Uriah McDonald is a super grom. He’s just eight years old, but he’s already making serious waves. Not just for his surfing, but for his skateboarding and his snowboarding, as well. At six, he learned to backflip on a snowboard. He can handle himself just fine on a skateboard, too. He’s not scared to surf hollow, shallow waves like Teahupo’o, either. At seven, he surfed Pipeline.
But like any grom, he’s got his heroes, and at the top of the list is Jamie O’Brien. Like Jamie, Uriah has a love for surfing and has already amassed a solid following on YouTube and Instagram.
So when Uriah had the chance to meet Jamie, he leapt at it. Hailing from Oceanside, Uriah knows what to expect when it comes to California surf. The Wedge is a bit of a different beast, but Uriah managed it just fine. He comes from a family of surfers, so he got into it early — very early.
“I first started surfing when I was eight months old, and I loved it,” he told The Inertia. “You don’t really get hurt too much unless there’s a reef or unless you get the fin in the head or something. But I have loved surfing for my whole entire life and just fell in love with it when I was a baby.”
Despite all the different waves he’s surfed, the day you see in his most recent YouTube installment was one of his favorite ones.
“Meeting one of my biggest inspirations and surfing one of California’s most iconic waves on the same day,” he wrote. “It doesn’t get much better than that!”
