Surf Cat

Growing up 100m from the beach in the Australian town of Coolum, Julian Wilson’s life revolved around two things: surfing and skateboarding. While other childhood pastimes came and went – golf, motocross and more – the two board sports had Wilson’s heart from day one.

Although the 2014 Pipe Master clearly found his true calling in the ocean and the occasional injury saw him put away his deck for a month or two here and there, he never turned his back on skating, and last year he started to imagine combining his two passions. That’s where the idea for The Rail Project, building and then riding a skate-style rail in the waves, first sprang from.

Wilson talked to his shaper, Jason Stevenson from JS Industries, about the and the pair agreed that due to its minimal weight and maximum strength, carbon fibre was required for both the custom surfboards and custom-made rail needed to attempt the project.

Wilson left his beloved Sunshine Coast a few years back to live closer to his wife’s family in Newcastle and his first few attempts at hitting the freshly built slick box went down just off the coast of his new hometown. Whipping in behind a jet ski, Wilson tasted success from the start, but deep down he felt that paddling-in unassisted, grinding the rail and then riding out cleanly was the only way to truly declare the mission accomplished.

The local trial and error sessions were invaluable, but given the endless challenges presented by the ocean, Wilson decided to turn his sights to Australia’s first commercial wave pool, URBNSURF, and its chlorinated, controlled environment. He never assumed it would be a simple task, but even after the move to a man-made lagoon in Melbourne, The Rail Project still refused to be a straight forward affair – even with 600kg of ballast to keep things anchored down.

A team of swimmers was deployed to wrangle the rail back into place after every attempt, but it was so heavy that it took more than 15-minutes to reset between attempts and, despite the very early pre-dawn start, time started running out in a hurry.

A change of tactic saw most of the box’s weight jettisoned and while this lead to greater manoeuvrability, it also lead to the scariest moment of the whole project. You need to hit play on the video above to see for yourself that despite how fun this project looks, it was also pretty damn dangerous.

With some positive reinforcement from coach Luke Egan and driven to get back to the carefree approach of his skating days, in the last hour of the attempt something clicked for Wilson. As time ticked away, he launched a string of successful attempts and was left grinning from ear-to-ear when he finally found himself sessioning a rail like he was back at the Coolum skatepark of his youth – just with 5’10” of fibreglass underfoot.

As well as Hype Republic filming and editing the clip atop this page, photographer Andy Green shot the stills on a project he helped conceptualise with Wilson. To say the team was happy as they flew out of Melbourne would be an understatement, but we’re happy to let their actions to do the talking on this one.

As the saying goes: dream it, believe it, achieve it. That’s exactly what Julian Wilson did with The Rail Project, all while continuing to push his surfing to new heights and take it to new places along the way.