It was like a massive dump on Christmas morning–4th of July weekend brought a huge swell to Southern California beaches, and under atypically murky conditions the lemmings took to the waves. Think you can just go get pounded like that in a dictatorship? No way, baby–you need the independence of the home of the depraved. And nowhere is that more freely expressed than at the slice of humble pie known as the Wedge in Newport Beach.

Thanks to a unique confluence of breakwater and beach, waves are funneled into the corner where sand meets rock–with nowhere else to go, the wave energy jacks up, creating h-bombs two and three times the size of the surf everywhere else. It’s total madness and complete mayhem. Hard surfboards are banned during the main beach hours, so the Wedge remains the purview of boogie boarders and body surfers. It keeps the carnage down, but only by a matter of degrees, as you can see in this Grind TV segment.

Tagged as: ocean, sick, surfing