The Descendent

Noa Deane’s punk sensibilities and go-for-broke approach may connect him to freesurfing’s past, but they also make him a man apart in freesurfing’s present

The world is so fucking weird right now,” Noa Deane tells me over the phone from Australia, where he’s slept in past our original interview time, but is ready to wax philosophical now that the coffee is kicking in.He’s right about the world—especially his world. Deane went berserk upon arrival on the freesurfing stage, laying down the kinds of massive airs and searing turns that earned closing sections in top-tier surf films and drew immediate Reynoldsian comparisons. But the world that Deane inhabits today is much different than that of his high-flying, hard-turning predecessors. Professional freesurfing has receded from its early-2010s high-water mark as high-concept surf films have largely been replaced by mindless Instagram clips, and the pedestal where the world’s best free surfers once resided has more or less toppled. Deane also recently lost his father, legendary Gold Coast surfer and shaper Wayne Deane, to cancer. It’s a tragedy that Deane tells me he’s not quite ready to talk about, but surely it’s contributed to the weirdness of this current place in time for him.

Instead, we talk about the things that still make sense to Deane. He sees himself as part of a lineage of raw, creative freesurfers that spans from Christian and Nathan Fletcher to Ozzie Wright to Dion Agius and Dane Reynolds. Although it’s evolved over time, expressing itself in different ways in each era, there’s always been a certain punk ethos embodied by this sect of surfers, and Deane is both immersed in it and grounded by it.

Deane is certain of his surfing principles, so he doesn’t care about freesurfing’s toppled pedestal, or who’s watching when he breaks his board stomping an 8-foot alley-oop at North Point. Deane knows what kind of surfing he wants to do and he’s going to keep making his own brand of hardcore, thrashy surf edits, regardless of what the weird world around him is up to.