“Massive surf, insane bodyboarding,” Wedge expert Brent Weldon told The Inertia last week. “And some of the biggest action we’ve seen in years at the Wedge in Newport Beach, California.”
The Wedge holds an iconic place in surfing. Now in 1936, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn’t know they were creating a wave-reflecting mirror when it extended the rock jetty at the end of the Balboa Peninsula. Its 20-foot teepees breaking just meters from shore would have carved its own cultural rep, but its starring role in the 1966 film Endless Summer, which created the catchphrase ‘The dirty old Wedge,” cemented its status.
This June’s historic run of south swell topped up the Wedge’s institutional reputation and clogged the Instagram arteries, but also had us thinking about other surfing wedges. Those waves where a convergence of wave energy that creates that characteristic thick, doubling-up peak. A search on Surf-forecast.com, which has more than 7,000 surf spots, shows at least a dozen waves with “Wedge” in the title, including Blaketown (NZ), Kiama (Aus), Allenhurst and four in South Africa. But which are the best? We investigated…