to buy those separately.

Oh, and that guy up there? That’s Laird Hamilton, friend of Gizmodo and expert surfblogger. [H20]

Let me be honest, I don’t want surfboards to be designed on computers, sent to factories in Thailand and shipped back to us en masse without the shaper ever touching the material. I’m not a purist—really I’m not. And as someone who doesn’t make surfboards, and will never try, I have no right to expound righteously on this subject. But still, a big part of me—I think the part that wishes we all grew a different rare vegetable on our windowsills and bartered with each other from our front porches at meal time—wants surfboard shapers to be people who still draw their visions in the sand and give boards away from banana leaf huts.

To anyone actually trying to make a living from designing surfboards, which have notoriously low profit margins, that’s unfair. But you should know my bias, and know that as I drive to meet this former Apple designer guy, Thomas Meyerhoffer, the man who designed that translucent eMate for Apple in the 90s and has become recently renowned for using his technology chops to design some revolutionary type of surfboard, one that looks like a compressed hour-glass alien spaceship, I have my reservations. It doesn’t help that Meyerhoffer, a very hip man with a Swedish accent, a thin goatee, and a shaved head, meets me in the parking lot of his home break in Montara in a shiny white BMW.

Man, this is not how it should be, I’m thinking from the smelly confines my rusting van with 370,000 kilometres on it (you do detect a hint of jealousy). This is just not, not—not wholesome.

But neither would it be wholesome for me to judge this man so early in our day-long relationship. I have to give him a chance. It’s our first date. And since the waves are slop here in Montana, we decide to drive up to Ocean Beach, San Francisco, for a better shot at testing out his gizmos. (And no, I don’t like calling surfboards gizmos, and yes, I’m feeling a little bitter that Meyerhoffer wouldn’t let me take photos of his Miami Vice looking home to remember the scene. I mean, what surfer cares about that kind of stuff? But the drive will give me a chance to drop into a less judgemental space. We are all one, all one.)

We are rounding the bluffs on Highway 1, chatting casually now, and while Meyerhoffer explains about quitting Apple 10 years ago and starting to surf everyday, I’m not really listening. I’m thinking about the fact that I too am so dependent on technology, recording our conversation on my iPhone. I’m forcing myself to see myself as the same as Meyerhoffer. These are the exercises strange people have to do to feel normal. And surprisingly, it doesn’t take long.

For starters, Meyerhoffer is nice. And I like nice people. And he doesn’t seem at all weirded out by the fact that the doors on my van don’t work, which goes a long way in my book. Also, he went to art school. One I haven’t even heard of. And he’s deep. “A surfboard is a very complex shape, a never-ending curve,” he says at some point in the conversation, and I like this statement. With his accent, it sounds like a sort of koan. Can curves really never end?

And like this, five minutes into our drive, Meyerhoffer has transformed into a sort of bohemian guy who just happens to have lots of money, a friend you might want to give you advice on your love life or what sort of refrigerator to buy or whether to quit your job and take up oil painting.

In other words, I can finally listen to him.

So let’s start over, shall we?

Curves are a good place to start. Meyerhoffer is all about them. He recently designed the first “soft computer” for a start-up called Chumby, which is like a little beanbag with Wifi. It’s very cute. He also designs bubbly ski goggles, snowboard bindings, expensive chairs that look like something George Clooney would model in, windsurfing sails. He is a refiner, taking stuff that already works well and making that stuff work better, in an out of the box kind of way, of course.

That’s cool. Whatever.

But a surfboard? This is sacred terrain. Every surfer knows that real shaping is an art that only a select few—usually hand-craftsman who have been surfing since they were in the womb and who have been anointed by the Hawaiian gods—really excel at, and even fewer become innovative enough to design something that is profoundly innovative and functional. Meyerhoffer started surfing later in life and he designed these alien boards with CAD software, which would be the equivalent of making French wine in steel barrels. You might get away with it in Napa, but you’d be barred from Bordeaux for life.

Meyerhoffer is clearly used to the heavy scepticism. “I never did this to get famous,” he says without my prompting. “I did it so people could enjoy a different feeling…People see the board and they think that I made it like this to differentiate it from other surfboards. Or they think, ‘oh parabolic, it’s like a ski.’ But it has nothing to do with that. I didn’t design the board to look like this. It just became like this. I started to take away, and I took away a lot of mass. So where do you take away? You take away where you don’t need.”

Meyerhoffer determined that what you don’t need is all that rail, and he basically scooped out chunks at the waist of the board and took in the tail drastically, making it long and narrow.

The idea came over five years of trial and error at solving a problem. Meyerhoffer loved longboarding because of the momentum you get with a big boat-like plank. But he missed the agility of a high performance shortboard. He also liked single-fin hulls, a sort of in between model, for their speed and glide. But those boards, Meyerhoffer found, really only work well on point waves that usually have a predictable way of peeling down the line. Most of us surfers find ourselves in the same predicament and so spend enormous amounts of time and money acquiring just the right combination of boards to fit the changing conditions and our fickle moods. Meyerhoffer set out to make a board that could do it all. He was bound to be criticized, at least by those closed-minded surfers, whoever they are.

The model he has started to settle on, the one we are about to ride, is the result of letting himself make a lot of boards that simply failed. “Sometimes I’d go out on these really weird boards that I know won’t work at all and I look like a total kook,” he laughs. “But I still have to take them out to test a theory.” Anyone who has suffered the stink eye one gets from surfing poorly on a good wave knows what a sacrifice that is. But it appears, at least from the press, to be paying off with this model, which has been receiving praise from the likes of pro surfer Peter Mel. Retired pro surfer Mike Tabeling has gone so far as to buy one Meyerhoffer in every size. He recently told Surfer Magazine, “That’s what the Meyerhoffer does-it brings back the fun of your shortboard days, as you can make this longboard really turn.”

But this is all rhetoric. I may like Meyerhoffer after our friendly drive, but I still think his alien babies in the back of my van are likely dripping radioactive material into the bag of stale chips I’m planning on salvaging for lunch. And since I’m not a longboarder, I wonder if Meyerhoffer’s claim that I can surf it like a shortboard will be even close to true. Doubtful.

We’ve arrived at Ocean Beach, which is basically slop as well: barely one metre waves and disorganised. Meyerhoffer doesn’t seem like the stressed out type, but he is visibly uncomfortable from this. Even after good press in Surfer Magazine, The Surfer’s Journal and some The New York Times, Meyerhoffer seems to be trying to convince the surfing community that his works of art are worth around $US800 a pop, not to mention worth every single person you meet on the beach asking, “what the hell is that?”

“It’s just going to feel like crap if we go out here,” he says.

Excuses excuses. He’s already lowering our expectations.

And there is no time to keep looking for waves. So, after fielding 10 or 15 questions from surfers who approach with their heads cocked—”are you the Apple surfboard guy?”—in we go, paddling over the rough, textured deep green lines, through wisps of fog, on our brand new Meyerhoffers, which, to my surprise, feel really good to paddle: light, streamlined, comfortable.

I have a theory that any good board feels that way from the very first paddle. So far, I have to admit that the alien board feels down right proper. And fortunately, it’s not as bad as it looked from shore. A relatively clean line churns toward me.

Game time.

I get in easy, just like I would on a longboard, minimal paddling, and begin cruising down the line of a waist-high crumbler. I do some pumps along the face and—wow, OK—it bobs along the face much more easily than a normal board this length. Less responsive than a shortboard, but still, impressive. Without much rocker, the board is certainly fast and as the wave peters out, I edge toward the nose to hang five. That works too. Damn it, these things actually surf, like, well.

I paddle back unable to conceal my grin, but trying. Meyerhoffer grins back. He can tell I like it. Technology is winning. Maybe a dolphin will come and bite the nose off. Yea, that’d be cool.

And besides, that was just one wave. I didn’t need to turn. I’m pretty sure that when I do the board will just topple over with all that rail missing. But, on my next wave, as I go to cut back, the thing just flips around in a 180, like one of my little twin-fin boards would. And that’s just weird. Boards this long and buoyant don’t turn like that, not the ones I’ve ridden.

This is—I admit—very, very fun.

And so I surrender to the superiority of the machine. My crusade is over. Insert a chip in my head and get it over with. And the icing on the cake is that you can feel how the Meyerhoffer works while you’re riding. If feels just the way he described it to me in the car. “Once you’re on a steeper wave,” he explained, “you ride on the back of the board, the tail, so you don’t need the stuff on the front of the board and it will feel like a shortboard. But you still want to be able to nose ride it and have that length, plus have the board transition so that once you paddle into a slightly steeper wave it has the drive of a shorter board too. And that’s it.” I get it: a shortboard inside a longboard. It’s sort of like, oh screw it, an iPhone.

And there’s your sure sign of the apocalypse—comparing a surfboard to a mini computer. We might as well, as Stephen Colbert recently put it, go have “end of the world sex”.

I’m still holding out some hope that Meyerhoffer will stop having his boards manufactured in Thailand and start hand shaping them from recycled egg carton foam and sell them only to Tibetan refugees within a 16 kilometre radius of his garage. (He’ll have to make an exception for my friends and me, of course.)

But I have a hunch that his new design may be the beginning of a whole new wave of surfboards. I still think the design has something to do with aliens and radioactivity, but that will just be fodder for a cool comic book series where Meyerhoffer becomes immortal.

Trademark on that idea by the way. I’m not that much of a hippie.

[Video/Photos by Robert, who took many waves to the head to get them]

Summermodo is a chance for Giz to get outside and test our gear where it belongs.

Invented by Vermonter Jason Starr, surf skiing was invented because of “Starr’s belief that surfing and skiing share a bond as originals in the world of action sports, both rooted in rich cultures and ancient histories, and both fuelled by timeless sources of peace and power-the ocean and the mountains. They co-exist harmoniously on the snow, and the relationship now extends to the surf.” Sure. They kind of remind me of those street skis that old guys use to practice cross-country skiing in the summertime.

And I’ll bet these are pretty fun, I assume if you bring these out to a serious surfing spot you’re just asking to get your face punched. [Stoke Report]

The most commonly asked question I get is, what was the scariest wave I ever took? I used to get rescued probably three or four times a week when I was a kid, before I was five or six years old. I was known to be lost at sea, out in the ocean. The lifeguard used to come to my mom’s house and say, “Laird’s out in the rip again.” She’d be like, “No he’s not, he’s in his room napping.” And they’d be like, “No, he’s out in the rip again.” They’d get sick of rescuing me, so they finally said, “Hey Laird, we gotta fix that.” My point is, I’ve had a lot of extremely scary moments growing up as a young kid and young person.

There’s been a ton between then and now, but the most recent was one of the scariest things that’s ever happened to me and hopefully ever will. It was two years ago, on December 3. A friend and I were out in a surf that was over 30 metres—well over 30 metres—and I had dived off on a wave that might as well have been 30 or 60. I don’t know—at that point I didn’t have my tape measure—but it demanded every bit of my experience and strength. I came up to the back of it, and my friend who was on the back of the wave grabbed me with the jet ski.

We proceeded to try to run away from the next wave and got run down from behind by one of the biggest waves that I have ever seen. It was definitely the biggest wave to ever run me down from behind.

We were dragged an incredible distance underwater, anywhere up to one kilometre, I would say. I came up from a depth that I haven’t been down at on a wave before, got just one breath before getting hit by another one. I saw my friend and we got pushed in by probably four more, each one smaller. Finally we were pushed all the way to the inside.

My friend was severely cut and needed a tourniquet. All I had was a wetsuit, so that’s what I used. And then I made a decision: If I didn’t swim for the jet ski that was about a half kilometre from us, he was going to die and I wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it. I had to make a decision to leave him and swim to a jet ski and get back. It’s a close friend of mine. We both have daughters the same age and we’re best friends.

I got there and the jet ski was running. Had it not been running, I don’t know what would have happened. He might have bled out or whatever. But because it ran, I was like, “OK, saved by the ski!” You know?

I think that the fear of his death probably scared me worse than anything I’ve ever had happen to myself because obviously, when it’s happening to you, you’re not thinking about how bad it is, you’re just dealing with it. When it’s happening to somebody else—especially someone that you care about—that’s a lot worse. So the fact that he was good and I didn’t have to explain…that he made it, and I didn’t have to tell his family why he didn’t come home that day, that was a great thing. The dead aren’t worried about dying, it’s only the people alive, left here thinking about it, who are. It’s a lot harder on them than it is on the people who have died.

Laird Hamilton has been a surfing hero since the 1980s, solidifying his reputation as the king of big wave surfing when he conquered Tahiti’s Teahupo’o Reef at its most perilous in August 2000. As an innovator, he pioneered many new activities including kitesurfing, tow-in surfing and hydrofoil boarding. He’s on the board of directors at H2O Audio, makers of pro-level waterproof iPhone and iPod cases, and has his own signature line of Surge waterproof earphones, proceeds of which are donated to the Beautiful Son foundation for autism education.

As you can see, the idea is simple—integrate the board directly into the bike by sliding it into the frame. In that way, it doubles as a seat—leaving your hands free to steer and providing better overall weight distribution. Longer boards might be a problem, but it’s still not a bad idea. [ecofriend via Trendhunter]

I’ve been involved in the conception of a few different activities or disciplines of surfing, however you want to describe them: Foil boarding, kite-surfing, stand-up paddling most recently, and then of course tow-in surfing, which kind of allows us to ride some of the biggest waves in the world.

Stand-Up Paddling

I don’t describe them as inventions, but really as a combination of a couple things that together created a new thing, a form of invention I guess, but we’re never going to take credit for something that existed in some form before, that somebody else may have done.

Tow-In Surfing
I just think we were the first people to realise that you needed a motorised vessel to give you the speed in order to catch waves that are beyond 20-metre faces. They move at 50 or 60 kilometres an hour and manually you’re just unable to match the speed and the timing it takes to ride one. That’s really where tow-in surfing came from—a necessity.

We were able to catch these giant waves with a wind surfer and ride them unlike when we were surfing. Then we had foot straps. We already had a relationship with riding these outer-reef breaks in real rugged conditions that you just couldn’t get to by laying on your stomach, paddling around.

And once we realised it, we were able to do it. And we started with a Zodiac boat and an outboard. That was obviously a little fragile and dangerous, so then, eventually, came the jet skis; the Yamaha WaveRunner helped us evolve. Driving a Zodiac around in 10-metre surf is a lot trickier than getting on a WaveRunner. If the Zodiac gets tipped by a wave, you’re over, whereas the jet ski doesn’t do well but it can survive.

I describe it like the four-minute mile. Once the guy broke the four-minute mile, then 30 guys broke the four-minute mile, but before that it was this invisible barrier. That’s a little bit like what’s happened with tow surfing.

Hydrofoil Surfing
As for the hydrofoil surfing, what we’ve found is that the foil board is probably the single most efficient wave-riding instrument that we know of today. The reason why we say that—and the reason why we know that—is because you can ride waves that don’t break.

Now we have a thing that we can use on a day when we wouldn’t be able to ride the waves on anything except maybe a jet ski or some sort of power boat. We get on them by being towed, and we ride these waves for kilometres at a time. By eliminating surface texture and tension, resulting in less friction, we created the ability to ride waves that don’t break—to surf waves that were really unsurfable. Now we can ride a ground swell in the middle of the ocean.

We’ve also done it with the kite, but then you’re obviously not going to let go of the kite—as you would a tow line—so then you’re kiting-foiling instead of just foil surfing.

Kite Boarding
We were involved with the conception of kite boarding as well. Not the first people to ever kite obviously, since they’ve been around for thousands of years, but we were first guys really to start, because we had these big wave boards with foot straps—the perfect setup for being towed by a kite. We had these kites that you get launched, but if your kite crashed you were done. If you were a kilometre out in the ocean and your kite crashed, you now had yourself a giant bed sheet and a small little board.

Inflatable kites really created kite boarding. We were able to get those from a French guy who had invented a blow-up kite and a blow-up little catamaran—you could have a backpack and go hike and launch your blow-up catamaran and your blow-up kite and go and sail around with it. We got a hold of one of those little blow-up kites and then one thing happened after another, then kite surfing or kite boarding was really born. Since then, it’s been just a matter of evolution.

Laird Hamilton has been a surfing hero since the 1980s, solidifying his reputation as the king of big wave surfing when he conquered Tahiti’s Teahupo’o Reef at its most perilous in August 2000. As an innovator, he pioneered many new activities including kitesurfing, tow-in surfing and hydrofoil boarding. He’s on the board of directors at H2O Audio, makers of pro-level waterproof iPhone and iPod cases, and has his own signature line of Surge waterproof earphones, proceeds of which are donated to the Beautiful Son foundation for autism education.