Kelly Slater's Guilty Pleasure Is Still Candy Crush
I’ve been trying to teach myself calligraphy,” says Kelly Slater. It’s not the first thing you expect to hear from the world’s greatest surfer, but a man’s gotta have hobbies, especially one who spends his working hours traveling the globe in search of the next great wave, or making them-literally-on his ranch in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Right now, he’s taking advantage of a little R&R to get acquainted with his new iPad Pro-a gift from Apple, he tells me-and practice some handwriting with its digital pencil. Being the GOAT, it seems, comes with a few perks.
It’s a Sunday afternoon in November, and downtime seems to be the order of the day. It has been for awhile now. A May 2018 incident on his personal wave machine left him phoneless for a couple weeks (call it an occupational hazard), forcing Slater to disconnect and appreciate the moments when acquaintances, brands, and obnoxious journalists aren’t blowing up his cell to chat.
“I was doing a live thing from a jet-ski and I dropped it in the water,” he laughs. “They found it like three weeks ago. It was kind of nice-you stop thinking about it, you know?”
Slater talked to Esquire.com (from a new phone) about how technology has changed his industry, his guilty pleasure app, and where the world's best surfer goes for the world's best waves.
Slater is amazed at how far technology has come since he started surfing.
Sometimes I wonder about what it would be like to be a teenager now with all this stuff. Back in the day, I met Sean Collins, and Sean had this thing called Wave-Trak. It was like a 1-800-number you would call every day. You'd get surf reports, and eventually that evolved into Surfline. I kind of like where it was when I was that age, because you were less distracted … But having access to all these things is pretty interesting. You have total access to everything that's happening in our world right at hand. We actually have an app where I recently judged a contest that happened-I was in Hawaii and I was doing some judging via my iPad.
He’s obsessed with his Shark Tracker app.
You can see when a Great White swims past Florida! I’m looking at one right now, just off the Bahamas in this place I go surfing. I think people would be freaked out by how many sharks there are off the coast of New York. It’s super cool.
Technology can go a long way toward protecting the oceans.
There’s this group called the Save the Waves Coalition, and they’ve created an app where you can download pictures in real time from basically any beach, geo-tagged straight into the app. They’re trying to get all the information people have about any beach, the type of trash they see. You can do a live report on it and everything.
For the best surfing in the world, head to Indonesia.
If you had to pick one place where you get the most surf consistently all year, it would probably be Indonesia. If you look at the map of the Indian Ocean, Indonesia just opens up all the way across to Madagascar and South Africa and then down to Antarctica, so you have thousands and thousands of miles for any storm out there to send swell up that way. Especially around this time of year, because of the hemispheres, you get the biggest, strongest storms in that part of the world.
Slater admits to one guilty pleasure when it comes to his phone.
Candy Crush. Oh man. I’m probably one of the last remaining Candy Crushers. When you're in the airplane, or when you're just bored... I'm not playing it very much, but I'm like, 2,300 levels in or something.
And he has one piece of advice for aspiring Crushers.
Don’t start.
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