JC: McKercher has always been rated as one of the best onshore wave riders in the world after being brought up smacking lips at Scarborough Beach back in Perth Western Australia. In 2004 he was the surprise package at the Gran Canaria World Cup and took the locals down at their home patch on his way to securing the World Title later in the year in Sylt. A few years later, injury would force him off the tour, but a fulltime vacancy in Starboards R&D Dept. beckoned and his career in windsurfing continued.
SM: “Winning the world title when I was 34 definitely elongated my career. It was hard to see what was going on at the time as other things were quite turbulent in my life. It was all pretty surreal. When I finally quit the tour, it took a while to let go of that life. But then I found myself sailing perfect waves when the rest of the tour was in Sylt and I was pretty happy about that. I didn’t feel the need to go hang out with the granny groupies of Sylt anymore! But then, when events like Cabo Verde came along, there was no way I was missing out on that. But a couple of years later I was even able to let go of that desire too. I am still keeping my hand in when I can and the last few years I have been in Tenerife for testing and the forecasts have looked really good, so I entered. While there’s jumping involved I know there’s no hope these days but I was pretty happy to get through a couple of heats each year due to my wave scores though. It was kind of a natural evolution from what I was already doing to shift over to testing. I was already doing all the waveboard design, but in 2008 when my hip just couldn’t handle the jumping anymore, Svein had asked me to come along and help out with some of the SUP testing. And then, as things kept accelerating on that front, it evolved into a full-on job balancing windsurf duties along with the growing SUP range. The main thing was that it has kept me on the water since the competition days and perhaps even more than when I was competing”