On December 29th, during one of the biggest days in years, 27-year-old local Skip McCullough was the first to paddle out at his homebreak in La Jolla -- a notoriously shifty, dangerous and mutant left barrel that had way more watchers than takers. He didn't come out of his first wave, which ended up breaking his board in three places. He raced back home, grabbed his backup 6'6" and went on to be, by most all accounts, beyond a standout -- "beast" -- at one of the heaviest waves in SoCal making a dozen+ supremely technical barrels over the course of a marathon eight-hour session.
“He’s got this thing with the ocean where the good ones come to him and he just puts his head down and goes,” said longtime La Jolla local Jojo Roper, who watched Skip grow up tackling these fickle and challenging reefbreaks. “That wave looks like that once every five-plus years - and that day had to be one of the best there’s been. And Skip cleaned house. He’s on another level of reading the shifty slabs out there. The comparison to Pipeline gets thrown out all the time, but I must say -- it looked like Pipe and he was knifing them like Pipe, all day long.”
“I’ve always have seen giant barrels out there,” said Skip. “But it's always so hard and it's such a shifty wave. But the last three or four years, I've really tried to focus on it and it's starting to make more sense to me out there; like what it takes to actually line one of those waves up. This year, it all came together. I’ve finally had a more methodical approach to it, figuring out where to sit and where to line up and which waves to look for. The reefs in La Jolla are not perfect. Nothing like Indo or Hawaii. So you really need to know how a wave's gonna react when it hits the reef. And this year, I decided I’m just gonna sit out there till the right one comes. Obviously, not every wave's gonna be good, but if I wait for the right wave to hit the reef in a certain sort of way, then I might get a barrel and I might make it.”
This is exactly what happened, over and over again, all day long, as McCullough shared the lineup with only a handful of local and visitors till he came in at 3pm. “Waves don't get like this all the time," he said. "It might be 10 years before we get another day like that. So when it's like that -- if you're cold, if you're tired, you're hungry, you gotta just suck it up because it might be a long time before you get another session like that. I was cold and hungry the whole time. But I've since warmed up and I've since had a good meal, so doesn't even matter."
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