Thursday, October 1, 2026
Will Skudin can routinely be found on his surfboard in the waves off Long Beach, waiting for one more good ride.
But earlier this month, the 36-year-old Skudin, whose family name is synonymous with surfing in Long Beach, headed to Nazaré, Portugal, to compete in an annual challenge that attracts some of the world’s top surfers for a single day of monster rides.
Skudin was one of 18 competitors on Feb. 10, and the only one from the U.S. It takes a lifetime of dedication to get to compete at Nazaré, he said.
Each of the surfers teamed up with a partner and took turns on the waves. Teammates each surfed twice, for 50 minutes at a time, and were permitted to switch whenever they wanted to save energy. The judges scored each surfer’s top two waves, and each pair’s scores were added for an overall score.
Skudin and his British partner, Andrew Cotton, finished third out of nine teams.
Nazaré saw 50-foot waves this time around, but Skudin said he has seen waves as big as 70 to 100 feet over the course of his career. He has been surfing competitively for most of his life, mostly in “paddle-in” events, in which contestants paddle themselves out to the waves. Nazaré is a tow-in event, in which the two teammates alternate towing each other out with a personal watercraft and surfing.
The event was once paddle-in, but changed to tow-in in the winter of 2018 to make the surfers’ trips out to the waves safer and easier, since there’s nothing safe about paddling out to waves as big as Nazaré’s, according to Skudin.
“I grew up more with paddling myself in — it’s more man versus wild,” he said. “With tow-in, I love the team aspect. To be back in a competitive environment, and now with a team, it’s really fun.”
His partner, Cotton, who is from North Devon, England, was competing in his third Nazaré event, and this was the second time the two had teamed up. They surfed together in another big-wave contest in Nazaré in December, and finished seventh.
The two met at a big-wave event in Ireland in 2012, and decided then that they would someday team-up.
Cotton, 42, said it’s an “absolute no-brainer” that they’ll team up again, because they feel like they just keep getting better together. “It’s like building a house,” Cotton said of their partnership. “Our first event was the foundation. This event was the walls, and for the next one, we’ll finish it.”
Skudin shared Cotton’s enthusiasm about teaming up again, and added that he hoped to return to Nazaré as well. “I’m grateful and blessed to have the opportunities, and to be able to compete,” he said. “I’m still learning, though. You never stop learning.”
