Dudes! You are just so totally awesome in “The Endless Summer II,” sequel to the legendary 1960s surfers flick. So give up the dope on what it’s like to ride an epic wave.
“You know the thrill of going downhill (on a bike) and you don’t have to pedal and you have that speed?” asks Robert “Wingnut” Weaver, 28. “You’re doing that, but you’re doing it on curbed sides, so you can rock up and down and on the sides of it.”
Ripping!
“It’s pretty incredible,” adds Pat O’Connell, 22. “If you had just the worse day of your life, you can honestly go out and surf and you do feel better.”
You guys are champion surfing gods, man. You spent more than a year hitting places like Australia, Fiji, France and South Africa looking for killer waves.
But is it a drag to learn how to ride, ride, ride the wild surf?
“It doesn’t take that long to learn the basic concept of how to catch a wave and how to stand up and go straight,” says Wing-nut, who, like Pat, took only three months to learn how to surf.
Whoa, wipeouts don’t look too gnarly.
“I get hurt more in small waves than I do in big waves,” says Wing-nut, adding that you’re underwater for less than 30 seconds, but “you are part of the Maytag washing machine. … You are spinning around … You have no idea which way is up or down. But the human body floats.”
Pat, you started surfing when you were 12, after your family moved from Chicago to California. Did you move because you can’t catch any ripping sets on Lake Michigan?
“You can surf Lake Michigan on the right day, from what I heard,” he says. “Generally not very good, I would imagine. Just the novelty to be surfing in Chicago would be the whole” experience.