Malibu, by all accounts, was cranking the past few days.
That was thanks to the massive swell that walloped the West Coast, officially kicking off the summer south swell season, with many calling it the “swell of the decade.” When Malibu turns on, strange things start sounding like good ideas.
And for Los Angeles surfer Hunter Jones, all that swell, the hype, the excitement meant attempting one of surfing’s most notorious maneuvers — shooting the Malibu Pier. Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan. See below:
The goal is simple in theory: ride a wave, race toward the iconic structure, and thread the needle through the pilings before the wave closes out. In reality, it’s a high-speed gamble with very little margin for error. A mistimed section, a wobble, or a bad line can send a surfer straight into wood, concrete, and decades of Malibu history. Shooting the pier has long been considered one of California surfing’s most dangerous rites of passage.
Jones recently documented his attempt in a video breakdown, walking viewers through every tense second of the ride.
“I think I just caught the biggest wave I’ve ever ridden at Malibu,” Jones recounts. “It was lining up. This was my one chance [to shoot the pier]. So, I’m pumping and getting ready for it. But then I feel the wave kind of backing off. I just didn’t have enough momentum, so I dove off.”
As he approached the pylons, Jones lost speed and purposely wiped out directly in the danger zone, while still attempting to evade the pier. Suddenly, the mission changed from making it through the pier to avoiding a violent collision with it.
The footage shows a chaotic scene as whitewater explodes around the structure. Somehow, Jones emerged unscathed.
“Everyone was like, ‘that’s probably the gnarliest thing I’ve ever seen,’” said Jones. “It was the biggest backwash they’ve ever seen. All the lifeguards were like that’s so gnarly.”
His surfboard wasn’t as lucky.
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The board snapped clean in half during the incident, becoming another casualty of Malibu’s legendary swell. Jones later recovered the remains and recounted how close the whole ordeal came to ending much worse.
All that matters, according to Jones, “I’m still in one piece.”
Just for good measure, here’s the iconic clip from years ago of (who else?) Laird Hamilton on (what else?) a SUP, successfully shooting the Malibu Pier.
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