Surfing is a sport of frontiers. You enter a wave the exact moment it begins to shift, when it has reached its peak power, just before that energy causes it to fold over itself and collapse. You seek out points on the map where storms thousands of miles away, rolling across the ocean-floor geography, have channeled swells towards land. You experience a departure from the body itself, a feeling of perfect, ego-dissolving synchronization with the rhythms of the ocean—or the three-dimensional chaos of being flipped off a moving tunnel of water and careening in the undersea dark.
These are frontiers that pro surfer Koa Smith knows better than almost anybody.
