Tom Carroll nearly drowns at Turtle Dove Shoal

No stranger to epic big waves, here’s Tom Carroll seventy-five kilometres off the coast of Geraldton in Western Australia, at a secret reef known as Turtle Dove Shoal, in what he describes as ‘the worst hold down of my life’. 

‘It was a long, kind of rollercoaster ride – quite a heavy impact and then the whole thing just went over me.’

Over one big-wave winter season in 2011, Aussie tow-surfing legend Ross Clarke-Jones and two-time world champion Tom Carroll enlisted the help of surf forecaster Ben Matson and together they tracked and chased giant storms across the Great Southern Ocean experience the brutal force of Mother Nature, score the waves of a lifetime and come close to death, before embarking on an expedition to surf a mythical wave that has never before been ridden. Truly heavy scenes – watch the whole trip in Storm Surfers right here: