The world’s best surfers will descend on Raglan in May for the World Surf League Championship Tour. Ex-local and former young person Luke McPake remembers the day he and his mates spotted a 90s legend riding the left-hand break.

At the lookout above Indicators there’s five of us grommets and Dylan’s dad sitting in the car. The surf looks average. Average waves in Raglan are still pretty good though.

It’s somewhere around 1996, our grommie gang is aged 12-14, we have salt-spiked hairdos and we are the most annoying little shits in a town that unknown to us has a bright future, but for most of our childhood seems to be battling through a permanent off-season. 

But in the world of surfing this town has value like few others – and the whole place is ours. (It definitely isn’t, it just feels that way when you’re 12 and a whole community of parents and neighbours are supporting you to have fun surfing.)

At the Indies lookout the rain is coming down and in the back seat the four of us wriggle for a view of the break. Beyond the car window the sea is grey, and the rain has darkened the smooth volcanic boulders of the foreshore to a deep black. The surroundings are of zero interest to us though, we’re focused on the surf. 

The waves aren’t lined up, but the light northerly wind is making the faces kind of clean. There’s only a few people out, bobbing black specks, anonymous from this distance but people we probably know by name. 

A goofy-footer takes off at the Indies peak, smashes the lip and begins to race through The Valley – Indicators’ fast-breaking inside section. We bring our eyes to the crack of the fogged-up car window. It’s only an OK wave but the goofy-footer is racing, weaving to generate even more speed, choosing… a kind of perfect line, but the wave starts to lose power. No problem, the goofy-footer has built up so much speed he streaks out onto the shoulder of the wave and gouges a huge roundhouse cutback, returning to the wave’s power source right as it starts to re-energise. 

In the car we’re mesmerised. 

“It’s Rob Machado!” a buzzing, pre-pubescent voice jokes.

Our eyes track the goofy-footer through the screen of the window, he hits the lip vertically, sending spray flying, but he hasn’t lost any speed whatsoever – crazy. 

Something’s happening, there’s a wild energy forming among the groms in the car. 

The pre-pubescent voice cries out again: “It’s Rob Machado!”

Again, the goofy-footer smashes the lip and this time his fins release into the air.

“Oh… My… God!!” Another squeaky voice stutters in mock disbelief that has come full circle back to actual disbelief. 

“He’s schralping!” (Say it with me: Shh-RELL-ping.) 

In the car we start to believe, maybe it really is Rob Machado – Californian surfing icon, pipe master, world no. 2, Kelly Slater’s bestie, and star of Taylor Steele’s seminal surf films Momentum and Good Times.

It was Rob Machado. 

Here in Raglan. And he had Taylor Steele with him too.

Olly Coddington was the grommet that recognised Machado before anyone else that day. “It was like an actual high, heart racing, tingly, that’s freaking Machado. He’s so smooth, so fast, he sticks everything, this guy does not fall off, and he’s doing stuff on a wave you’d only see in surf movies,” he remembers.

When you’re 12 and all the adults in your orbit are seasoned surfers there is a lot to learn. Our classroom was the corner of the Raglan Surf Co., where the wetsuit racks and TV were situated. We would sit there for hours breathing in the fresh neoprene vapours wafting off the brand new wetsuits and analysing the style of every surfer ever recorded to VHS.

There were two kinds of vids, Aussie ones and American ones.

The Australian ones were colourful and relatable, full of blue water, golden landscapes and aggressive power surfing, but… kind of boring. The American offerings had tail slides, airs, skateboarding fashion, Slater, and music called pop-punk, and something about the NTSC to PAL conversion gave them a cool, washed-out filter, like they were beaming in from an alternate timeline.

The Taylor Steele video that had just dropped was Good Times – Coddington was a fan.

“The Aussie vids were awesome, but the American dudes were higher-ranked, and they were doing more airs, more progressive surfing – not saying that that is better surfing, but at the time it was like ‘whoa, yeah cool, give me airs!’”

Luke Cederman of the Raglan Surf Report was another air-obsessed grommet gang member. 

“Those videos were the most important thing for my surfing progression. You couldn’t just go for a surf and see someone out there doing airs, because it didn’t exist in New Zealand.”

We harvested these movies for biomechanical data harder than a Hollywood motion capture studio, analysing the twist and flex of every joint, the foot placement, the fingers skimming the wall of the wave, the facial aggression of a cutback and the casual attitude displayed after a life-changing tuberide.

So it was no coincidence the groms ID’d Machado through the rain from half a kilometre away – we’d been studying the vids, and what we experienced through the drips on the car window that day was like that déjà vu kind of knowing, the knowing before knowing when you recognise your best friend’s body language from across the park, or the other side of the mall. 

Machado’s shredding in The Valley that day put surfing lore on a higher plane for us groms in the car – for surfing is full of tall tales and word of mouth exploits, but to see Machado’s blazing forehand attack with our own eyes made the world of tall tales a little less tall, and our own aspirations in surfing a little bigger. Here’s one of the best, here’s what’s possible at this spot, in these conditions, today, right now.

For the groms, the afterglow of Machado and Steele’s Raglan visit was a slow burn. It pushed Cederman’s aerial surfing progression, but it also had a grounding effect. 

“When you’re a kid you really idolise people, as like, these gods of surfing, but you get to see that they’re actually a real person.” 

Thirty years on Coddington still admires the famous visitors’ generosity. “They were really giving of their time, they weren’t too cool for anybody.”

I asked him if he was amped for the World Championship Tour event.

“I’m stoked for the new generation of grommets, they’re gonna be so frothing.”

The author wishes to thank Cynthia, Sheree, and the Hughes family of Raglan Surf Co. for facilitating life-changing video viewing sessions, and for sometimes allowing hot chips to be eaten while sitting on the floor in front of a TV in a pristine retail setting.