The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
Harrison Roach calls to his dog as he traces a fence line down to Lake Cooroibah, just outside Noosa, Queensland, Australia. “Dru!” he shouts, punctuating the warbling of magpies, the birdsong from a handful of cockatoos, and the running list of snakes that are likely to kill us: the red-bellied black, the brown, the…fuck, this is a long list, even for a Floridian like me.
The dog passes through a gate at the bottom of Roach’s property and we carve through a field of tall grass and into a stand of palms and scribbly gum trees. Then the lake appears, surrounded by the green ridges marching into the Pacific that stake the edges of Roach’s home.
Long before he won a world title in 2022, Roach was known as a surfer’s surfer, admired for balancing a career that was made from equal parts curiosity, creativity, and complexity. Some knew him for winning three Duct Tape Invitationals and for surfing for brands like Rhythm, Deus, and Roark, some from appearing in films by Thomas Campbell and Andrew Kidman, always surfing longboards well, properly surfing single-fins at Pipe and alaias in heavy surf. But the flyover was exponentially less impressive than everything in between.
Along the lake, Roach lifts his arm out of a sling. A couple weeks earlier, he explains, as the tropics lit up ahead of Christmas, the waves in Noosa turned on and he found himself falling into a double-up and drawing an arc off the bottom on a way-too-tiny fish. His fins lost contact as he put the thing on rail. He slipped out and was sucked up the face, pitched over the falls, and plowed into the sand. Instantly he knew his shoulder was out of place, but he first needed to escape from being pinched between a rock face and the following set.
On the beach, a doctor on holiday reset his arm on the back of an ATV. Christmas Eve was a painful, sleepless one, but two weeks later he dropped his aluminum johnboat into the river and ran into town to play one-armed tour guide for me.
Roach grew up in Sunshine Beach, a tiny suburb outside the string of villages known as Noosa Shire. From his grandparents’ porch, which hangs on a bluff above the Pacific, a turn to the left reveals the headland where the continent falls into the ocean, forming some of the world’s most beautiful, welcoming pointbreaks. One by one, they march west from Hell’s Gates in dizzying shades of blue beneath a cathedral of gum trees before reaching the heart of town, strung along Hastings Street, once a sleepy bohemian outpost.
In 1956, Roach’s grandparents bought a place overlooking Sunshine Beach with a little bit of money they’d received after marrying—“a shack,” as Roach put it. Back then, the area was mostly a grid of two-tracks and stands of trees filled with koalas. Footprints in the sand were the only way they could tell if anyone was nearby.
Nearly 70 years later, they still live in the same house, although the footprints have increased. Often, Roach surfs the shorebreak out front, and his grandparents still wave from the porch. His parents spent vacations during the early years of their relationship visiting Sunshine, but when Roach turned 1, they put pen to paper on a place up the hill and made a home.
“My mom loves to have fun,” Roach tells me. “My dad’s pretty serious.” The two hereditary strands are bookends for Roach. “I definitely have the good and bad,” he says, “which is inevitable, I suppose.” As a kid growing up in a place where water was central, the area’s collection of beachbreaks and sand-bottom points seemed almost as paternal as the cast of mentors who raised him. An important strand of his DNA also formed when he watched Tom Wegener, CJ Nelson, and Kevin Connelly in the water during the Noosa Festival of Surfing.
“That was the first time I’d ever really watched longboarding,” he remembers. He went home, put his hands on a log his mother had bought to surf alongside him, and declared himself delivered. “From that moment on,” he says, “I became a longboarder.”
After two weeks in Australia, bouncing around the South Coast, Sydney, and the Northern Rivers, I found myself a bit homesick for the American South before I connected with Roach.
I just couldn’t place the people, the etiquette, the humor. When I woke up on my second morning in Noosa, however, I felt at home among the palmettos, cabbage palms, and poinciana trees dripping a spray of coral flowers, just as they do back in South Florida. The people, too, reminded me of home: warm and kind, proudly strange. As the week continued, I felt like I’d been dropped into some sort of alternate Florida, the bizarre southern hemisphere equivalent.
On this morning, Roach and I walk into the Thomas Surfboards factory, take a coffee, and circle the sprawling space with Thomas Bexon, shaper and partner. Folks call him “Doc.” He’s one of many shapers Roach has worked with over the years, including Neal Purchase Jr., Rich Pavel, and Bob McTavish.
“He’s hands-down the best at giving feedback,” Bexon tells me later. “What makes boards work and why, being able to articulate that.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Wegener. He remembers Roach describing how well alaias work in hollow waves, the way the design can slip through a shockwave running up the face like a snake over a piece of wood.
“I just loved the way he so calmly and seriously gave me that feedback,” Wegener says. The two shapers describe Roach as contemplated and measured, and his ability as rare, varied, and focused. “He’s very serious,” Wegener adds. “He doesn’t screw things up the way surfers tend to.”
Growing up, Roach always tried to sneak in a session before school, then again after school, heading straight to whatever point was breaking. Come Saturday, he’d run out of the house and pile into a van with Peter Biden, one of his most important mentors, sharing the front seat with Biden’s son as they drove north into Noosa National Park to camp on a point and surf.
Darryl Homan, another significant mentor, remembers Roach finishing homework on his laptop between surfs. “I’m thinking, Well, none of the other kids would do that,” he says. Day trips up and down the coast became increasingly common.
Roach also became part of the tight-knit Malibu Club in Noosa, which led to his ascension as a formidable competitor. And then, every year in March, a slew of surfers would pour into town for the Noosa Surfing Festival. Soon, Roach was toggling between sticking punts in the shorebreak at Sunshine and learning the nuances of an S-turn around the corner.
After graduation, he was invited to attend some of Australia’s best schools and was planning to study journalism, but then came another invitation. This one was from Thomas Campbell, who asked Roach if he wanted to join a group he was assembling for his new film in Indonesia.
The weight of the decision gnawed at Roach. He asked around about what he should do: go to college or go to Indo? Ultimately, he boarded a flight with a bag of alaias.
With Campbell shooting on land and Mike Stewart filming from the water, Roach and Chris Del Moro put the planks into proper surf, revealing just how well they performed. That session became a sequence in Campbell’s The Present, with Roach claiming the final stretch of the film before the credits. (Twelve years later, Roach earned his degree in literature from Griffith University, following thousands of hours traversing the world as an unconventional sort of transfer credit.)
In 2009, the same year that he joined Campbell in Indonesia, Roach walked into the local lifesaving club in Noosa and ordered a drink. He grinned at the woman behind the bar, and she mirrored it. That bartender and Roach show me around the property where they’re making a home now. “It’s the only time that’s ever worked,” he says of smiling at his partner, Eadie.
The two decisions, Indonesia and Eadie, seemed to determine the cardinal directions of his life.
Largely, through role models like Steve Montell, Homan, and Biden, Roach assembled a broad, storied sense of what surfing once was and, maybe inadvertently, what it was becoming. The trio not only devoted time to him, but also shared their boards, their perceptions of the world, their stories, and, most importantly, their curiosity. Eventually, folks could smell it on him. “He doesn’t limit himself,” Homan says of what Roach likes to ride and how he lives.
By the time he was in high school, Roach says, “I hated being referred to as just a surfer. It’s like my biggest fear in life was to be just a surfer.”
Dane Peterson became an early waypoint during those years, along with the surf journalist Phil Jarratt. Later, it was folks like Joel Tudor and Derek Hynd. But for Roach, Noosa, its history, and its community nourished him.
Some years and a hemisphere later, Roach came out of the water in Huntington Beach, following his first go at the US Open of Surfing—maybe the world’s worst venue for longboarding. He ran into Joel Tudor, who said Malibu was firing and asked if Roach wanted to join him for a session. Their conversation between Orange County and First Point made them friends. “It was super fucking cool for me,” Roach says. “You know? I’d been stoned with Joel Tudor, driving down the freeway.”
The next year, Roach returned to California as a guest of Tudor’s. It became a tradition—Roach staying out back of Tudor’s place in Del Mar during the summer. “He really looked after me,” Roach says. “He showed me a great time, introduced me to everyone at the beach.”
Whether it was San Diego, Orange, or Los Angeles counties, Roach became a familiar face in the car park, in part due to his charm and in part due to the friendships he cultivated. He celebrated his 21st birthday there in Del Mar and, throughout his twenties, traveled with Tudor, spending winters with him in Hawaii. In some ways, he became an adult in Tudor’s company during his most formative years, an experience that mirrored Tudor’s own adolescence—being chaperoned by luminaries like Nat Young, Miki Dora, and Donald Takayama.
“It would be impossible to count the influence he’s had on my approach and my surfing,” Roach says. “I learned a lot from Joel, just about surf history, about integrity with your surfing, about longboarding and longboarding’s history.”
If Roach’s path were a constellation, and if each influence and mentor were a marker, Tudor resembled something like his North Star for a time. But the southern hemisphere had its own stars to map, and Roach set out to make his own place. “He outgrew Joel’s scene,” says Chad
Marshall remembers Roach’s early periodic visits to Malibu and how he was one of the few groms who saw life outside surfing—that there was more to surf culture than surfing itself. Roach’s curiosity struck Marshall— his interest in books, music, Asia, East Los Angeles, the Valley, et cetera.
“It’s translated into who he is and how he surfs,” Marshall says. “He was really open to it. He wanted to learn about it and respect it.”
Roach remembers how during the first Duct Tape Invitational contest in Virginia Beach in 2010, nobody really knew each other. All the surfers had come from their own tight-knit communities, familiar in Noosa or Newport or Jacksonville. But at the East Coast Surfing Championships, in some newfangled longboard competition—which in many ways would resurrect traditional longboarding—they were far from familiar with each other.
The same was true at the next contest in Montauk a month later. This time, however, much of the East End’s city-dwelling population had already decamped for the fall—tumbleweed season, as they call it—and Vans put everyone in the same hotel, essentially forcing the surfers to at least talk to each other. “I think that set the tone,” Roach says. “It was immediate. It tied us together.”
Late one night during one of many gatherings that preceded the event, the 16 competitors broke into two groups. One camp was sound asleep, counting sheep with the hope that they would make the final heat and win with a clear head. The other gathered with drinks, growing warmer and sillier as the hands of the clock spun.
Roach remembers at one point raising his beer, taking a drag of a cigarette, and shouting, “I’m an athlete!” Who was going to win seemed meaningless after midnight among this group—and the joke articulated a question about whether this culture, its range of careers, and longboarding itself was better considered as a sport, something to win, or closer to an art, something to practice.
In most of the years that followed, money and competition didn’t move Roach. They were there in bits and pieces—a win here, a contract with decent incentives there, maybe a livable wage when cobbled together—but any sense of security remained elusive. Contests were thin at best. Brands he worked with over the years paid paltry salaries. Even partnerships with companies like Dior didn’t fill the piggy bank.
Instead, there was a sense of mystery that became its own currency for him. Returning year after year to Indonesia, learning each bend in the coast and which little hole in the jungle led where, shaped his life. And, like a web, he spun that into a career. The same sentiment of mystery held true on trips into the North Atlantic, to Middle America, or even just a run down the river in Noosa. “I was trying to sustain the lifestyle I wanted to live,” he says. “I never really thought about it. I wanted to work with cool people. I wanted to be creative.”
When you look back today at the individuals Roach has worked with, it’s clear that he made good on that promise, counting Campbell, Kidman, Peterson, Jack McCoy, Dustin Miller, George Trimm, Steve Cleveland, and Chris Burkard among his long list of collaborators.
It wasn’t until his late twenties that he began to think, Oh, fuck, I need to make some money. I’m just living month to month.
“I’m sure he’s getting his dues now,” says Harley Ingleby, “but for a long time he was underrated for how good he was. He just surfed so well on everything.”
Devon Howard remembers seeing Roach at a club contest in California more than a decade ago, riding a step deck, and thinking to himself that the rumors were true, that Roach had “tapped into something.” The word that came to his mind was “proper.”
After agreeing to retool the WSL’s Longboard Tour in 2019, Howard immediately invited Roach to join it. He knew it was a weak deal in an ailing market, as everybody participating would lose money to compete, but he gave Roach a shout anyway and hung up with his fingers crossed.
Across the Pacific, Roach sat with the idea of pursuing a world title for the first time since he was a kid. World Tour longboarding, after all, had become a parody of shortboarding in many ways, completely out of touch with the thing it was meant to celebrate. The changes Howard was making to the criteria, however, were moving back toward traditional aspects of longboarding, which seemed significant.
I’ve got a chance, Roach thought. I could win.
Immediately, he made his ascension to the top of the leaderboard. Unfortunately, the altered sway of the world in 2020 caused his campaign on the remade tour to come apart in short order. “He was always in the world-champion conversation,” Howard says, but that year he finished seventh.
In 2021, Roach returned, gracefully moving through hiccups like a wave-pool malfunction that forced him to surf in the dark. Still, he made the final in Malibu with his mentor, Tudor.
Tudor won the heat and collected his third title. “That was slightly painful,” Roach says. “But it was also cool to see who I consider to be the legend of longboarding win at his age.” Roach returned home in a fog, the sting of the loss following him. “At that point, I was unsure and still conflicted about whether I wanted to do it again,” he says. After many conversations with Eadie, chewing on just what a world title meant, he found himself wondering what it signified to win among a field of surfers who didn’t really invest much value in that sort of thing. He thought to himself, Who cares? Why do I?
“I found it hard to articulate,” he says. “But I wanted it, and I hated myself for having set that goal.”
In 2022, Roach put on a singlet and paddled out to begin the year on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. By the time he found himself in the final again at the end of the season, in Malibu with Kaniela Stewart, things felt light. His careful, composed surfing lent itself to the corners running through Second Point that afternoon. And to be faced with Stewart, just as tenacious and graceful, seemed fitting.
When the scores deemed Roach the 2022 world champion, the reward for him became less about winning a series of contests and more a reminder of all the places, and the people, that had led him there. A set bent around Third Point and Roach and Stewart shared a wave after the heat, drawing arcs between noserides and highlines—a stark counter to conventional world tour campaigns.
As Roach came out of the water, he remembered sitting with Eadie late at night on their porch a year earlier as he was trying to place just whether this pursuit was at all meaningful. He hadn’t been sure he’d make another go, but then, as if something washed over him, he’d told himself, If I win, I win. If I don’t, I don’t.
A celebratory bacchanal in California ensued after the heat. Then Roach and Eadie flew to Florida, rented a car, and doubled back west to a little haunt in Apalachicola. They hemmed themselves into a wraparound porch with oysters and champagne for Eadie’s birthday. Two days later, they continued west and pressed up against the bar at Liuzza’s by the Track in New Orleans. There, the order was gumbo and Abita amber.
Some days later, after floating through one of America’s most vital corners, tracing the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, Roach thought about pursuing another world title. Why would I ever want to put myself through that again? he asked himself.
[Feature image: Roach’s surfing is mannered, refined, and unflappable. While grounded in the helmsmanship of heavy tankers, his approach also deftly ports over to all type of craft, pits, and walls. Substance and style intersecting at Bells. Photo by Dean Walters].
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