Australian pro wakeboarding champion Josh Sanders rides on water year round, splitting his time between Australia and Florida where the water’s always warm and the temperature never falls below 70 degrees. “It’s a great lifestyle—and good to avoid the cold,” Sanders says.
PRO WAKEBOARDER
The 27-year old Aussie moved to the U.S. when he was only 16 to pursue a pro career in wakeboarding, a sport that was still in the early stages of development back home. Sanders, who won the Pro Wakeboard Tour in 2005, changed all that. He started a nationwide pro contest circuit back in Oz to create opportunities that didn’t exist back when he was coming up as a young, aspiring pro. “When I first started wakeboarding, I had to fly all the way to Orlando to rate myself as a rider. I wanted to change that. Now kids can ride on the Australian Pro Tour all over the country."HAVE BOAT, WILL TRAVEL
Sanders grew up surfing on the south coast of New South Wales in a little beach town called Nowra. “My dad had a fishing boat, and whenever there were no waves, we’d get him to tow us around behind his boat on our surfboards.” The surf must have been pretty inconsistent that year, because soon Sanders was riding behind his dad’s boat more than he was out catching waves. “One day we went into a shop and found someone had made a scurfer—one of the first versions of a wakeboard around—and that’s when it all began,” he remembers.
LARGER THAN LIFE
It’s not always just about the contest circuit, though. Sanders joined fellow pro wakeboarder Parks Bonifay on a ground-breaking journey to Tahiti in 2002 where the duo towed into Teahupoo—the heaviest wave in the world—on their wakeboards. “That wave is a totally different beast,” Sanders says, explaining they had tried towing into waves in Australia prior to embarking on their adventure to Tahiti. “For us, it was huge. We were totally out of our element. If you fell on the wave, the board was still strapped to your feet so the wave would suck you back over and just pound you. At one point I got caught inside and took three or four waves on the head and thought I was going to drown before [pro surfer] Ross Clark Jones rescued me on the jet ski. But the waves we rode were amazing. I’ve never done anything like it.”
