ABOUT

10 Officially Entered Surfers: Tom Knox - Co Kerry, Ireland Grant Twiggy Baker - South Africa Pete Shaw - New York City, USA Sacha Bongaertz - Netherlands Leo Rowland - French Basque Country Willyam Santana - Brazil Jose Carlos Molestina - Ecuador Freddy Olander- Germany Ollie Dousset - Australia Joaquin Garcia Castañon - Argentina

Safety: David Langer Daniks Fischer Jeanpierre Ballestros

RESULTS:

Best Ride: 1. Pete Shaw, USA 2. Sacha Bongaertz, Netherlands 3. Tom Knox, Ireland 4. Willyam Santana, Brazil 5. Leo Rowland, French Basque Country

Send It Award: 1. Ollie Dousset, Australia

Best Wipeout Award: 1. Pete Shaw, USA

On Sunday March 12th we held a Free Surf contest at Praia do Norte, Nazaré during a massive west swell with waves breaking in the 25-35ft range. How the "free surf" works is each surfer, our jet ski safety team and our 3 head photographers all got together the day after the free surf to watch all the day’s footage and vote for the winners on a piece of paper. There were a few waves missing due to Nazare’s unpredictable foggy weather so we allowed everyone to vote based on the rides they witnessed in person as well as the footage that we watched. Everyone voted their choice for 1st, 2nd & 3rd best ride (based on how big and critical the rides were) as well as best wipeout and the Send It award (to the guy who was charging hardest all day). 1st place & 2nd place won the money that all the surfers threw in the hat. 3rd place won some cold-water Solite Gloves and a Gel Blaster gun to shoot the winners. The best wipeout and send it award winners got YouRip CO2 safety vests since they need it the most haha.

There haven't been many big wave events lately, so the Nazare crew that has been there all season charging every swell thought it would be an epic idea to run a paddle-only 3-hour “Free surf” where the surfers would all throw 30 Euro in a hat, watch footage of all the rides the next day and vote on a winner, peers voting for peers. We plan to do a few of these free surfs throughout the year with the focus being big-wave cold-water locations. We want to show the world these dedicated underground chargers who come from cold-water surf towns. When we watched the footage from the day it was pretty clear who had the best rides based on wave size and how critical the wave was. We ran our session from 7:30-10:30AM while the swell was at its peak with light winds. Then the guys all decided to run a 2nd session from 4PM-6PM to make the most of the incoming tide and evening glass off. That was the right call because there were massive wedges coming in near the cliff with perfect glassy conditions and some of the best rides went down then. In this digital age with virtual surf events we thought a big-wave event like this would be a great idea, and it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. This was a total grassroots passion project and it was a huge success. We scored incredible waves with the biggest 1st peak sets up in the 30-35ft range. Sebastian was towing while the paddlers were charging hard right next to him. We had 5 safety skis watching over the paddlers. Twiggy happened to be in town for the swell on his way to surf a cyclone back in South Africa. He joined us in the free surf and was one of the only guys to attempt paddling out through the heavy Praia do Norte Shorebreak. He summed up the “contest” best by saying “This is the most grassroots thing ever. Money in a hat. I love it”.