Gnarly, dude! A California surfer hanged ten big time on a recent wave and may have just surfed his way into the history books. It's very possible that he surfed a record-breaking wave.
23-year-old surfer Alessandro "Alo" Slebir went surfing on December 23 when he saw the opportunity to ride a monster wave. In fact, the huge wave may have measured 108 feet by some measurements. Slebir went surfing at Half Moon Bay near San Francisco. He journeyed to California from Hawaii after hearing about a massive storm headed toward the West Coast.
"It wasn't like a decision of maybe we should go or not," he told KSBW. "You're going so fast on those surfboards — you're probably going 30, 40, 50 miles an hour and that wave was so tall that it was sucking so much water coming back at you that it was a weird feeling. Feeling the friction of the water underneath the surfboard, I've never felt that on really any other wave that I've ever caught."
Surfer Rides The Big One
Just check out the wild footage below. The surfer looked very much in his element despite the size of the wave. He kept enough distance to outrun and not be consumed by the water as the wave broke.
If the wave was indeed 108 feet then it would have beat the previous surfing record of 86 feet. German surfer Sebastian Steudtner made the record in 2022 while surfing in Nazaré in Portugal. However, getting a measurement on the wave is easier said than done.
"You can measure Mt. Everest every day of the week for 100 years, it never moves," Bill Sharp, a surfing official, told the Los Angeles Times. "But even the biggest wave lasts only for a few seconds, and then it's gone forever."
Experts will attempt to examine the footage and properly measure the size of the wave. They'll use the surfer as a measuring point. It's complicated because surfers don't typically stand up right when surfing. Plus you have to try to figure out where the wave begins and end. But it could be a potential record breaking wave if it all measures up.
