It’s a crude sport—packing tubes. Take one thumping beachbreak. Add a little performance-enhancing squirt from some modern machinery. The methods are as lawless as the thrill-seekers. Christian Beamish reports on the stretch of black sand in Mainland Mexico where it all goes down.

Stephanie Gilmore was an unlikely candidate, at first, for Andrew Kidman’s single-finned experiment. Putting a Dave Parmenter-shaped craft through the paces on a three-day run of Queensland point surf, Gilmore’s line-drawing, as per photographic evidence, proves inscrutable.

A look at the work of Brooklyn-based contemporary painter Jules de Balincourt, earning his fine art bones with salt-caked neo-folk and a boatload of reference points.

Shortboard modernist and archival shaper CJ Kanuha takes a self-shaped Olo out for a session near his home on the Big Island. Never mind that the board, built from Acacia koa, cost as much as the truck he hauls it around in—Kanuha’s is a labor of pure enjoyment.

A portfolio of the finest images from Andrew Buckley. “Shorty” as most people call him, has not only evolved with the changing landscape of surf photography—generally, he keeps ahead of it. Sean Doherty provides a close look at the lensman’s career.

From his beginnings on the pointbreaks of Santa Barbara and mid-’60s Hollister Ranch to his current outpost in Byron Bay, Michael Cundith has made a life whittling high-velocity headland runners.

A border run from South Africa to Mozambique for warm but fickle tuck-and-run sand points.

Denny Aaberg recounts the lifecycle of his favorite home break during his teenaged years: “Nobody knows for sure when the transformation was complete, but one day in ’59, probably at low tide, a glassy northwest windswell rolled in, found the jetty’s sculpted sand bottom, and peeled off through the virgin cove in a proud sand-grabbing barrel.”

Across surfing history there is often a Right Historical Side and a Wrong Historical Side. Drop-knee bodyboarder Paul Roach enjoyed world travel and Momentum fame but as his peers ascended, Roach hit a dead-end. Charlie Smith examines the uncalculated value of surfing’s evolutionary cul-de-sacs.

Touring Western Europe for the filming of The Old, the Young and the Sea—a look at the lesser-explored surfing micro-cultures, and the characters who comprise them, in France, Spain, and Portugal.

In Ocean Beach, San Francisco, long period swells are easy to come by. Four-day-long storms from Japan combining with perfect weather are not. Lewis Samuels recounts his experience of the rare, well-tuned conditions.