Gable was sent off to Africa’s west coast with a gaggle of professionals, but it was one fellow who stole the show.įorever known as “Cory’s Left,” the moment the surfing world got a glimpse of one of its most beloved goofyfooters getting barreled seven times in one wave every other spot on the planet ceased to exist. And for the first time a surfing publication was intrigued enough to see what the fuss was about. Then a man named Brian Gable, a Californian software developer, submitted the location for Surfing magazine’s Google Earth Challenge in 2007. But HD surf edits weren’t uploaded to the internet at a rate of eleventy thousand + per day by that point, so the skeptical editors ignored their invitations. Surfers had ridden this wave for years, and some even say just about every surfing publication in South Africa got an invitation to drive up and see “The New Cape St. And that’s exactly what put Skeleton Bay “on the map,” so to speak. But if you pick the right line and can hold your speed inside the barrel without much room to maneuver you’re due for a ride longer than a minute. Imagine a wave so fast you can’t make a single turn. But that’s just lazy thinking, and Skeleton Bay’s story is proof of exactly that.Īs for the wave itself…not that I’ve ever surfed it, but plenty of people who have surfed it have plenty to say about the barreling left.

With so much of this globe having been driven across, flown over, mapped, and walked on it seems impossible that we could still find something new lying right underneath our noses.

The concept of “discovery” seems more the stuff of ancient surf folklore than an everyday possibility in today’s surf world. But seems is the operative word in that sentence.

Google maps earth view