Relive Laurie Towner’s Mind Bending Performance At Teahupo’o

First up there was one afternoon on a building swell, and Laurie didn’t have a board and borrowed a board from me, a 6’6”. I think he might have snapped all of his. He only rode two waves that afternoon but one in particular, what he did on it was so amazing, I can still see it clearly in my head today.

It was an eight-foot set that swung wide into the west bowl and no one was going to get it because they were too far up the point. The thing reared up and the way he took off under it… he went straight from being in a vertical, gnarly drop to perfectly bum-dragging in a heartbeat. The way he slid in on a board he’d never ridden was so natural, and he almost came to a complete stop. The whole wave seemed like it almost stopped with him inside it, time just kind of stopped, and he just stood in there perfect. And that was it… two, three seconds tops, but it was just about the best two seconds of surfing I’d ever seen.

That Code Red day at Teahupoo was something else again. We knew that swell was coming and we woke that morning and of course it was ginormous. It was just white to the horizon, and the waves were washing through the lagoon and into the houses. I prone-paddled out on a 12-foot standup board to sit in the channel and watch.

Everything out there that day was amazing, don’t get me wrong, and it’s hard to single one guy out but watching Laurie that day was incredible. Pretty much with all of the other guys, it seemed like the wave was riding them and they were just hanging on, but Laurie was surfing the wave. He had the audacity to pull high lines on those waves with so much water coming up the face, and everyone who has surfed it big will tell you that you have to stay low, don’t go high or it will take you with it. But Lozza was still pulling high lines and driving back down the face in these big swooping arcs inside the barrel, and just making it look natural when everything around was the most supernatural thing you’d ever seen in your life.

Everyone looked like they were strapped to their board, like their legs were locked, whereas he seemed to have an ability with his feet locked to shift his weight over the board, forwards or back, to slow down and speed up. The weight transfer itself was incredible. He was towing with Dylan (Longbottom) that day, and they knew the reef so well and they knew the ones they wanted. They didn’t want the biggest, craziest ones, but seemed to be chasing the mid-size perfect ones from right up the reef.

The wave Lozza didn’t make was one of the best-ridden waves I’ve ever seen. He was way too deep and should never have even made it as far as he did, but he pulled these two high lines inside the barrel. He actually surfed up the wall and rode high inside the barrel, just hung up there as long as he could. It was only a fraction of a fraction of a second but it’s etched in my mind. He knew he had to come down and when he came down the second time he ate shit, just dived into the shockwave behind the breaking lip. Even that looked natural.

I think out there at Teahupoo he’s one of the best, but to watch him that day was something I’ll never forget. It’s a different kind of special to watching Occy at Bells. It’s not Curren at Rincon. But it was the way he read the ocean and the wave and it seemed like he knew each wave by name, how they’d break, what they’d do, how they’d behave. He was seeing through them.