Alt-right mountain blog singles out half of the population!
Venice-adjacent’s alt-right The Inertia has been accused of overt racism many times but today they went after women too.The sometime surf website reported just hours ago:
Turns out the vibes were not all aloha at Lunada Bay during the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day protest meant to end localism at the righthand point. A female surfer believed to be a Palos Verdes local was apparently dropping in and attempting to run visiting surfers into rocks, according to video footage obtained by The Inertia.
Two women repeatedly perpetrated these aggressive shenanigans, according to Victor Otten, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the federal class action lawsuit against the Bay Boys. Otten was not at the event, but speaks on behalf of his clients.
“A female surfer attempted to spear my client Ken Claypool in the face with her surfboard,” Otten said in an email. “There was also another local girl in the water intentionally dropping in on visiting surfers attempting to drive them into the rocks. As the link to the video shows, these two women spent the day harassing visiting surfers and intentionally putting them in danger.”
A female surfer? Attempting to run visiting surfers into the rocks? Aggressive shenanigans? Face spearing?
For shame The Inertia! For shame singling out women surfers as perpetrators of lineup violence! Watch the video for yourself and gauge if there was purposeful rock pushing and face spearing by the fairer sex in video footage obtained by The Inertia (below).
For shame!
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Kelly Slater certainly doesn't need a surf journal. His mind is a steel trap.
Lewis Samuels' wonderful surf journal is put on display!
And I am finally just home from Japan. Tokyo. Shabu shabu. Kawaii. Pow. Etc. My brain is wrapped in a blanket stitched of lag. It feels as if I’m swimming through the world very slowly. Stuck in deep molasses. Maybe a ponzu reduction.
In any case, this general malaise found me scrolling through Instagram very early in the morning and do you know what I saw? Do you know what impressed me greatly?
The great Lewis Samuels’ surf log!
Just look at it! Look at it in all of its glory.
He writes:
My surf journal from January 1992 – twenty five years ago. Includes earnest statements such as “2-3′ EPIC tubes” and “caught as many lefts today as @natemccarthy”
If you zoom in you can make out some phrases like:
January 8th: Go wide in tube as strong watches, then speed then second section…
Or:
January 9th: A pristine day of surfing…
And it impressed me greatly because of the seriousness with which surfing is taken. It is no frivolous pursuit. It is a science, here. A series of noted experiments. And it made me think of how much better at surfing Lewis is than me and also make me wonder if what separates us is this level of exactitude.
My memory being bad and such, every time I go surfing it is like the first time. My body retains enough memory for me not to look overtly foolish (I hope anyhow) but my mind is a blank and shallow landscape. An empty pool. Thus progression stalls. I have fun but the same sort of fun every time I surf (I think anyhow).
How do you approach your surfing? With the eye of a surgeon or the eye of an drunk?
Should we all keep surf journals and see if we can improve our skill?
Taylor Paul seeks a finite answer from the 3x champ!
Ever since Fanning’s fateful 2015, the surfing public has been left to wonder about the path of Mick’s professional career. Will he fuck off and travel the world, trading beers and tubes across the five oceans and seven seas, or will Lightning strike a fourth time?
Mick has relentlessly shirked this question for the past year and for good reason — he’s not sure himself. Well, at least he wasn’t at the time. But according to this wonderful article by ex-Surfing-editor Taylor Paul, Mick should have made up his mind by now! Here’s a snippet:
Right now, I’m interviewing Mick in our hotel, and he’s giving me the answers you’ve read above. He’s thoughtful and well-spoken in his responses, the consummate professional until — ping! — his phone announces a text message after I ask him whether he’s accomplished everything he wants to in surfing. He pulls out his phone to silence it, but looks at the screen first.
“It’s John,” he says. As in, recently-crowned world champ John John Florence. “I texted him yesterday and he just wrote me back.”
“What’d he say?” I ask.
“Umm…” Mick swipes his finger across the screen and reads quickly, almost bashful, “He said, ‘Thanks for the text. I’m so stoked. Couldn’t be happier. Thanks for inspiring me. I’ve learned a lot from watching you and can’t wait to learn more. Hope you’re scoring waves and enjoying the year.’”
“That’s awesome,” I say.
“Um…yeah…” Mick’s looking down, his wheels are turning. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I know what I’m thinking — I wonder if John would have won if Mick had been there. After a few moments, he looks up at me, “What were we talking about again?”
Tonight we’ll see The Lumineers in concert. Tomorrow we’ll leave. Mick will go to London for a few days to rendezvous with Parko, Alain Riou and Ben Howard. Then he’ll go to Amsterdam for a week. By himself. He’ll work on a book project, he’ll wander the city, he’ll be invisible. Then he will go to Norway to surf beneath the northern lights. Two weeks later, I’ll bump into him in the Dubai airport on his way home, the place where he’s going to “sit with it” and make the right decision. He’s pale and unshaven. He buys me a coffee and we talk for while. He doesn’t mention the tour and I don’t ask. He just wants to know how I’m doing.
Soooo that was like three months ago. Which means Mick should probably have an answer by now, right?
Whilst we await his final decision, why don’t you take a few minutes to watch Mick’s triumphant return to his Irish homeland. It’s got good surfing, cinematography, insight, etc.
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Guns? Aren't they part of the Great American Dream too? Of course, says Noa Deane. "I like the away they look, though not the fact they can kill," says Noa. "It's a powerful fucking thing in your hands. It's a weird feeling. You've got a gun with a bullet that can kill someone. Is it sexy? Yeah."
| Photo: Morgan Maassen
The beautiful honesty of Coolangatta grip mogul and gibber Noa Deane.
“It is in my experience that a man with no vices has few virtues” – A Dead President
Lest I should have to remind you, this is BeachGrit. A place to loiter and talk shit about surfing. Call it “Ultra Hard Surf Candy”, say it’s “Anti Depressive”, but know that you are not alone for your obsession with waves and the words written about them. You’re not crazy even if explaining your love for this website strikes others as queer. Remind them that we are BeachGrit and we are proudly libertine.
We all keep coming back showering Chas and Derek with our clicks because all other surf journalists (except you Sabre Norris!) don’t quite scratch the itch. BeachGrit is the only place where our convoluted world revolving around surfing makes sense. It has become in a weird way, a home for me.
Despite the negativity that I’ve spawned in the comment section, I’ve taken the hits and kept coming back. Because this is BeachGrit, we air our grievances publicly. Sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes we lose Rory, but it wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t.
If you didn’t catch it, the paragraph that threw me was this:
“It will be interesting to what comes of Noa, who is dripping with talent but has an apparent proclivity for substance abuse. We’ve seen what happened to Andy, to Bruce, and to tens of other world class surfers who were all but destroyed by their taste for the hooch or the crack or the smack”.
When I confronted Michael about this, he said by “substance abuse”, he meant alcohol and the “or” between vices was to infer that it could be any of those three things. I thought his words were built on whispers and not true.
Last I checked, Michael has never spent any time with Noa and to say that he has a substance abuse problem is to judge him for that one time he said “Fuck The WSL” at Surfer Poll awards or because he didn’t want to do that lame story idea for Stab.
Noa has slowed his roll when it comes to partying. At the Cluster premier, a red-carpet event held in the Ace theater, Noa who went with his proud father, Wayne, and spent the night sober so that he could soak it all in. His life had been a blur of surf trips and he wanted to remember it all.
Just because the guy enjoys a VB, a quarter-pounder with cheese and a cigarette, preferably in the same sitting, doesn’t mean he deserves to be vilified as a train wreck. A five hundred k contract with Volcom suggests something is working.
Yeah, he would surf better if he ate healthy, and he didn’t smoke or drink, but you could level the same charge at Dane Reynolds. And, last I checked, he was still free surfing’s king. If you think Noa’s personality is a contrived marketing technique, you’re wrong.
I called Noa to apologise for the story.
He said: “Stopped giving a fuck what was written about me a long time ago.”
I told him Derek was going to change the story from substance abuse to booze in order for people not to misinterpret that he wasn’t a crack-head or a junkie.
He said: “Isn’t Derek edgy? Why is he changing it… hahah… that’s pussy.”
Aren’t characters like Noa exactly what surfing needs?
Don’t we want more people who aren’t afraid to be ’emselves and don’t treat riding waves like a sport to be taken one heat at a time but as an artful self expression to be done only at full speed?
Don’t we?
Or am I wrong?
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Freed from the shackles of a half-year job that had me deskside for the better portion of daylight, I began counting the trips I would take, the waves I would catch, the dog I would spend my whole days with in this liberated state. Life becomes significantly more bearable when you remove the impermeable prism of schedule, simply by the fact that spontaneity breeds positivity.
Essentially I learned that I’m even lazier and more self-absorbed than previously thought. Any sane person would opt out of nine-to-five employment if it were that easy, and to think that I am somehow special enough to avoid it altogether would be a negative representation of myself, but also not untrue.
It’s exactly fifty-three minutes from my Welcome mat to the sand of Baja’s most consistent beachbreak. That’s if you don’t have to sneak into a Mexican alleyway to take a shit into a plastic bag first. So today it was closer to an hour.
The best thing about Mexico is not the waves (though they are great), nor the food (though it is best), but the fact that I learn something every time I go. This time I learned that I don’t want to work for a living — or at least not the average joe’s version of “working”.
Here’s how. And why.
I rode down with my friend Jeff. He turned his devotion to the environment into a lucrative profession, one that has him chasing honey-holes around San Diego county. And when he’s not getting barreled, he’s a bee removal expert! Specializing in safely extracting whole hives from private residences and transporting them to a bee conservation station.
“Spring and summer are really buzzy for me,” Jeff explained, “but the bees pretty much go dormant in the winter, which leaves me free to surf!” And so Jeff goes to Mexico on Wednesday mornings.
Oh, and did I mention that’s technically work too?
Because in his free time Jeff likes to tinker with cars and GoPros and shit. And one day he invented the MyGoMount GoPro mouth mount, the one with the clever respiration channel, the one that Anthony Walsh uses. In an effort to continually improve his product, Jeff puts in a lot of “R&D” time. Racing and Driving. He gets tubed and then indirectly paid for it.
And I am jealous.
Right now I have no real occupation because I got fired or laid off or whatever. I had what many would call a “dream job” – working for the illustrious Surfing Magazine as a writer/web editor.
Would I have picked any job over it? Never. Was I happy there? I don’t think so.
And that’s crazy! Because in terms of a nine-to-five, there’s literally nothing I am more qualified (which speaks to my lack of practical knowledge and skills rather than any particular talent in this field) or willing to do. Every time I found myself bored or annoyed by the trivial task at hand, I’d tell myself that not only could it be worse, but it theoretically couldn’t be better. And that’s a little depressing.
But then I was let go and within four hours I was genuinely happy about it.
I learned that I’m even lazier and more self-absorbed than previously thought. Any sane person would opt out of nine-to-five employment if it were that easy, and to think that I am somehow special enough to avoid it altogether would be a negative representation of myself, but also not untrue.
Freed from the shackles of a half-year job that had me deskside for the better portion of daylight, I began counting the trips I would take, the waves I would catch, the dog I would spend my whole days with in this liberated state. Life becomes significantly more bearable when you remove the impermeable prism of schedule, simply by the fact that spontaneity breeds positivity. The prospect of something awesome happening at any given moment is truly alluring. And there’s nothing more joyful than dropping everything for the evening glass-off.
I learned that I’m even lazier and more self-absorbed than previously thought. Any sane person would opt out of nine-to-five employment if it were that easy, and to think that I am somehow special enough to avoid it altogether would be a negative representation of myself, but also not untrue.
So I’m gonna ride this chowder train until it runs out. If I discover a way to financially support my personal brand of egotism and aloofness, awesome. If not, I’ll hop back on the wage-worker wagon and die the same slow, painful death as many of you.
But I’m definitely never doing manual labor. Those fuckers die fast.
