A peak behind the curtain of your most treasured surfing slices from the year just gone.
On our Instagram account, we’ve been doing a countdown of the 25 most-watched clips of 2022. For the top 10, which will get us to the dying embers of the year, we thought we’d dig a little deeper into the videos themselves.
It’s a peak behind the curtain on just why these slivers of surfing from 2022 proved so popular with the Wavelength faithful. You’re a strange bunch, sure, but you know your surfing, and you know what you like. And that’s what we love about ya.
No. 6: Not Drowning, Floating
Ah, Wavelength fans, you’re a funny bunch. Who’d have thought a funny angled video of little-known Australian surfer Beau Foster doing a floater would be the sixth most watched video of 2022?
It was Australia’s Mark Sainsbury, 1986 world amateur champion, who is credited with inventing the floater. However, Matt Warshaw of the Encylopedia of Surfing points to Cheyne Horan and Davey Smith as doing the move in the late 70s. “Whitewater Ripping,” a short 1982 Surfing magazine article, noted that Horan could “gain an extra 10 feet [of lateral ground] by coasting over the foam, where he might be fighting with small bottom turns to go around it,” wrote Warshaw. The term “floater” was introduced later that year. Richie Collins of Newport Beach, California, a top ten pro in the late ’80s, was sometimes called the “floater king.”
30 years later the floater has proved functional, but uncool. It might be the most disparaged surfing turn of all time. And yet, you, the Wavelength readers don’t play by the rules. Why did you like it so much? Is it the pintail board’s unstickered, classic white rail and red spray? Or maybe the above-the-lip angle helps? But getting into your heads is a fool’s game we don’t wanna play. For whatever reason, this floated your boat.
