We Shouldn't Be Friends

When winter comes to the north shore of Oahu, every swell is shrouded in myth. The Pipeline! Sunset! Waimea Bay! The outer reef spots that nobody ever actually names. But these swells and spots are just like anywhere else. They’re ridden and held down by human beings, just like you and us, and the experience is more down to earth than most of us might imagine. Mark Healey is as down to earth a human as you’d ever want to meet, yet he also hunts barrels at Waimea lefts, surfs the Pipeline with 25 years of knowledge behind him, and is a generational surfing talent in this hallowed surf zone. Nick and Hannah got hold of him after he’d spent a bit of pre winter time in NZ with his mates shooting red deer, and talked with him about Valhalla.

Recently the World Surf League has been dropping world champ comebacks like they’re on sale. Carissa, Stephanie, John, Gabriel! That’s 19 world titles rolling up almost out of the blue for the 2026 tour. They’ll change the game for sure. But in the meantime, what about the current men’s champ? Universally hailed as a great winner at Cloudbreak back in September, the magnificently chill Yago Dora has nevertheless not featured in any Western surf media since that win. Nick and Hannah thought this was very weird, so we asked Yago if he’d mind joining us to explore his life as a super-kid in Florianopolis, Brazil, how he made the transition from free-surf star to elite competitor, stepping out on his own at title level, and how he produced that searingly confident Finals performance.

It’s a sporting truism: once you’re a world champ, you’re forever a world champ. But that’s not all you are, and in this classic extended-play run-on from our chat with him during the WSL Finals, Kelly lets his mind wander freely across the new landscape of his life. Hip surgery — which he put off for years while resolving his time on the CT — is on the near horizon, his businesses are sending him to actual work, the grommet is running around all over the place. It’s a long way from the retirement he once imagined, hanging out in Cocoa Beach going fishing — or is it? Here’s an unusually relaxed and revealing yap with a surfer we’ve all known forever.

She challenged every surfing stereotype. Beat Andy and Bruce in their local Kauai juniors, charged Pipeline before it was for the fucken girls, towed Teahupo’o on Code Red day. Went on tour, made the top five while hiding her sexuality, then wore it on her sleeve. Built a big wave free-surfing career on the back of credit card debt and mad instinct, then re-built her life around a far more lucrative career as a DJ. To their great delight, with the North Shore surf season preparing itself, Nick and Hannah drag the amazing KK in front of a mic and find this fabulous human being as sardonic and brilliant as ever … while also seeming surprisingly content.

Surf magazines look like fun, but if you end up with one as your very own baby, it’ll kill ya. The beloved Sean Doherty has been dying on the altar of Surfing World magazine every three or so months for five years now. In the process Sean has made and kept making the grittiest, closest-to-the-curl, most beautiful and well, just the best surf magazine in the world. Yet we are talking about something that was first published 63 YEARS AGO. This is no baby! How have Nick and Hannah been recruited into Seano’s wild yet seemingly eternal creative masterpiece? Here the three dive into what makes SW tick, and where they hope to go with it.