Stitching up and down these little waves. It's maybe the worst surf day of the whole season-it's been raining, and today the waves are small and muddy, and John John, now charging in, is pretty much the only surfer out. Trying to find that magic one, as Ross, a sardonic, powerfully built former professional surfer who is presently coaching John John, explains to me. He's been surfing the same boards-a sleek, slim model Pyzel calls the Bastard-for the past three years, but today he's trying out a couple of new Pyzel designs. For example: This morning, after stickering up and then waxing his boards, he carries them out onto the beach. He'll be just a hundred feet from his house and draw a crowd. Still, winning changed things, in a way that John John and his family are still reckoning with. But in time John John emerges, still atop his board. Still on the wave, just as it breaks right over him. The wave shrugs him forward and he and his board are in free fall, straight down through maybe 20 feet of empty air, as the ocean masses even taller behind him, John John plummeting back down toward earth. What he does is get up on his board, near the top of the wave. John John is on a ten-and-a-half-foot neon green gun, the longer board that surfers use in big waves. So big it's actually disorienting to see a human in the same frame-your first reaction is that something has gone badly wrong. I'm going to estimate that the wave in question, the one he caught, was about five times his height. I don't know much about surfing, but you don't really need to in order to appreciate it. I would encourage you to watch his win at the Eddie.
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