And also because it’s just a good idea.”īack when Long was really pushing the importance of safety in big wave surfing, he faced the same criticism for wearing float suits that someone wearing a helmet these days might face. “You’ve never really seen me in one not because I don’t believe in them or because I’m worried about how I look - I’m the kind of guy who wears socks and sandals out in public five days a week - but I do think you’re going to see them more and more because people are pushing themselves more and more. “I do think that you’re going to see more and more people wearing them at the waves that warrant them,” Long told me. Greg Long in a 2016 big wave event at Puerto Escondido. I also didn’t grow up surfing crazy barrels, and I don’t consider myself to be an over-competent surfer when it comes to that type of wave.” But surfing a wave like Pipeline, it’s not so much a matter of the length of the hold down, it’s a matter of what the ocean decides to do with you and how hard you’re going to hit the bottom. You can train to hold your breath and be held under for a long period of time, which is the most prominent danger in large surf. “A big part of my surfing has always been about risk-management. “I tend to shy away from those types of crazy, shallow, slabby waves,” he told me.

Like Mason Ho, he doesn’t often wear a helmet, but he’s got a different reason. Greg Long surfs very big waves and is perhaps more embedded in the movement towards safety in surfing. Times do appear to be changing, and more and more young surfers at dangerous waves are wearing helmets. But, like Ho says, the next generation comes up on a diet of what their heroes are doing. Much like it was in snowboarding not so long ago, helmets just aren’t really accepted in surf culture - yet. “I do feel like it’s wrong sometimes, like riding a street bike on the freeway without a helmet.” “Honestly, it’s hard to put one on because I grew up watching most of my heroes surf it without one,” Ho continued. According to him, that’s because his idols didn’t. Which, ironically, likely would have prevented that head injury in the first place.ĭespite that, Ho doesn’t wear a helmet.

It appears that it takes a head injury to make a surfer wear a helmet. But there are surfers who do, and it’s strange that helmets aren’t more commonplace at waves like Pipeline or Teahupoo. I also don’t surf massive waves over shallow reefs and get spat out of house-sized barrels as much as I might like to say that I do. I have never, not once in my life, worn a helmet while surfing.

Now, I’m not saying that all surfers should wear helmets at all waves. But although we’re smart enough to create a helmet, we don’t appear to be smart enough to use them as much as we probably should. Which is why, of course, in their infinite complexity, our brains came up with a solution: helmets. We’ve got a pretty decent casing for our brains - a human skull is between 6 and 7 millimeters thick on average - but in our strange search for excitement, we often put our brains in harm’s way. All of your memories are in there, and all the information filtering in through your various brain-controlled senses that make them up are interpreted in it. All your intelligence, creativity, and emotions are made of complicated neural pathways, tiny bursts of electrical impulses, and squirts of hormones. Shitting, eating, and heart beating - it’s all just your brain directing your body to do certain things.

That three-ish pounds of grey meat between your ears is responsible for controlling everything your body does. So why is it, then, that surfing in helmets isn’t more popular? It’s generally accepted that you don’t want anything bad to happen to it, but in surfing, an activity where skulls are often bouncing off things, helmets are anything but normal. Your brain is a relatively important organ.

Surfs up. your helmet.