ABOVE: Special correspondent Derek Ferrar (right) grabs his Wheel o’ Shred-assigned soft-top for the Red Bull Foam Wreckers competition while host Jamie O’Brien (far left) emcees.
Marshmallow marauders, puff daddies, goofs on loofas—call them what you may, soft-top surfers are totally ... well, softcore. It's the craze that's taken the surfing world by Wavestorm over the last decade or so: bloatillas of mass-produced boards with soft foam tops, known colloquially as "foamies," churned out by the gazillion to choke lineups like herds of polystyrene manatees.
Given my bad attitude about the muffin-top revolution, perhaps the last place you might expect to find me is competing in the Red Bull Foam Wreckers, a novelty surfing event intended to showcase foamies' alleged boundless capacity for fun. Yet here I am, waiting my turn to spin the game-show-style "Wheel o' Shred" to find out which model of foamie I'll be riding in my heat at Oahu's notorious Sandy Beach shore-slam.
Admittedly, I had heretofore eschewed soft boards as terminally dorky, but apparently that's the point. "When I first started taking soft-tops out, I kind of weirdly liked it that everyone was so anti about them," says Foam Wrecker host Jamie O'Brien, or "J.O.B.," the celebrated Pipeline charger who has become the Sultan of Sponge thanks to his wildly popular foamie antics on YouTube. "The next thing you know, I was getting huge waves on these soft boards and pushing boundaries that no one even knew were there."
Today's soft-top tsunami first broke back in 2006, when the Wavestorm brand of full-length foamies launched. Famously hawked at Costco for just $99, the Wavestorm became the most popular surfboard in history by orders of magnitude. It wasn't long before the pros went soft too, spurred on by the higher-performance Catch Surf brand hyped by bigger-than-life stars—J.O.B. at the lead—forging a whole new kind of surfing career as personality-driven daredevil vloggers.
Which brings us back to Foam Wreckers, which Red Bull touts as "the anti-surf contest surf contest" featuring "minimal rules and maximum fun." Anyone can sign up and boards are provided, so when my shreditor rang to ask if I would cover the event for the Hou, I figured it was finally my time to join the foam party.
An unexpected late-season swell is hitting, and some of the better contestants are pulling crazy stunt moves. As one young ripper rides tall into a no-exit shore grinder, he casually pulls a Red Bull can out of his boardshorts and mock-chugs it into oblivion. "You're sponsored!" bellows the announcer.
With Jamie on the mic, I give the wheel a spin and draw a stubby model that would be a better match for some shredder kid a third my age, half my weight and five times my ability. But them's the breaks when you're a Foam Wrecker. Since the Halloween-time event encouraged costumes, I paddle out in classic journo getup: action slacks, bush shirt and a rattan fedora fitted with a homemade waterproof press card. I figure what I lack in talent I can make up for with style.
Thankfully, our heat is slow, with the bigger sets taking a breather. When I'm finally able to scratch into one, it's a sure trip over the falls. But it does yield one fleeting photographic moment: me perched at the top of the wave, committed to the drop, press hat intact and safari shirt flapping. It even earns me enough points not to finish dead last-bonus!
When all is done and dusted, first-place goes to underground ripper Connor Caldwell, who entered only after he saw how good the waves were. He crushed the final on a small, finless Beater model, sideslipping into deep tubes, then streaking out into a series of effortless spins. At the podium he says only, "I like barrels."
So yeah, Foam Wreckers was indeed maximum fun. I've even softened a little on soft-tops. Like my foamie homey J.O.B. told me: "It's all about being able to ride anything and having no expectations. That way, it's easy to exceed them."
