Oliver Risi was on the North Shore. While staying at the Volcom house they harnessed fun out of their surroundings between surfing and eating for a trip to remember. So they decided to document some of the moments and friends they met a long the way.

Pizza or pasta? What’s the wind doing? Those were our biggest worries for the sixteen days that Keanu Miller and I spent in the Volcom house on the North Shore. Keanu is sponsored by Volcom and spends a few weeks at the house each winter surfing. This time I joined and documented the whole trip carrying my cameras everywhere we went.

We arrived, from Down Under, as the winds were still blowing from the North, which they had been for around 4 weeks. This direction is terrible for the North shore so we found ourselves for the first few days running around to different skate spots and watching surf movies on repeat. I think we watched one old surf film on repeat about 15 times because it was left playing in the dungeon until somebody could be bothered to change it.

When we weren’t out and about or surfing, you could find us laying around and talking shit in the dungeon. The dungeon is a small room under the house with a bunch of bunk beds and a few lounges for team riders to stay in. We spent each and every night In there watching surf flicks and talking rubbish. There were a few other boys staying at the house at the time, Baptiste Gaud from France, Joao Moreira from Portugal and Marcos Hootman from Mexico. Keanu knew Baptiste and Marcos from the last few years and we all become great mates by the time our stay was up.

Being the young blokes we are, none of us really knew how to cook besides
turning on an oven or boiling some water on the stove. Our days consisted of a bowl of cereal for breakfast, maybe a banana if we happened to have any, an acai bowl for lunch from the food trucks down the road but sometimes we would try and eat a lot of dinner the night before to opt out of buying lunch to save a few bucks. Then the hard decision of either a frozen pizza or pasta for dinner. We would rotate between the two each night, with all of us giving a helping hand to heat the oven or cook the pasta. This was our daily routine.

There is a lot of time to spare when you are living on the North Shore and there are no waves! You could find Baptiste in the yard painting most of the time or mastering “Scar Tissue” on the guitar. We sat on the deck watching the waves and achieved legendary status at the art of doing nothing. When the waves were good though, the boys were out there.

This trip to find waves just happened to coincide with a perfect cyclone swell back home in Australia. Nevertheless, we scored plenty of waves and had a ripper of a trip. – Oliver Risi