You tell us. Biggest paddle-waves ever? Photo: Stu Gibson/The Collective

With all the snow we’ve been getting in the last couple of weeks, you’d be forgiven for forgetting to check the surf. It’s bloody freezing, and the rewards to be found in the hills seem to outweigh those that found in the ocean.

The cold water doesn’t phase the crew down in Tassie though, and a hardy bunch of the country’s most committed big wave surfers were watching the storms that dumped centimeters of snow on Victoria and NSW’s mountains, and knew they were going to get theirs. But they weren’t taking a chairlift to get up the mountains they rode.

With no jetski in sight, James Dell, Marti Paradisis, Mikey Brannan, James Hick and Queensland’s Mark Visser surfed what some are already calling the biggest waves ever paddled into in Australia.

Stuart Gibson was there to document the action, and on the always-excellent photog site The Collective, he has a bunch of shots that make Tassie look more like Hawaii’s Waimea Bay than anything we’ve seen at home.

The story Stu posted (before bailing to Fiji to chase the same swell into the tropics) gives just a tiny hint of the lengths they went to just to get in the water on Saturday. Getting bogged on collapsed roads, chopping down trees that had fallen across the path and wading through tidal surges isn’t even the half of it.

Hats off to all the boys involved – Saturday looks like it was a groundbreaker for Australian surfing. Check the Collective for more shots from this session, and keep your eye out for Stu’s feature from the day, coming soon to a surf mag near you.