Russell Bierke is not a normal surfer. I’m sure that he does enjoy those small days, the ones where the waves are knee high and the sun is shining and the lineup feels friendly and mellow, but Bierke’s heart beats for a different kind of day. The kind of day that could stop your heart from beating. In the first episode of Watermarks, an ongoing series exploring the waves that shaped Bierke’s big wave surfing career, O’Neill explores the Bombie.
The Bombie is not a wave for the faint of heart. It’s a wave that surfers like Bierke are built for. He’s been surfing it for a long time — his first crack at it was when he was just 11 years old — so he knows it about as well as a guy can really know a wave like the Bombie.
In this episode of Watermarks, Bierke revists a session that really brought his relationship with the wave into stark focus. It was just one wave in particular, but it was 10 years in the making.
“To be in the spot for a good one, you have to be really pushing it,” Bierke says. “It’s a constant game of cat and mouse. “… Once you take off on the wave, it almost wedges. You go so fast. Only one in ten are like a crazy big one that stays open. No matter how good the wave you just got was, you just see another one that’s like, incredible. It’s a never-ending cycle out there.”
Over the course of chasing that never-ending cycle, Bierke has paid his dues. After a brutal injury to his elbow took him out of the water for quite some time, he returned to exact his revenge. And he got it in the form of a wave that bested any other wave he’s ever surfed.
“I’ve had waves that I’ve maybe been deeper in the barrel on or a little longer barrel,” Bierke remembered, “but just the sheer size and thickness of that wave beats anything else I’ve had out there. That ride in particular was super cool because it was just kind of an accumulation of years of like, my dad surfing it and then my friends and I trying to figure out how we could surf this wave for a decade. To finally get a chance at a wave like that out there was incredibly special.”
