“Believe it or not, I’m not trying to airdrop,” Wilem Banks chuckled when I asked him about his propensity for going airborne at Mavericks. “I think with my style it kind of happens and I just go with it. It definitely feels good when I make waves when I’m just glued to the face.”
Though he said he doesn’t purposely go for them, over the years the 27-year-old Santa Cruz native has developed a knack for stomping airborne drops at Mavericks. Last winter Wilem bagged the 2023-24 Mavericks Awards Ride of the Year. That wave (filmed by Powerlines Productions ) is playing above in this post and features Wilem making a critically late drop, a near fins-free slide into the notorious trough.
“I know with that wave it seems like I could have pointed the nose through the wind and down into it, but I felt the wind getting under my board,” Wilem said. “So instead of trying to disengage that wind getting under the board and putting weight forward and making the drop that way, I just went with it. I guess I just allowed it to happen instead of forcing a different approach. Everything was happening so quick.”
So what advice does WIlem have for anyone willing to huck themselves over the ledge? For starters, the right boards help. Wilem rode a custom 9’4” quad (extra grip) based on a Grant “Twiggy” Baker model built by Mike Wallace , a Half Moon Bay-based shaper who builds Twig Surfboards in North America. Nothing too fancy, Wilem said, a flat board clean foil with vee-of the tail. Sadly, the magic stick snapped in pumping Todos Santos last winter. But in waves like this, the mental hurdle is just as important.
“If you feel like the wave is sucking out and you’re not going to get down the contour of the face, you just have to ride it out straight and not go down the line too soon, because that’s how you get sideways,” he said. “Usually if you’re sideways at the top of the wave and you make the airdrop, once you land you’ll still be on the transition of the wave. With all that force your board’s going to want to straighten out and it’s too hard to adapt. So if (an airdrop) is happening, you just have to commit 100%. Fly off the ledge and hope for the best.”
Far from a straight-and-inflate surfer, Wilem is widely recognized as an expert tube surfer and makes every effort to score slabs at home and abroad. When he’s not getting waves in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, Wilem works in carpentry (lately building saunas) and is an avid bowhunter. But he’s also keen to escape the crowds in much, much colder water outside the country. He travels a few months a year to off-the-grid locales, including northern Scotland with veteran UK-based photographer Al Mackinnon.
“It’s nice when you find an amazing setup in the cold because you’re not going to be battling the crowds,” Wilem said. “There’s something pretty pure being one of the only people to surf a wave, or many the only person. Chasing slabs up in Scotland, that’s kind of where my heart is. I just keep going back. There’s some setups that for sure haven’t been surfed. Just bringing that adventure to surfing makes it that much more interesting.”
Related: Wilem Banks is a Hard-Charging, Hammer-Swinging, Slab-Chasing Maniac
Most Popular
Comments / 0