Discovering and surfing a new wave remains one of the sport’s Holy Grails. After all, any known spot that’s ever been surfed had to be surfed first. Sometimes these origin stories are murky; disputed by various claims, and diluted by time. Others are clearer examples of adventure and discovery. In an ongoing series, we trace the origin stories of waves that have entered surfing folklore.
Bag Pipes, Scotland
As with a lot of the UK’s best discoveries, legendary Welsh surfer and photographer Paul Gill was at the heart of it. The Gill had first traveled to Thurso in Scotland in the mid-70s when he was working at the Dounreay nuclear power plant. He is credited as the first to surf Thurso East, known as the cold water Nias. But he also found other spots, including a thick-lipped mutant folding over onto dry reef. “It looked like Pipeline, but on rock, with no beach and no lifeguards to save you, I thought there’s no way it’ll ever get surfed,” he told Wavelength magazine. And for 30 years it didn’t.
Fast forward to 2006, and with a British Pro Tour event in town, Gill decided to show Newquay charger Paul Mullins, and his young protege Oli Adams, a wave that “might be surfable”. Adams was dubious, Mullins less so. “He was hopping around like a two-year-old that’s just seen his mother’s tit,” Gill told Wavelength.
“Russ just got the first one, showed it was possible, and we were go,” Adams told SURFER. “You have to remember that slab surfing wasn’t really a thing back then. That session changed everything for me. I knew there must be other waves out there in the UK like that, if not better.” As for the name, it is widely accredited to a local named Ross Kemp who watched that first session. The Pipe bit was obvious, and he added the bag as a nod to the Scottish instrument. That was never not going to stick.
Padang, Bali
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“It was 1974 and we’d been out that morning at massive Outside Corner,” legendary surfer shaper Peter “Grub” McCabe told SURFER. “That was the day they’d filmed Rabbit for the Ulu section in Tubular Swells. Anyway, the tide came in, and so we walked down through the cave and along the cliff to check the next wave.”
McCabe didn’t surf Padang that afternoon but returned the next morning with mates Steve Hamilton and Steve Agnew. “The swell had dropped and wasn’t even that big. But we paddled out and knew it was such a special wave,” said Grub. “I didn’t catch the first one, but we had a mate who was taking photos and I got the first image, so I’ll claim it.” For McCabe, who would pioneer many of Indo’s best waves, including G-Land, that first surf at Padang would be pivotal. “I lived for that joint from that day onwards. I went back in ’75 and ’76, and spent three months in Bali, surfing it with just a few friends every time it was six foot. And I did that for the next 20 years.”
Related: The Discovery (and Death) of a Baja Secret Spot
P-Pass, Caroline Island
While some American GIs based in Guam may have surfed the waves of Pohnpei in the 1960s, the first named surfer in the Caroline Islands was Mort McIntosh, who stayed for three weeks surfing in 1971. However, it was Alan Hamilton, a sailor, commercial fisherman and Hollister Ranch parcel owner, who is credited with being the first to surf P-Pass. In the late 1980s in Santa Barbara, he had hired a Pohnpeian deckhand named Danny. After Danny described the waves and reefs of his home island, Hamilton visited in 1991 armed with two surfboards.
“I got a map of Pohnpei and saw Palikir Pass on it,” Hamilton told Michael Kew in his excellent Dispatches series on the wave. “I thought it looked like a good setup for surf. I said, ‘Danny, take me out to this pass.’ We went out there, and it was just this dynamite wave.” Hamilton stayed for two months, then returned to Santa Barbara, sold everything he owned, and moved to Pohnpei. In 1994, he almost lost his left hand and forearm to an 8-foot-long bull shark surfing the wave alone.
Chicama, Peru
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In the 1960s, the best method for discovering world-class waves was by simply looking out the window of an airplane. It was a very primitive form of Google Earth, but if you can see a defined line-up from 10,000 metres up, there’s a good chance it has waves. That’s what Chuck Shipman did in 1966. He’d travelled to Peru for the 1965 World Surfing Championships and stayed for more than a year fixing surfboards, traveling and adventuring. On the flight back to Hawaii from Lima, he saw ruler-edged lines pouring into the flat-packed sands of Chicama. To his credit, Shipman didn’t keep his “discovery” to himself but phoned the news back to his surfer mates in Lima. A few months later in September, top Peruvian surfers, including Carlos Barreda, Oscar Malpartida, and Ivo Hunza, drove the 400 miles north to surf the spot that is credited as the longest wave in the world. Shipman never surfed the wave, despite being instrumental in its discovery.
Related: Lance’s Right: The Crazy Story Behind One of the World’s Greatest Surf Discoveries