With this Mondo swell in town (guess where), I have been checking a lot of various surf breaks via one of surfing’s greatest technological advancements that is Surfline. Amidst my browsing, I started noticing how curious the names of waves are. Some are very elementary, forthright, while others leave behind giant question marks. We have quite an illustrious list of labels.
A few of my all time favorites wave names:
- Pleasure point
- Churches
- Ghost Trees
- Blackies
- Sandspit
- Ray Bay
- Windansea
- Shark Park
- Boneyard
- Cottons
- Gravels
- Taco Bell Reef
- Playgrounds
- Boxcars or Trolley’s
It seems that surfers did not try to reinvent the wheel when naming their local shred zones. Most of these titles are garnered with quite obvious logic, deriving their origins from the surrounding environment: A local bar, a historical landmark, a family estate, the floor of the ocean, the inhabitants of the local waters, etc. When you read or hear the name of a spot to surf, you should already have some type of visual expectancy in your mind. Think of:
- Shitpipe
- Hammerland
- Jaws
- Off-The-Wall
- Cloudbreak
- Cyclops
- Rockpile
- The Wedge
- The Box
- Snapper Rocks – is the “rocks” even included anymore?
- The Right
- Supertubos
- Soup Bowl
- Pipeline
- Rifles
- Greenbush
- Backdoor – possibly the best ever surf related term & name, as noted by the Monday MASS podcast.
Then of course we have all kinds of ‘bays’:
- Jeffreys Bay
- Scorpion Bay
- Skeleton Bay
- Honolua Bay
- Waimea Bay
- Morro Bay
- Half Moon Bay – not really
- Lunada Bay – shhhhh
- Turtle Bay
- Lagundri Bay
- Tamarin Bay
So on and so forth.
Lastly, however, we have some names that would leave an unbeknownst traveling surfer puzzled to what he was about to encroach upon:
- Periscopes
- Telescopes
- Shipsterns Bluff
- Duranbah
- Cloud 9
- Bells Beach & Winkipop
- Macaronis
- P-Pass
- Restaurants
- G-Land
- The Ranch – Not Kelly Slaters
- The Hole
Imagine having no preconception of Macaroni’s, and someone tells you that we’re all going to surf Macaroni’s. Personally, I would be a bit confused and not know what to expect. In creating this list I realized if I ever had the privilege to be the founder of a wave, I would name it something so offhand, something so arbitrary that other surfers who heard of the name and location would have no idea of what to expect. Something weird – Lego’s, or Shoelaces, or Pots and Pans. Maybe Wildcats. I haven’t put enough thought into it, but I would do my absolute best to give no hints to the wave itself, or to the surrounding environment. You want to keep it a secret right? Right?!
Drop some of your favorite wave names below, let me know if I missed out on a few.
Cheers,
hwilsin