Shirley Rogers
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
The daughter of an American father and a Japanese mother, Shirley Rogers was born in Japan in 1953. She spent her first nine years there, then a few years in Texas. At 16, she moved with her parents to Oahu. At Campbell High School on the Westside, she took photography classes and found a passion for it. She also found surfing—the act of riding waves, the culture, and the community. In 1971, her parents moved back to Texas. Having freshly graduated, Rogers chose to stay in Hawaii. She moved to the then rural and untapped North Shore and fell in with the surf luminaries of the era—Jeff...
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Kai Neville
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born in 1984, Kai Neville came to surfing at age 11 on the Sunshine Coast, where his dad pushed him into his first waves. He loved it, aspired to be a pro, but soon realized he might be better off behind the camera rather than in front of it. He got a job at McDonald’s, saved up for a High-8 Sony Handycam, and started creating short surf films, which led to a job making promo DVDs for Australia’s Surfing Life magazine, and then a gig working with renowned filmmaker Taylor Steele. Under Steele, Neville got a crash course in surf filmmaking when he worked on 2008’s Stranger Than Fiction,...
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Maurice Cole
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born in 1954, hailing from Victoria, Australia, Maurice Cole started surfing at age 12. He got good fast, and won Victorian State Titles in 1973 and 1976. However, he got busted for possession of hash oil, which, after trial, led to a little over two years in jail. That obviously stalled his competitive ascent, but also proved to be formative. He got out in 1978 and surfed vigorously around the Bells region, where he lived. He got third in the National Titles in 1979. That qualified him for the 1980 World Surfing Championships, held in the southwest of France. He traveled there, finaled, and...
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Nathan Florence
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Nathan Florence, the middle of the three Florence brothers, was born in Hawaii in 1994. Like his older brother, three-time world champion John, and younger brother, Pipe charger and ace skateboarder Ivan, Nathan grew up in a beachfront house looking out to Pipeline, and made the seamless progression from building sandcastles on the beach to getting spit out of tubes in what was ostensibly his backyard. Nathan competed in amateur events, but they were never his thing. He preferred big, heavy waves, and he got friendly with Mack truck-sized barrels. Technology conspired in Nathan’s favor,...
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Mickey Muñoz
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born in 1937, Mickey Muñoz moved from New York to Los Angeles at age six, started surfing at age 10, and swiftly found Malibu’s First Point. He became one of the top surfers out there, and made friends with the regulars—Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin, Miki Dora. Muñoz eventually moved to Hawaii, where he rode Waikiki and worked restaurant jobs to get by. He soon found his way out to the North Shore, which was a new frontier at the time, becoming part of the pioneering crew at Waimea Bay. Muñoz appeared in the new Surfer magazine in 1960, riding at Malibu with Dora and Mike Doyle, all...
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Devon Howard
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born and raised in San Diego, Devon Howard came to surfing at age seven. He gravitated to longboarding—both the wave-riding approach and the culture. A graduate of the University of San Diego, he served as managing editor of Longboard magazine from 1999 to 2004. For the next decade or so, he worked as a freelance writer and photographer, and held marketing positions with Patagonia and Spy Optic. But he never let his surfing slip. He competed in pro longboarding events in the 1990s, then did the short-lived ASP Longboard Tour through the early aughts. He appeared in several surf films—The...
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Jamie O’Brien
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born in Hawaii in 1983 and raised in a beachfront home on the North Shore, with a view out to Pipeline, Jamie O’Brien started surfing at age three. As an amateur, he went on a contest trajectory—making the finals of the menehune division of the 1995 and ’96 US Surfing Championships, and the finals in the 1999 and 2000 World Junior Championships. Most impressive, though, was his close relationship with Pipeline. He seemed to toy with the world’s deadliest wave. In 2003, he won the Hansen’s Energy Pipeline Pro. In 2004, he won the Pipe Masters. In the aughts, O’Brien revealed his...
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James Nestor
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born in Tustin, California, James Nestor spent his teens surfing and playing in a straight-edge punk band called Care Unit. After graduating high school, he moved to the Bay Area, where he studied art and literature and earned an MFA. Nestor’s professional life began as a copywriter. Soon he moved into magazine journalism. His essays and features have appeared in Outside, Scientific American, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Dwell, The Surfer’s Journal, and many others. His 2014 book, DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, follows clans of...
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Shaun Tomson
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born in 1955, hailing from Durban, South Africa, Shaun Tomson won the IPS world title in 1977. He did 14 seasons on the world tour, and won 12 events, including the 1975 Pipeline Masters, in which he made giant leaps for backside tube riding. He starred in many ’70s and ’80s surf films, among them Free Ride, where he’s seen pumping through the barrel at Backdoor and Off the Wall—an entirely new thing at the time. But Tomson’s surfing was only part of the equation. He was business minded, and in the late ’70s launched a clothing label, Instinct, and in 1985 a surf shop, Surfbeat, in...
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Ozzie Wright
The Surfer’s Journal presents Soundings with Jamie Brisick
Born in 1976, hailing from Narrabeen on the northern beaches of Sydney, Oscar “Ozzie” Wright burst onto the scene in the mid-1990s and swiftly ascended to global surf fame—never in contests, but nearly always doing something imaginative, like flying through the air, doing spell-casting things with the tube, or surfing remote Indo in a pair of handcrafted bat wings. Wright appeared in a number of Volcom-produced videos, among them BS!, Psychic Migrations, Lobotomy, and One Hundred and Fifty Six Tricks. A prolific maker of artwork in a variety of mediums including...
info_outlineBorn in 1981 on Oahu, Mark Healey started surfing at age three, turned pro by the time he was 17, and made his name in heavy, scary waves, first in Hawaii, then around the world. But big-wave surfing was only part of it. An avid diver, Healey won the World Cup of Spearfishing in La Paz, Mexico, in 2008. And then there were sharks. In 2011, he traveled to Mexico’s Guadalupe Island to dive with great whites for a Nat Geo TV shoot. Outside magazine called him “the greatest athlete you’ve never heard of.” Recently, he founded Healey Water Operations, synthesizing all his singular skills into a personal brand.
In this episode of Soundings, Healey sits down with Jamie Brisick on the North Shore to talk about his first Pipe session, the nuances of discerning the personalities of sharks, weaving together experiential and scientific knowledge, chasing after big surf, the ins and outs of spearfishing, and staying composed in heavy situations.