Before reading any of this, watch the video below.  Try watching it without groaning.  Impossible.  Having a nine-foot gun stuck in a two-foot thick lip on an eight-foot wave and landing directly on one’s head while one is deep in a backside barrel is, by all accounts, a nightmare scenario. 

Luckily, Koa Rothman is alive and well.  He sustained a concussion, a tweaked neck, a hurt knee and broke (and swallowed!)  a bunch of teeth, but apart from the fact that he’s gotta be out of the water for another week or so, he’s in good spirits when he comes by the Surfline office for a chat. 

Thing is, it’s kind of amazing this is the first serious injury of the year.  Rothman and his Shadow Company brethren Nathan Florence, Luke Davis and Billy Kemper (and others) have been on an absolute tube-bender so far this spring/summer.  There was that slab in the Caribbean.  Rifling Cloudbreak.  Pumping Teahupoo (feature coming soon).  And then this remote, desert outer reef. ( Also coming soon.)  And with the Southern Hemisphere as active as it’s been, they’re not done yet. 

That said, hunting the heaviest barrels on the planet has its risks.  Shallow reef.  Bone-crushing lips.  And even if you do everything right, there’s another guy’s giant surfboard. 

Koa explains: “This place was just amazing.  It was the smallest town and the people were great.  And we went to this wave, a big bombie, and we scored.  It was like a mini Jaws — a mellow takeoff to a perfect, V-Land barrel.  It was more consistently barreling and easier to get barreled than Jaws, actually.” 

After catching about five bombs over five hours, Rothman was beat and decided to catch one more. “ I finally got this wave and pulled in backside,” he says. “ And that was probably the most barreled I’ve ever been on my 9’0” — it was like an eight- to ten-foot wave.  And I’m in the barrel, and all of a sudden I saw this like flash of red — it was this guy’s board.  I put my head down a little bit, ‘cause it was coming straight to my face and it just cleaned me out on the side of my head.  And as soon as that happened, my teeth like shattered together on top of each other.  Broken in half.  And as soon as that happened, I hit the water and swallowed my teeth.  I was like, ‘oh f++k.’” 

After impact, a guy paddling out saw what happened and rushed over to Rothman. “ I thought I crushed my eye socket,” he says. “ It hit me so hard.  And I asked the guy, ‘what’s wrong with my face?’  He said, ‘nothing.’  But I thought he was just saying that ‘cause he didn’t want to freak me out ‘cause we were in the middle of the ocean.  I said, ‘don’t worry, I’m not going to freak out.’  And he says, ‘nothing’s wrong with your face.’  I’m like, ‘what?’  I thought I lost my vision.  It was pretty traumatic.  Worst wipeout surfing for sure.  It was like a car accident.”