Fact: The people despise Surf Ranch!

The masses chant "Fuck the WSL!" just like Noa Deane!

Oh how my soul has been buoyed today by you. By the people. The bald clouds have officially left my sky and the sun shines through upsold Stuttgart tint illuminating both my spirit and path forward in this new dystopian world.

We will overcome!

We are the resistance!

99% lyphe!

Yesterday, you see, Derek Rielly and I both put out starkly opposing viewpoints on Kelly Slater’s Wave Ranch. I hate it and hate it honestly and truly and with everything in me. Seriously. Much of what I write here flips between semi and hyper ironic but that fucking wave pool. Ooooooh. I want, as I said on the Grit! podcast, for Kim Jong Un to sic his hydrogen bombs upon it.

Derek Rielly loves it. Loves it to the point of lusty tears. Loves it and would give up on most everything to be able to surf it everyday.

Who is right?

I am.

You have spoken. You and scientific analysis. For our impassioned pleas were offered up and you have chosen and you have chosen that Kelly’s Modern Hell is a gutless abomination.

My story received (at last count) 160 BeachGrit hearts (shares).

Derek Rielly’s? A mere 57.

So what do we do about that shit, assuming Kim Jong Un can’t quite target nor intercontinental yet?

Should we stand outside Surf Ranch with picket signs? Should we propose a general strike?

Help! I’m new to the people! How do we shut down Wave Ranch forever?


Outer Banks
One day y'gonna ride your last wave home. | Photo: DJ Struntz

Surfer Dies in Outer Banks Storm Swell

No dumb jokes here.

Irma and Maria, stirring up a fine bitch’s brew, claimed another surfer this Thursday.

Irma stole Barbados’  Zander Venecia, who was seventeen, two weeks ago. He was young, full of everything possible, his life pinched  short.

The man who died in Hatteras was 66.

Here’s the brief from AP:

The National Park Service says a surfer pulled from the water off North Carolina’s Outer Banks has died.

The federal agency said in a news release Thursday that a 66-year-old man with a surfboard attached to his ankle was seen floating face-down in the water north of Rodanthe at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
Dare County emergency medical service workers and park service rangers determined the man was dead.

The cause of death has not been determined.

We can appreciate the statement regarding the undetermined cause of death, but the evidence clearly shows he died from doing what he wanted. Thursday’s waves were just about as daydream as any east coast surfer can imagine. Nice, warm clean sets all day.

Who wouldn’t take the day to get wet?

There’s something which pounds at the chest thinking of dying at such a seasoned age whilst surfing. A lifetime of waves kept this cat coming back into his sixties and it’s aspirational.

Now, I’m sure this is causing the most wrenching emotions among his family. But, maybe there’s proverbs in the pain here.

There will be a concluding wave ridden for each of us: the final paddle strokes, last hard bottom turn, then down the line, and so forth. We’ll be grossly unaware of when this will be, however. Maybe appreciation of what we have is only realized when others lose it.

Sixty-six years old.

The man’s death won’t change our behaviors, of course, and there’s nothing romantic about drowning. We waver at the “ultimate act, ultimate price” maxim.

But, certainly it forces us to question the far bookend of our life and how we would like to leave.

Not that we have any lousy choice.


Watch: Mason Ho bathes weary eyes!

A salty bath!

My eyes still burn from looking at Kelly Slater’s ghastly pool monster. All that machinery. All those… machines. My eyes burn as if I have a bacterial infection from commercial dairy farm run-off but thankfully there is Mason Ho. He is my Visine!

Do your eyes need a cleanse too? Well come. Watch. It’s inclusive. It’s for everyone.

snapt3 mho preloaded from rory @ digital good times on Vimeo.


Nuclear: World’s worst surf rage!

Machete dismemberment and arson!

Whew, I sure did blow my stack yesterday re. Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch. 24 hours of quiet frustration came spewing right out like the Bellagio fountain in Las Veh-Gus. Many times, after going nuclear, I’ll recalibrate and feel, “Well, that amount of bile sure was unnecessary…” but this morning I feel equally angry. I’ve got the surf rage and maybe to Indonesian levels.

It was reported by Surfline that a 43-year-old ex-pat surf tour operator working in the Mentawi’s got arrested by the Indonesian government after being involved in bout of surf rage. He claims he was merely defending himself and a crowdfunding page has been set up for his legal defense which reads:

Jordan was attacked after an accidental drop-in at Rifles. The other surfer then threatened to cut him up with a machete, and then burn down Kandui Villas, before trying to jab Jordan with his surfboard one more time. After simply blocking the attempted blow from the other man’s surfboard with his right arm, and in an effort to defend himself from the aggressive attack, he counter-striked with a few punches that resulted in the other man merely having a black eye and a small cut below the eye.

Wow!

Threatened to cut him up with a machete then burn down a hotel then surfboard stabbing? This is not the worst thing I’ve ever heard happening in the water but it is the worst thing I’ve heard being threatened. Machete dismemberment then mass arson?

Wait. Headed to Lemoore. BRB.


This don't get you excited? | Photo: WSL

Epic: Surf Writers’ Wave Ranch Tantrums!

World’s best surfer invents world’s best artificial wave. Why so sad?

There isn’t enough plastic buckets in all of China to contain the flood of tears from surf writers these last couple of days. I’ve wet a few t-shirts myself but only because, even with a drone, a drone pilot and a cherry picker lined up, your pals at BeachGrit couldn’t summon the momentum necessary to record history.

Travis Ferré, of What Youth, he with the honey-hued shoulders and chestnut head of hair, first wept at Kelly’s enclave and its crushing insularity. From an office bedraggled with magazines on every chair, he wrote:

“It feels slimy. Elitist and weird… I get the same queasy feeling I get around private golf courses and churches… I’ll hack my gold ball down any old street before I pay to play that course.”

This morning, Chas Smith, a loveable Lawrence of Arabia figure who likes to stir his Arabs into futile, suicidal attacks, wrote,

“I hate Wave Ranch. I hate it with everything in me and with no pulled punch in vague hopes of getting invited to surf it one day. I hate it with a hatred reserved for drunks who speed through red lights near elementary schools and the Apple Genius Bar. Hate.

“Because it is officially over. The dream has died. Surfing has been successfully and cleanly amputated from ‘surfing.; The simple physical act from one of the most wonderful, most indescribable joys on earth.”

And in an interview with Matt Warshaw on the day of the event he posited,

“If wavepools are the end game, pro surfing is well and truly fucked.”

Now tell me.

Is this surfing? Is this the apex of soul? Surfing weak corners at Seaside or Newport with thirty pals, catching maybe five waves in a two-hour session? Risking literal, and not figurative as is the apparent case with Kelly’s pool, decapitation when longboarders winsomely toss their craft away at a set? Dreary, pointless waves with all the sex appeal of a raw carrot?

The hate toward wavepools, and especially this one, is tedious.

It reveals an inability to pan back and see the breathless garden laid out before you.

I saw magic at Kelly’s (and Adam Fincham’s) pool. The greatest artificial wave ever created. Fruits ripened over ten years of thinking and finessing.

(Come and click here to look at the wavepool patents.)

If I walked down a little track at a remote beach and saw this shorebreak trumpets would blare and I would cry for joy.

Thank you ! @wsl @kswaveco It's not a dream! Obrigado , não é um sonho! By : @penrose73

A post shared by Filipe Toledo (@filipetoledo) on

Joy. 

I’m sick with longing for this wave.

It affects my respiration!