At first glance, you’d think this clip was a good day at Jaws. The size, the angle of the right, the barrel and the cliff angle look the part. But it turns out this 20-foot nugget isn’t even in Hawaii. It broke thousands of miles away from its doppelganger in a small Sydney suburb on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
It’s known as Queenscliff Bombie, a wave with a long but tight-lipped history. The wave in question, a serious contender for the 2025 Big Wave Challenge, was ridden by an under-the-weather local tradie named Tom Myers. The 33-year-old carpenter and firefighter almost didn’t surf this day due to a nasty sinus infection. But he ended up with the wave of his life. Afterward, he recalled the entire session, including his historic spit-take spitting barrel, to Jed Smith on the Ain’t That Swell podcast.
Oftentimes, with big-wave awards, the prestige goes to the names and faces known to the general public. The professional men and women paid by companies to show up on the day of days and send it. All fine and good, but how cool is it when a blue-collar surfer shows up under the radar and packs one even the best surfers in the world would cough up a lung for? On this day in mid-April, Tom put on his pants one leg at a time and checked his local like the rest of us.
“Just got straight out there,” Tom said. “Definitely didn’t know what was to come. I didn’t really think it was that big or that there were going to be waves like that going down.”
Tom first surfed this wave over two decades ago, and even the most dedicated guys there only have so many chances to figure out the lineup and get a few gems. It just doesn’t break often. Tom reconns that a massive northeastern swell in 2016 produced an all-time day at the Bombie, perhaps the best ever. Of course, he was on the tools that day.
“To be honest, it breaks so rarely that it’s really hard to sit here and tell you exactly what’s better and what’s worse,” Tom said. “It’s pretty deep, so it needs a big swell to fill the bottom. I’d be lying if I were telling you I knew all the inner workings. Mostly luck, mate.”
Maybe it was luck or intimate local knowledge that led to Tom waiting out a long lull, sitting wide and finding the chip-in on the wave of the day on April 18. On the same swell that turned Ours on, Queenscliff Bombie sent Tom a gem. “I think if I was a meter deeper or a meter wider, I probably would have gotten pitched,” he said. “That thing came out of nowhere, and I was in too good a spot to say no.”
What followed was one of those show-stopping, mind-melting barrels that so many reach for but rarely grasp. Humble and gracious as can be, have a listen to Jed and Tom as they recount that day. From what it sounds like, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.
“It was an unbelievable feeling, and that wave was special,” Tom said. “There were five or 10 other blokes out there who would have done the exact same thing if they got that wave. But for some reason, I just got chosen that day. It was an amazing experience. But the positive feedback and message I’ve gotten from my friends and peers after it has probably been even more special than the wave. Just to hear the nice things people were saying, that probably meant more to me than the wave itself.”
Related: Watch: Nathan Florence’s First Crack at Pumping Ours