An Unfinished Tale of Surfing the American Continents

It was a cold morning when I trundled up in my Hiace to the lot near Mitre 10 in Torquay, and as I pushed the glass door open to Corey Graham’s shop it was clear there’d be no one waiting to greet me. Racks full of hand-shaped boards, walls full of art, and emanating from somewhere deep in the back, I could hear Kyuss turned up loud amongst the muffled whirl of a sander.

Found him deep in dust, working hard on a memorabilia board for the Bells comp starting in a couple of days - it was Easter time. The whirring slowed as I approached the door. Tools down. Big smile. Bit of a tour around the shaping bay and the latest prototypes. Me quietly frothing.

“So what can I do for ya Matty?”

“…Well I’ve kinda got this idea…” I trailed off, and then grinned…

“I’m going on a trip. It’s kind of a long one. Y’see…I’m thinking I’m gonna try and ride a motorcycle from the Arctic Ocean in northern Alaska, along the Pacific coastline of the Americas down south, like really south – hopefully to Patagonia in Argentina… and I want to surf the whole way - sort of…” I spat the words out, all question-like, almost expecting a laugh in response.

“Wow… that’s bloody awesome.” Corey’s eyes lit up and wandered to the ceiling, his hand stroked his chin.

I watched him for a moment, waiting for a response...he looked as if he was imagining far off worlds… It was on. He got it.

We spent the morning talking excitedly about the places the boards would visit, an almost endless list of beaches united by that one epic ocean. I explained how over the last few years I’d been exploring shapes outside of the standard HPS – Corey wrung his hands smiling.

“Sweet – so good to hear mate, ‘cos that’s what really gets me frothing.”

I explained that if I was planning on surfing only two boards for the next two years of the journey, I wanted them to feel as versatile as possible. I needed two boards for any scenario. I’m a 6’3 lanky guy with moderate to lanky surfing skills, so we decided on a 5'10" single-fling 4 + 1 all-rounder, and a 7'2" 6-channel widow-maker singlefin with stabilisers…for when it gets good. Purple and Red.