A few short weeks ago, I found myself at The Palm Springs Surf Club, a wave pool nearly two hours inland from the closest beach. Music bumped as Mikey February, one of the finest young surfers in the world, tore apart the complex’s synthetic wedges. I sat in a hot tub, sipping a Big Wave, absolutely mindblown. How could a machine make waves this perfect? Why were so many of the globe’s best surfers spending their weekend in the desert, ripping alongside a bunch of average joes?
My waking daydream had an official name: E.A.S.T Fest. Hosted by STAB and Kona Big Wave, the inaugural live event shipped a handful of the world’s best shapers and surfers into Palm Springs. There were boards to test from past seasons and chances to share sessions in the pool with your favorite pro. The event was an atom bomb of surfing’s most charged molecules, the equivalent of MoMA putting on a paint and sip with David Hockney and Yayoi Kusama. (Or: Pat Mahomes and Travis Kelce showing up to the neighborhood turkey bowl to toss the pigskin before Thanksgiving dinner.)
When I speak with February, he says of the event: “This is a chance to bring generations together, different designs together, people together…to share [this sport] with one another, I think that’s the whole purpose, really.”
It was also an opportunity to tear down surfing’s professional barriers. “Surfing can be a little bit separate,” he says. “You don’t really get to interact and be close to the people competing — their boards are like this secret thing that no one gets to touch.” And so the typically untouchable for us mortals gained physical form, as California’s surf-obsessed demo came together to ogle its heroes, sample a revolutionary quiver of boards and hunt a few baby blue barrels along the way.
The Present (and Future) of Surf Media
In the 20 years since STAB was founded by Sam McIntosh and Tom Bird — who at one point sold the company, and later bought it back — the imprint has evolved from a small Australian surf magazine to surfing’s premier multimedia platform.
STAB filled the void after the old surf mags collapsed, centralizing its growth around short form video, YouTube series and live events. They’re not shy about sharing controversial opinions to drive conversation, either. In short, they saw the direction media was heading and brought surfing along for the ride.
Growing up in the industrial surf mecca of Orange County, CA, I couldn’t avoid STAB’s influence — not that I wanted to. Whether you always agree with them or not, they’ve pushed the boundaries of the sport, providing an outlet for the content of free-surfers (non-competitive professional surfers) and a touchpoint for the parking lot chatter of surf laymen worldwide. One of their most fruitful endeavors, and my personal favorite, is their series EAST (an acronym for the Electric Acid Surfboard Test).
An homage to Ken Kesey’s 1960s counterculture, the show raises the curtain on the most mysterious of tools: the board beneath the surfer’s feet. First, STAB challenges some of the sport’s prolific shapers to make boards for an anonymous pro. Over a few weeks, the surfer test-drives each board, with the goal of correctly guessing each creator and selecting a favorite from the bunch. It’s is a double-blind experiment, hellbent on pushing the surfer into uncharted territory, and it has a secondary impact of innovating the very art of board building.
EAST is the kooky cousin to the original iteration of this idea, made popular through STAB in the Dark. But while that series tested the stock standard blades of the World Tour, this one leans towards the kooky and colorful. Shapers are asked to make ’em weird, alternative, even asymmetrical, in an effort to pry open every possible door in surfboard design.
It’s a task that requires, as February says, “Going into open to the fact that you maybe don’t know as much as you think you do.”
With this open mindset — and the series debuting this week — February follows in the footsteps of past test subjects including: eight-time Women’s World Champ Stephanie Gilmore, three-time Men’s World Champ Mick Fanning and surfing’s perennial antihero, Dane Reynolds, to name a few. All are monotheistic devotees to those aforementioned high-performance shred sticks. But all are very different from this year’s host.
Meet Mr. Mikey February
STAB could not have chosen a better subject for this year’s test. February has slowly but surely become the long-limbed style master of our generation. He surfs — and lives, from what I can tell — with a grooving elegance, a fluid patience, neither of which detract from the fact that he absolutely rips.
Before becoming one of the world’s most well known free-surfers, February was a competition surfer and, in 2018, became the first black South African to make the WSL championship tour. After achieving what he’d spent his whole life chasing, he realized it was no longer what he wanted. There was more to surfing, his career and his life than competition.
No longer confined by a rigorous tour schedule or contest paradigms, February was finally free to experiment. He goes far beyond surf porn, delving into the sights, sounds and colors of the places he travels. February manages to find the rhythm of these locales, making them a protagonist unto themselves, and matching their tempo by shredding on a wide and vibrant array of boards.
He brings a depth of exploration and storytelling to the table that surf culture desperately needs. And he applies that skillset in STAB’s latest project, using the idea of time travel to better understand surf design. “I wanted to pick and choose from the past, present and future as a way to have this wide understanding,” he says, “and kind of use that to inform the whole picture.”
“Crackling With Radioactive Potential”
Surfing, at its deepest core, is about exploration. Exploration of the planet and its farthest flung corners, of ourselves and our limits, of the possibilities of engineering, innovation and the vast difference of feelings these can bring.
It is one of the few sports that puts you in direct communion with nature, riding the energy of a storm thousands of miles away on a vehicle born of a creative and technical human mind. EAST forces this all together, in one place, putting us in the hands of one of the sport’s most exciting athletes for a five-part series.
Mikey says the experience has been a gift: “With EAST, these are boards that you would get in a lifetime, but you get them all within a few months. As a surfer, that’s kind of the dream.”
It’s a gift he’s taken full advantage of, considering his fingerprints are all over this thing. I’m told he had a strong hand in all the art and branding, and put together the whole musical score himself. He expanded the pool of shapers from 10 to 16 and rode the boards in waves from Australia to San Francisco. The ingredients are all there for another incredible season, crackling with radioactive potential.
Come join February, as I had the opportunity to last month, as he embarks on the 2025 edition of EAST, in all its fizzing, popping, rainbow-tinted glory. I think the Merry Pranksters would be proud.
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