A good swell isn’t sneaking by anybody these days. Well, maybe that’s a little hyperbolic, but let’s just say most of the surf world knows about the special ones when they’re nothing more than purple blobs to us. There are forecasting tools and websites devoted to simplifying a swell’s direction, period, and coupling them with numerous conditions on shorelines where all that energy will be met — wind speeds, tides, bathymetry, and the list goes on. The everyman typically needs nothing more than a generic size range and even more generic label on the conditions of those waves.
“Head high? Good? Epic? Ok, it’s on.”
And here’s the deal with those “special ones.” When all the lofty predictions and forecasts actually become a reality, those swells become a new benchmark for every other epic run of waves to follow. The two words “Code Red” are a perfect example of this — a once-in-a-lifetime swell that converged with the 2011 Tahiti Pro window and lit Teahupo’o up beyond imagination. That was 15 years ago now, and those two words still get thrown around anytime a new swell pops up that has even the slightest chance of turning the South Pacific on like it did in July of 2011.
Filmmaker Tim Bonython is a guy who’s documented countless XL days at the End of the Road, and he’s probably already heard the term “Code Red” more than most of us ever will. But as a Teahupo’o devotee, he’s learned that he’d rather book a flight to Tahiti and get skunked than miss out on a swell with the potential to produce Code Red size and conditions.
“I had to go because if I stayed home and later watched giant Teahupo’o detonating across social media, I would never forgive myself,” Bonython admits while looking back on a recent swell.
We all know what goes down when a swell lives up to the hype. Our social media feeds are flooded with highlights. But getting skunked, while we all know it happens, goes by without much detail. This is the story of one of those swells — one that didn’t live up to the hype.
“From everything we heard it was heading to be a historic day,” Lorenzo Avvenenti said of all the hype. As he pointed out, even hype that reaches this level is rare, so it wasn’t something to scoff at. “The swell was there, but it was really not the best conditions we were hoping for…God decides when he turns on the machine and when he turns it off. And this morning it looks like it’s gonna be off.”
