Wavelength Surf Magazine – since 1981

Ten Days In Portugal With Yago Dora

A few months back when we caught up with Yago Dora he told us that he often receives criticism online about the wave quality in the edits he puts out online. “They’re always complaining” he told us of the online critics “saying things like ‘fuck these waves looks so bad, he should put a good wave edit‘. But I’m travelling for the QS, its not my fault if I don’t get good waves, I wish I was!”

However we do not share the opinion of the ever-critical online surf-armchair pundit. We spend lots of time watching the worlds best surfers shredding incredible waves all over the globe, and thats all well and good, but sometimes it’s nice to see how they surf when presented with the kind of average aquatic bumps that most of us are forced to face on a daily basis. Here we see Yago doing just that, filmed on a 10 day trip to Portugal, where he was competing in the Billabong Pro Cascais, back in September. Yago was knocked out by comp winner Jesse Mendes in RD 5, landing a 9th place finish. Most of his time was probably taken up with heats, however it looks like he found a bit of time for some high octane free surfing (most surfers competing surf at 50% during their free surfs in order to keep their boards and ankles on ice).

The waves range from rubbish and messy to decidedly ‘fun’, (but nothing more), however Yago makes an absolute playground out of the lot of them, throwing down maneuvers that wouldn’t look the least bit out of place in a CT heat or Kai Neville film: