Spring has sprung, and surf season on the North Shore of Oahu is nearly over.
But before the ocean goes flat for the summer months, and surfers look elsewhere for waves, there was one last gasp of swell in Hawaii to cap off the 2023/24 winter season.
And it was big, good, scary, wonky…depending on who you ask.
San Diego, California’s Jacob “Zeke” Szekely made his way to Hawaii for the final swell of the season and, per his latest YouTube offering above, it was the “day of the year at Pipeline” and he got “destroyed” in “big” and “scary” conditions.
“We just got over here to the North Shore of Oahu for a late-season Pipe swell,” Zeke narrates. “In the usual fashion, I came straight into a shocker. Broke my board, got smoked on a big rising long-period swell. Pipeline said, ‘Welcome back, mother*cker.’ Got a couple. Went over the falls on one, and hit the reef really hard.”
That was just the first day; on the second, conditions were a bit cleaner, and by the looks of it, Zeke faired a bit better. Mostly, it was the usual suspects standing out from the rest of the crowd – Mason Ho, Makai McNamara, Eala Stewart, Kalani Rivero, etc.
And speaking of Rivero, at one point during the swell he locked into an ultra-heavy, extremely steep, fins-free airdrop at Pipe. Check it out above, and at the 9:23 mark.
Wave of the winter? Maybe so.
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