THE CRUEL SEA

The German leg of the 2019 PWA wave world tour once again showed Sylt’s reputation as a formidable contest arena. It is a maker or breaker of dreams; a cruel sea. JC gets the thoughts of some of the top pros on the challenges of the North Sea.

- Thomas Traversa, Graham Ezzy, Antoine Martin, Marcilio Browne, Robby Swift, Alex Mussolini, Jaeger Stone, Ricardo Campello, Justyna Sniady, Iballa Moreno.

THOMAS TRAVERSA

I am 1.78 m and 62 kg. The board I used is my 70 litre, 220 x 55 cm. We originally designed that board for Maui, but it works everywhere for me, it’s one of those magic boards! That is the board I was using in Tenerife for the PWA and also the Aloha Classic. It is pretty wide in the centre, but the tail is very narrow, so there’s a lot of curve on the outline. It is floating a lot because of the 55 cm in the middle, but once you get on the rail it feels like a tiny board. Rocker is the same as I use on all my boards, 20 mm, that’s more than on a production board (around 15 mm on the small Da Curve from Tabou), but that’s not too extreme. For example I used to have 24 mm on my boards when I won the PWA title, but the last three years we added channels so I can have a quicker rocker line.

For the sail on Sylt I like to have a good downhaul tension to deal with the gusty wind and to keep a light feeling. Then when it gets really light I just use less outhaul tension, that helps lift the board out of the water and make the sail more reactive. Boom maybe a touch higher to lift the board up.

I have no special tactics, just going for it and try to use the wave more than the wind. I just try to focus on the waves because they are very powerful and hard to read so I always try to attack them as hard as I can.

GRAHAM EZZY