On The Search In The Great White North With Mathea Olin
“Kentent”, the latest release from Rip Curl team rider Mathea Olin and filmmaker Nate Laverty, takes you deep into the cold-water solitude of Canada's seldom explored coastline.
A deep dive into the Canadian outback—affectionately known as the Great White North—Mathea Olin’s the new film “Kentent” is an compromising look at just what it takes to surf and explore in some of North America’s harshest conditions. Produced by filmmaker Nate Laverty, the project was an adventure from beginning to end.
“The wind kicked up and created some tight interval swell that was about six-foot and capping basically the whole way,” recalls Laverty. “Combined with hard rain and fog, we couldn’t really see the coastline, and then the GPS went out and we nearly drove straight to Russia.”
“If you want to surf some of the best waves in Canada it will come with nasty boat rides,” adds Olin. “We definitely had a few times where stuff went wrong, it was bigger and windier than the forecasts were calling for, it was foggy, our GPS stopped working. But on boat rides like that, you really realize how important a good crew is and how important it is to know your stuff and help in anyway you can, so you can all make it home safely.”
Two years in the making, what started out as plans to make a short edit transformed into a revealing look into some of Canada’s secluded barrelling waves.
“At the beginning of the summer, I talked to Nate about some filming ideas I had, and we decided to do a summer camping and filming trip to create an artsy, two to three-minute edit just from the one trip. We ended up getting skunked on waves but had all this amazing camping footage that we just sat on for half a year or so; not sure what to do with it. Then we ended up having a bunch of good swells hit our coastline in the fall and winter and just did a bunch of last-minute surf trips to the waves that excel with those swell forecasts.”
As for the film’s unusual title, “Kentent,” that also has a story of its own.
“The reason we decided to name the film ‘Kentent’ was because I was super content being at home, and spending more time exploring our area, but Nate didn’t like the way ‘content’ looked so we wrote it as ‘kentent,’” laughs Olin. “For me, personally, when I was on these trips, there was no other place in the world I would rather be, I was just feeling so happy with the life I was living and so grateful to call this place my home.”
“Our coastline is so rich with wildlife, when you are out camping in the middle of nowhere, you see something around every corner, they are doing their thing and we are doing ours and its quite special to get to grow up with that experience,” she continues. “I remember a camping trip a while back we were all sitting around a fire having our morning coffee and we got to watch a pack of wolves walk right in front of us. That was definitely one of the most insane experiences I’ve had so far.”
