When you consistently push your limits in the ocean, the ocean is bound to push back.
South Africa's Matt Bromley – one of the hardest charging surfers in the world –learned that the hard way, multiple times. Last year his 7'0" big wave gun smashed him in the dome at Puerto Escondido, resulting in 20 internal stitches. The year before, he packed one of the biggest waves ever in Indo (without wearing flotation) and copped a terrifying beating afterwards. Oh yeah, and he's also been trapped in an underwater cave at Pipeline.
But that's not all. Bromley is a sucker for punishment, as we're learning in his "Worst Wipeout" series on YouTube.
The latest? A wipeout at Mavs that he calls "one of the most intense and heaviest wipeouts of my entire life."
"I pulled my vest — I think I pulled it two or three times — so I was fully inflated, and I was grounded on the rock, and it was like I was at the bottom of an underwater waterfall, with all of this water just pushing down on me," recalls Bromley in the edit above. "The heaviness of the whole ocean just weighing me down to the bottom."
As you'll see, Bromley goes down at 6:45 seconds on a bomb slab at Mavs. Thanks to the cameraman keeping the footage rolling, we can count the seconds between the entire Pacific cascading on his head, and him resurfacing again at the 7:05-mark. That's a 20-second, violent hold down.
In the video above, Bromley relives those terrifying seconds in colorful detail.
More must-reads: