Born in 1970, raised in Bondi Beach, Australia, Pauline Menczer found her way to the surfboard at age 14. Actually, it was half a surfboard—a snapped hand-me-down from her brother. Four years later she won the 1988 World Amateur Champs, hopped on the ASP world tour, and finished the year ranked fifth overall. Her surfing was loose, springy, full of hurled tail. She won lots of events, and, in 1993, the world title.

Menzcer has appeared in many surf videos, including 1998’s Blue Crush (the surf video, not the feature film), 2001’s Peaches: The Core of Women’s Surfing, and 2004’s Surfabout: Down Under. She’s the unofficial star of the 2021 documentary Girls Can’t Surf. She released her memoir, Surf Like a Woman, in 2024. She was inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame in 2018.

In this episode of Soundings, Menczer talks with Jamie Brisick about grommethood hazing in Bondi Beach, winning a world title, overcoming adversity, battling stereotypes, adjusting to life after pro surfing, and writing her memoir. 

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett. Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin). 

Born in 1986, Chris Burkard grew up on California’s Central Coast and knew from a young age that he had to get out. Photography became the avenue. Primarily self-taught, Burkard won the Follow the Light Foundation grant in 2006, and away he went, working as a senior staff photographer for Surfline, Water magazine, and Surfer magazine, as well as freelancing for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and ESPN.com. In 2009, he was contracted by Patagonia to be a projects photographer.

Burkard’s photo books include The California Surf Project, Come Hell or High Water: The Plight of the Torpedo People, Distant Shores, High Tide, and The Boy Who Spoke to the Earth. Along with still photographs, he makes films, including Russia: The Outpost Volume 1, Faroes: The Outpost Volume 2, The Cradle of Storms, and Under an Arctic Sky.

You might glean from those titles that Burkard has a penchant for the colder locales. On that note, he started photographing Iceland about two decades ago—and fell so in love with the place that, a couple years ago, he up and moved there with his wife and two sons. Along with photography, Burkard is also an avid adventurer, recently completing a 90-mile fat-tire bike ride across Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest glacier.

In this episode of Soundings, Burkard talks to host Jamie Brisick about traveling, Ansel Adams, the allure of cooler climates, finding purpose, moving to Iceland, the state of surf photography, and the challenges and rewards of environmentalism.

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett. Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin).

Born in California in 1948, Jeff Hakman’s father introduced him to surfing at age eight. Four years later, the family moved to Oahu, and the year after that, at the age of 13, Hakman surfed Waimea Bay for the first time. In 1965, he was invited to the inaugural Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, held at Sunset Beach. Hakman was 17. He won. In the ensuing years, on his Dick Brewer-shaped boards, Hakman transitioned seamlessly from longboards to shortboards—and went on a winning streak. He won the Duke again in ’70 and ’71; won the first Pipe Masters in ’71; won the Hang Ten Pro and Gunston 500 in ’72; and the Hang Ten again in ’73. Bookending his stellar competitive run, he won the Bells Beach event in 1976. After winning that event, Hakman sat down with the owners of a fledgling Aussie brand called Quiksilver and convinced them to make him the US licensee.

Today, Hakman lives in Bidart, France, where he sits down with Jamie Brisick for this episode of Soundings to talk about surfboard design, growing up on the North Shore, the birth of the surf industry, humility, and the challenge of returning to an everyday existence after living the extraordinary. 

Born and raised on the northern beaches of Sydney, Holly Wawn’s father started pushing her into waves at their local Bungan Beach when she was three. She started competing in her teens, won local events, and won the 2012 Australian Junior Titles at age 15. From 2015 to 2019, she competed full-time on the ’QS, bagged a few thirds, but came to realize that she was happiest surfing outside of the contest forum. Now 27, based in Coorabell, near Byron Bay, Wawn is a freesurfer known for her big, swooping hacks.

In this episode of Soundings, Wawn sits down with Jamie Brisick to talk about lineup hierarchies, her relationship to competition, life as a freesurfer, producing content, the importance of self-expression, and her cinematic goals.

From Newport, New South Wales, Australia, Derek Hynd is known for his unconventional approach to surfing and all else. Hynd was a pro surfer in the late 1970s and early ’80s, making his name both for his surfing in a jersey and for the pieces he wrote for the surf mags of the era. In 1980, while competing in South Africa, he suffered a brutal injury that resulted in the loss of vision in his right eye. He retired after the 1982 season and became a coach, first for Billabong, then for Ripcurl. In 1992, Hynd came up with The Search, Rip Curl’s iconic film series starring Tom Curren. Around this time, Hynd bought a prime plot of land at Jeffrey’s Bay and built an architectural marvel of a house looking straight out to Supertubes. Design experimentation led Hynd to FFFF, aka Far Field Free Friction, aka finless surfing. Today, he lives near Byron Bay, where he practices his latest obsession: mat riding.

In this episode of Soundings, Hynd sits down with Jamie Brisick to talk about his career as a professional surfer, unconventional surfcraft, writing, childhood’s golden moments, J-Bay, the allure of going finless, sharks, and how he lost his eye.

Born in 1960 in Sydney, Australia, Cheyne Horan joined the pro tour in 1977 at age 16, and finished second in the world four times, in 1978, ’79, ’81, and ’82. He surfed with an urgency and potency, weaving in and around the pocket on his needle nose, fat-tailed Lazor Zap single-fins. His boards had vibrant, elaborate airsprays. His wetsuits were bright and loud. His hair was peroxide blond. He became a macrobiotic vegetarian, a yogi, a devotee of astrology, and the I Ching. He was outwardly pro-weed and pro-psychedelics.

Horan retired from the pro tour in 1993. Soon after, he began to focus on big waves, riding giant Waimea Bay, Outer Log Cabins, and Jaws. In 1999, he won the Quiksilver Masters World Championships. Today, Horan shapes boards and runs a surf school in Queensland.

In this episode of Soundings, Horan sits down with Jamie Brisick to talk about dealing with fame, committing to the single-fin, pro surfing’s wild days, and his victory at the 1989 Billabong Pro at Sunset Beach.  

Born and raised on Oahu, Kelia Moniz is a two-time world longboarding champion, freesurfer, wife, mother, and entrepreneur. From a deeply rooted surfing family, Moniz rode her first waves around the time she learned to walk. She started competing at age 15, racked up a string of victories, and turned pro shortly thereafter. She is the 2012 and 2013 world longboarding champion. She spent much of the 2010s as a traveling freesurfer. In 2015, on a trip in Tahiti, she rode serious Teahupo’o on a longboard. Now 31 and a mother of two, Moniz and her husband, photographer Joe Termini, recently opened the Honolulu Pawn Shop, which sells clothing and Joe’s work.

In this episode of Soundings, Moniz talks to Jamie Brisick about competing, longboarding, her Town roots, living out her dreams, her most memorable trips, overcoming self-doubt, Rell Sunn’s legacy, starting her own business, and surfing as a universal language.

Born in Honolulu in 1951, Tom Pohaku Stone made a name for himself at Pipeline in the early 1970s as a stylish goofyfooter. Around that time, he was imprisoned after a drug bust. While incarcerated, he found books and higher learning. He studied, and, after his release, got a job as a lifeguard and enrolled in college. He got his BA in Hawaiian Studies from the University of Hawaii in 1998 at the age of 46. A few years later he earned his MA for his thesis paper about the ancient Polynesian practice of riding papa holua boards—which are long, wooden sleds—down grass-covered mountains. Now a professor of Hawaiian History at University of Hawaii, Pohaku Stone’s commitment to the preservation and revival of ancient Polynesian knowledge and practices extends beyond academia and into his personal life as a surfer and shaper.

In this episode of Soundings, Pohaku Stone sits down with Jamie to talk about the early days at Pipeline, finding solace in the past, his Hawaiian heritage, sobriety, Jose Angel, finding academia, and memorable moments on the North Shore. 

Michele Lockwood is an artist, writer, photographer, clothing designer, mother, activist, and environmental scientist. She grew up in the boroughs of New York City and started sneaking out to hip-hop gigs, house music clubs, and punk shows while in high school. She hung out at the Brooklyn Banks in the late 1980s, and played the character “Kim” in Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids. The X-girl logo, designed by Mike Mills, was based on her face, which led her to becoming a clothing designer in Tokyo with her own brand, called Material. Lockwood has lived in Australia for the last 20-odd years with her partner, Andrew Kidman, on a rural property in the hills between Byron Bay and the Gold Coast. Recently, Lockwood has started working for a not-for-profit Indigenous organization that helps to build more resilient communities and ecosystems. In her spare time, she studies and publishes papers on a local endangered frog species.

In this episode of Soundings, Lockwood sits down with Jamie Brisick at the Big Sky compound to talk about her teenage years, creativity, fashion, surfing in California, Kids, music, the artistic process, moving to Australia, and the study of frogs. 

Born in 1944 in Queensland, Australia, Bob McTavish started surfing at age 12 on a 16-foot plywood paddle board. Best known as a surfboard shaper, he started working with Sydney’s biggest board builders at age 17, then became a major player in the shortboard revolution. He worked closely with George Greenough and Nat Young, helping Young design “Magic Sam,” the thinner, lighter, shorter longboard that would win Young the 1966 World Championships in San Diego, California. In 1967, McTavish produced the first vee bottom, nicknamed the “Plastic Machine.” Shortly thereafter, he and Young were seen tearing it up at Honolua Bay in Paul Witzig’s The Hot Generation. In the late ’70s, McTavish wrote several essays for surf magazines talking up the long- and mid-range boards he was shaping. In 2009, Bob penned Stoked!, his memoir. Now in his eighties, a father of five and a grandfather, McTavish is still actively shaping and surfing.

In this episode of Soundings, McTavish sits down with Jamie Brisick inside his factory to talk about his prolific shaping career, stowing away to Oahu, Magic Sam, The Hot Generation, Dick Brewer, and his most memorable moments in the water.