Slater's Arc

March 25th, 2024, sometime after 9am - well into the Gentleman's Hour.

It's the day before the Bells Beach Pro waiting period and, with six feet of southwest swell on the march, pro surfers are sending fans of spray over every section of reef from Lowers to Centreside. Gold Coast photographer Andrew Shield has made the trip south, and upon taking in the options he sets himself up on the rocks in front of the Bowl, which is where most of the action is unfolding. His decision also influenced by the presence of a surfer sitting deeper on the reef.

"Kelly was surfing really good," said Shieldsy. "As good as any of the other CT guys. He was taking off real deep, right over toward Centreside, and doing great turns before even getting to the Bowl."

A few waves into the display, Kelly raced a walled-up wave, then just as he got to the Bowl and found some space, he extended through a bottom turn and aimed for the pocket. Knowing what was coming, Shieldsy readied himself then pressed the button, the shutter opened, and three decades of surfing compressed into 1/100th of a second.

In the early-nineties - the exact date is unknown - photographer Tom Dugan set himself up in a crook of the Sebastian Inlet breakwall. The 'Honey Hole' as it was known as it offered the primo angle to shoot the prodiguous talent launching out of Brevard County. Matt Kechele, Jeff Crawford, the Hobgood twins, Lisa Anderson, Charlie Kuhn, Todd Morcom, Greg Loehr, and Mike Tabeling, all focussed their energy on First Peak, Sebastian, often with Dugan or his business partner Dick Meseroll shooting.

On this day, however, it was Kelly Slater in Dugan's viewfinder, and in this moment he captured, not just the surfer at his athletic peak, nor the quintessential Slater turn, but the difference between two generations of surfers.

Through the seventies and eighties, power surfing was considered state-of-the-art. Distilled down, power surfing had one basic tenet: Bury the rail and hold it there throughout a turn.

"Losing the rail during a turn was considered a mistake," two-time world champion told Swellnet in 2010. "Sliding was considered bad technique."

But for Slater and his peers, controlling a board as the fins began to drift was deliberate and it required a completely new technique. The photo above gets to the heart of it. The arc of spray and displaced water show that the move began as a traditional rail turn. If Dugan shot the frame a split-second earlier, the image would've shown Slater with all his weight on his back foot powering through a top turn.

However, by the time Dugan did open the shutter, Slater had unweighted his back foot and shifted bodyweight onto his front foot. With that, the rail is released, the board is laid flat and what was a traditional rail turn has been punctuated by a slide that leaves the board laying 90° to the trail.

Such a shift might cause the rider to fall backwards, an inadvertent layback, but the slide isn't accidental, it's not a result of bad technique, Slater's counter-weighted body position shows it's deliberate and controlled. It also shows photographic flair: the cheek-puffing exertion, the flying side kick, the Kecak hands.

"The brand of surfing my friends and I were doing was an extreme change from what was going on at the time," wrote Slater in Pipe Dreams.

It wasn't just slides of course, their 'brand' of surfing included airs, but as with loosing the tail, airs involve radical weighting and unweighting of the board. Drive off the bottom, 'pop' off the top.

For two decades, this brand of surfing ruled, at least until surfers like Jordy Smith and Dane Reynolds made the CT heralding a new age of rail surfing. One that didn't release the tail three-quarters of the way through a turn but kept the rail buried to new extremes. Their approach didn't come at the expense of an air game, they could do that too.

These days surfers such as John Florence, Jack Robinson, and Ethan Ewing are operating at the vanguard of performance, in part because their technique allows them to maintain a full-rail, full-face approach with spontaneous unweighting above the lip or when showing the judges variety - they can do it all.

There's an argument to be made that Kelly Slater, now 52-years old, can't keep up with the full-face power surfing of John, Jack, and Ethan. Perhaps his muscle memory keeps taking him to the turn that once served him so well? The theory is reinforced by Slater's lack of contest wins in 'turn waves' - 2013 at Snapper being the last time it happened.

If so, it's worth checking this turn by Slater, filmed one week after Shieldsy's Bells photo.

//STU NETTLE

Postscript: In 2010, Dugan's photo of Slater was turned into a nine-foot high statue at Cocoa Beach, Florida. "I remember when that photo came out," Kelly joked at the unveiling. "I borrowed a board from Sean [Slater] that he shaped and it had Volcom stickers all over it. I caught like five waves on it and this ended up being a double-page spread. I didn't think Quiksilver would be too stoked..."