Jaws: “Blue scary not brown scary!”

Chas Smith

By

Ian Walsh talks surfing Jaws. The lost files!

You have certainly seen the teaser for Ian Walsh’s new film Distance Between Dreams with the swirling passion, the guts, the glory. If, for some reason, you missed please click here. 

I wrote, when the clip was released, about meeting with Ian Walsh under a warm Cardiff sky to discuss. Oh we had fun and I scribbled his descriptions of big wave surfing, Maui life etc. in my moleskin and then put it away, forgetting about it until just yesterday when I was flipping through and saw the phrase “Blue scary not brown scary” in reference to, I assume, Jaws.

There were more scribbles too but the context is unclear so I will just reprint here, context-free, and call this Ian Walsh Talks Surfing Jaws (Probably): The Lost Files. Like poetry!

Blue scary not brown scary.

Big waves.  Dropout

everything bills (stills thrills?), feelin etc.

Only time I’m completely in one place, one goal

How fast everything moves

Football speed.

So much faster, the speed.

The wave is so

kind of have a general idea

part of surfing

Jaws… any big wave such a challenge

head down sending it the appreciation is so much more.

julia roberts pretty woman

“Prostitution at surf shops!”

Derek Rielly

By

All the kooky search words that land you at BeachGrit!

How did you land at BeachGrit? Are you a regular, for whom misleading headlines and harmless slander are as much your morning go-to as your cup of joe?

Maybe you’re just a periodical browser, tempted here and there by BeachGrit‘s anti-depressive ethos, by the occasional lure of aggregated videos and whatever else.

Or are you, like the following internet users, lured, perhaps, by our habit of tagging stories with the oddest combinations.

Did you land here, for instance, when you googled “prostitution at surf shops”, perhaps needing a pre-surf rim and golden shower along with your Sex wax.

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Do you imagine a world where your every dark desire is attended to?

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Would you like to see America’s first Samoan-Hindu congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in the nude? Google drives you to BeachGrit!

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A north Shore holiday needs a little extra zing?

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Or are you a real creep? A real bear freak?

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I’m curious! Real curious. How did you land here?

Dear Rory: “Is surfing worth it?”

Rory Parker

By

It's a hard sell when you're fighting for onshore scraps with self-centered assholes…

Dear Rory,

I have given the act of wave riding most of my best years. I’m heading towards 40 now and still manage to spend a lot of time in the water, but I can’t shake the feeling that I should be doing something else. Surfing has given me a decent level of fitness but there’s a thousand sports that will do the same without the time commitment or the frustration levels. I’ve given so much time and effort to becoming a slightly aging, average to competent surfer. Is surfing worth it?

Sliding that Midlife Crisis 

Dear Rory says: I really want to say, “Yes! It’s totally worth it. Only a surfer knows the feeling. You’ve become one with the aquatic mother Gaia. The rest of the world are sad, unhip, dry-land losers.”

But that’d be a lie.

Truth be told, surfing is pretty much a waste of time. It doesn’t improve anything. Doesn’t help anyone. We can try to pretend that it’ll help you find an emotional center, serve as a crutch as you struggle through your day to day. But that’s a hard sell when you’re fighting for onshore scraps with your hundred fellow self-centered assholes.

Surfing will never make you a better person. Judging by your average wave slider it might actually make you a worse one.

Truth be told, surfing is pretty much a waste of time. It doesn’t improve anything. Doesn’t help anyone. We can try to pretend that it’ll help you find an emotional center, serve as a crutch as you struggle through your day to day. But that’s a hard sell when you’re fighting for onshore scraps with your hundred fellow self-centered assholes.

But the nice thing about life… there’s no point. You’re just gonna put one foot in front of the other until you drop dead. Hopefully in some sort of awesome explosion, or a naked lady avalanche. The latter being my choice of demise.

The real problem with surfing is that we all treat it as part of our identity. I know I do. It’s in there with the other labels I apply to myself. Writer, lover, diver, really-big-penis-haver, surfer. In that order.

And that’s a bit of a curse. What do you do when you realize you don’t love your own identity? It’s a part of growing up, for sure, and we all go through it at some point or another. But getting hit with that realization hammer well into adulthood absolutely fucking sucks.

What to do?

Just quit for a bit. When surfing stops being fun, stop doing it. Maybe for a short period. Maybe for forever. It just doesn’t matter. Nothing does.

You’ll lose your tan, your shoulder muscles will wither, but odds are that one day you’ll wake up and feel like going for a surf. You’ll have fun. Rediscover the stoke. Yeah, your ability will suffer, but who cares? It’s not like any of us are that good to begin with.

Take up another hobby in the meantime. Feel free to keep it ocean related. Those big salty bodies of water hold a never ending source of fun and excitement.

Freediving is very fun. It dovetails well with ocean experience. It’s got an awesome, always lurking, potential for death. And there’s really no better way to feel alive than by dancing at the edge of the void.

Caught in a jam? Stuck in a pickle? Send your life questions to [email protected]. Due to volume Rory cannot respond to every letter. 

Official: WSL Fun yet mentally retarded!

Chas Smith

By

Will the World Surf League use the phrasing in new marketing initiative?

We all know that Wikipedia is truth. It is where late night, drunken arguments are settled. Where college students cut and paste to finish overdue assignments. And if any college students are writing essays about your World Surf League right now they will cut and paste:

The World Surf League (WSL) is a band of fun loving, yet mentally retarded, water dancers who splash in the ocean for points handed down by a motley crew of potentially more mentally retarded Australian and Brazilian judges.[1] Alternately, it is the governing body for professional surfers and is dedicated to showcasing the world’s best talent in a variety of progressive formats.[2] It was known as the Association of Surfing Professionalsfrom 1983 to 2014.[3] The organization, originally founded in 1976, began with Hawaiian surfers Fred Hemmings and Randy Rarick [4]

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Thank you Mariano Landa. I have never chuckled so robustly in my entire life. Go and click on the WSL wiki page HERE before some cruel, humorless stagehand takes it all down.

Once again:

The World Surf League (WSL) is a band of fun loving, yet mentally retarded, water dancers who splash in the ocean for points handed down by a motley crew of potentially more mentally retarded Australian and Brazilian judges.[1] Alternately, it is the governing body for professional surfers and is dedicated to showcasing the world’s best talent in a variety of progressive formats.[2] It was known as the Association of Surfing Professionalsfrom 1983 to 2014.[3] The organization, originally founded in 1976, began with Hawaiian surfers Fred Hemmings and Randy Rarick [4]

Ha!

Build: An Ivy League wave pool!

Chas Smith

By

The smartest people in the world jump into the artificial wave game!

Kelly Slater is a very smart man with diverse opinions but is he Ivy League smart? For those amongst us who might confuse “Ivy League” with “World Surf League” allow me explain some differences.

The Ivy League is an eastern seaboard conference that includes some of the best colleges and universities in the United States. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Yale. Only the brightest are allowed in and, there, work on curing cancer etc.

The World Surf League is a band of fun loving, yet mentally retarded, water dancers who splash in the ocean for points handed down by a motley crew of potentially more mentally retarded Australian and Brazilian judges.

But guess what? At Yale the students in the mechanical engineering and materials science department decided to take a break from serious matters in order to build the best wave pool ever!

Kelly Slater good? Let’s read about it on Yale’s website!

Although no surfer herself, Katherine Berry ’17, took on the challenge. She built a prototype with help from Schroers and Wilen with the goal of designing a ring-shaped surf park that would produce longer-running waves.

Her prototype is a 3-foot-by-3-foot-by-6-inch park base with a series of interchangeable underwater inserts, both made with polystyrene foam. A rotating arm made from PVC piping hangs overhead, pulling a small plow through the water to generate the waves. The base of the park is adjustable to produce a variety of wave sizes and shapes. 

This fall, Berry moves on to other things, though other students  may take up the project. A lot of progress was made in the spring, she said, but more work is needed on getting the waves to break. She’s hopeful that using a curved plow instead of the flat one of the current design would help correct this.

Berry said the project was a good way to demonstrate the far-reaching impacts engineering can have.

“It forced me to think about specialized needs for groups I am unfamiliar with inside a community, why those needs exist, and how to approach satisfying them without necessarily having a vested interest,” she said. “I think as an engineer it’s good to be exposed to unfamiliar projects, because throughout your career you’ll need to know how to ask the right questions to effectively and think through all kinds of diverse design problems that apply to groups beyond yourself.”

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What the hell is she talking about? That language thing is hard to read and the pichure is not so clear.

Photo: Justin Jay/@justinjayphoto
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