It was around seven years ago, on a surf trip to the Coffs Harbour region of Australia’s NSW, that I first started noticing TCSS logos. And no wonder. At the time, The Critical Slide Society was a fledgling enterprise started by two local boys, Jim Mitchell and Sam Coombes. In fact, it was more of a movement than a brand. TCSS started as a blog, and slowly grew into a community. But then things started to gain momentum, and suddenly, less than a decade later, TCSS is a multi-million dollar surf brand. The irony, of course, is that TCSS is...

While soft-top boards were all but written off 10 years ago, these days it seems like everyone has one. From total beginners to pros who rip the snot out of them and paddle them into double-overhead Pipe, foamie surfboards are everywhere. Jamie O’Brien has pretty much built a career around surfing critical barrels on soft-tops, and pulling stunts like mid-barrel transfers from foamies to normal boards. Kalani Robb has seen his career revived after signing with a soft-top brand, and Koa and Alex Smith are notorious for breaking and returning so many soft-tops to Costco that they forced the retail...

  I’m on a surf trip in Iceland at the moment—that’s 66 degrees north, just a hair shy of the arctic circle. In other words, it’s cold. At the moment, the water is around 48 degrees, the air is a bit less, and the wind is ripping at a solid 40 knots. But it’s ripping offshore, which means that I’m doing multiple sessions per day. After all, the wind could turn tomorrow and it could be onshore for weeks—gotta get it while it’s good! Having grown up in Hawaii and spent 15 years on an island in the south Pacific,...