Review: The Other Stuff

On paper, Suunto's New Vector "wrist-top computer" ($199; 800-543-9124) is dauntingly equipped: It harbors a wristwatch, a compass accurate to within two degrees, a barometer with automatic memory, a temperature gauge, and a digital altimeter with a range up to 29,500 feet. But strap it on and you'll find that it's more fun than frightening, the ultimate toy for your wrist. The altimeter spews out total elevation gained and lost and can tally runs skied — great for adjudicating bar bets at the end of the day. It'll also log your times for each of these runs, so that you can see how you've improved on, say, High Rustler at Alta over the course of a season. And the barometer updates every 10 minutes and tracks barometric trends for the past six hours, which can certainly come in handy when you're trying to determine your turnaround time on a fourteener. The Vector, waterproof to 100 feet, displays all this information in large, easy-to-read numerals and has a bright backlight. Helpful features all, if a bit excessive. Indeed, when you consider that Hakeem Olajuwan could polish his dunking at the summit of Everest without topping out the altimeter, it's fair to say that you'll never utilize the Vector's full potential. The fun is in trying.
— Glenn Randall

There aren't too many surfers who would even consider paddling out at Maverick's — that infamous break just up the California coast from Half Moon Bay — during the 15 or so times a year that it "goes off." But we can all check it out from a safe distance with the arrival of Mavericks: Condition Black ($27; 888-345-6484), a new video from Stormproof Films that's not so much a documentary as it is a 28-minute highlight reel of perhaps the most fearsome convergence of wave and reef on the planet. Veteran surf filmmaker Alexis Cottavoz-Usher weaves in scenes captured during the El Ni±o winter of 1997-1998, when Maverick's fired a record 38 times, with footage shot from the shore and boats over the last seven years. The result is a video that brings you close to the foaming turmoil as one tower of water after another rises from the dark bottom, with surfers pawing madly to make the drop and then (typically) wiping out in harrowing fashion. The effect is a little numbing, and indeed the surfers themselves seem somewhat dazed by the forces at work. In what is sure to become one of the most memorable lines in the genre, surfer Neil Matthies, when asked about the magnitude of a wipeout he's just survived, replies, "It wasn't that big." Then the video cuts to the ride in question: Matthies drops in on a 25-footer, pearls violently at the bottom, and is held under for two consecutive waves. Still, the star of Condition Black isn't any of its marquee big-wave surfers — chargers such as Evan Slater, Peter Mel, Grant Washburn, and the late Mark Foo — but rather the waves themselves, which are, in the literal sense of the word, awesome.
— John L. Stein

Photographs by Clay Ellis