Five Myths, Pranks and Fakes That Fooled The Surfing World

Ever since Robert August and Mike Hynsen walked for miles over the (non-existent) dunes to find the “perfect wave” in the 1966 film The Endless Summer , surfers have loved a good prank and occasionally fallen for a well-told surf legend. Whether it's the old surfy version of a fish tale told post-session after a couple of beers or a little embellishment that's morphed over decades, we've all fallen over some not-totally-accurate surf legend. As Gerry Lopez once said in his ever-popular memoir Surf Is Where You Find It , “As we tell and retell surf stories, waves grow ever more enormous and frightening, wipeouts ache immeasurably more each time, and our heroes dwarf human scale.”

Here we collated some of the most enduring examples, from video chicanery to myths to outright fabrication. Let's just not call it fake news, okay?

The Left Off The Sydney Opera House

You gotta love a hoax with an extended shelf life. A faked video by Sydneysider Darren Johnson of surfers riding a wave in front of the Sydney Opera went viral back in 2012. You can see why the mainstream press bought the fakery. It was first posted after a massive storm, where the rare waves inside Sydney Harbour attract surfers for the novelty value. The lad's inventive and hilarious post-surf wrap too is pitch-perfect.

However, the Opera House is tucked much further inside the harbor and has deep enough water for the world’s biggest cruise ships to drop anchor. The photoshopped rocks were another giveaway. Three years later, when another storm battered the coast, dropping the heaviest rainfall in 100 years, the video resurfaced. When a Sydney radio DJ shared it on Twitter, it caught fire all over again.

JJ Moon: The World’s Best Surfer

In the mid-60s, for a short time, JJ Moon was the most famous surfer in America. Surfing magazine gave him a regular column and a huge profile appeared in Life magazine. In that article, it was said that “He holds more titles than there are championships. Saloons and surfing hangouts are filled to all hours with stories and arguments about his prowess. There are JJ Moon fan clubs and JJ Moon T-shirts and, naturally, JJ Moon surfboards.”

The problem was there was no JJ Moon. He was a fabricated character, played by part-time surfer Ned Eckert, who was the foil behind Mickey Dora, Corky Carroll, Joey Cabell, and Mickey Munoz' prank as they transformed him into a surf media personality. He was even entered in the Makaha Invitational by Rick Steer who billed Moon as the Lake Michigan wake-surfing champion, a good 20 years before Rick Kane. In a show of real commitment, they kept the gig up for a solid three years. For the full history of surfing’s most elaborate hoax, read Matt Warshaw’s excellent blog titled "JJ Moon: More Myth Than Moon".

Related: JJ Moon: More Myth Than Man

Dynamite Surfing

Way back in 2007, a mere two years after YouTube's launch, Quiksilver funded a video that was surfing’s first viral clip. Directed by Jonas Arnby, and filmed over three days in Copenhagen's Lake Sortedams, it shows a group paddling into a lake on a surfboard while another lights and throws dynamite from a bridge. The explosion creates a large wave, which the surfer then rides.

While looking grainy, and as if shot on a phone, the expensive shoot used high-grade cinematography and needed 100 hours of post-production. Most (non-surfers) thought it real and it quickly racked up millions of views after being shared on MySpace (look it up, kids) and YouTube and even spurned some copycat attempts of the stunt.

Impossible Impossibles

This image was the work of Bali-based surfer and artist Ashley Bickerton. Bickerton, who sadly passed away from cancer, loved the wave of Impossibles and used Photoshop to alter a line-up shot of the Bukit wave, before adding images of Padang’s inside bowl section. The always uncredited “line-up” shot quickly flew around the internet with the caption “Chicama Peru”, which, while known as the world’s longest wave, has certainly never looked like this.

Non-surfers would gawp at the 12-wave set (with many more stacked to the horizon) as totally possible. Surfers must have known it was a fake but perhaps wanted to pretend that such perfection could still exist in the surfing world. Either way, it became one of surfing's most shared images.

“I knew that once the image got loose, my name would not matter, it would take on a life of its own,” Bickerton told Wavelength Magazine. “I was not interested in getting credit. It was an experiment, one that would hopefully spread some pleasure in the world.”

Hurricane Surfer

This was a 2002 TV advert by the sports drink Powerade. Featuring Flea Virostko and Zach Wormhoudt and a mash-up of some Mavericks waves, it was portrayed as news footage of a storm making landfall, while a reporter narrated the episode.

The ad made a bit of a splash during its initial release but gained much more traction once it was stripped of all the branding, and released on the internet as a real-life event. To be fair, you’d have to be a relatively keen surfer to spot the chicanery, and as it usually does the rounds after any tsunami event, it keeps clocking up even more views.

Related: The Mythology of Tom Curren