New South Wales has been absolutely hammered by storms. A mix of king tides and an extraordinarily low pressure system created conditions that haven’t been seen in decades, and New South Wales bore the brunt of it. It was a big brunt, too–so big, in fact, that one wave in particular entered the record books as the largest ever recorded there.
The wave in question was created by the same system that turned the Red Bull Cape Fear event into one of the greatest contests ever run, much to the chagrin of the WSL. While the competitors in Fiji played ping pong and got drunk at the bar, Red Bull’s event–which, to be fair, hasn’t ever materialized the way everyone knew it could and had a full year to be prepared–blew the doors off pretty much any other contest before it.
According to the Daily Mail, at just after 4 am on Monday morning, when seven buoys off the coast of Eden in New South Wales recorded a wave of 58 feet, smashing the old record of 49 feet. Surprisingly, the previous record wasn’t set all that long ago, in April of 2015.
Although there has surely been a larger wave at some point in the past, it hasn’t rolled through since the early ’70s, when they began keeping records.
“It was so hectic. The surf was washing the beach away up to the point where homes were washing into the ocean,” said Riley Gray, a Canadian arborist and surfer living in NSW. “People lost swimming pools and shit like that… it’s pretty hectic.”
