The two swingers in the front are the father-and-son
owners of Taiwan's Sheico Group, the world's biggest manufacturer
of sports wetsuits. Cute guy in the back is a model. | Photo:
Rashley Pon/Global Assignment by Getty Images for
Forbes
Meet the Taiwanese Geniuses Who Make Your
Wetsuits!
Are you like me? Do you think it’s flashy
American and Australian know-how that gets our suits just so?
You are so wrong and maybe racist too!
Taiwan’s Sheico Group has got their paws all over the wetsuits
market. Biggest maker of sports wetsuits in the world. Closing in
on half-a-billion US dollars a year in trade.
Billabong’s Xcel, O’Neill , Quiksilver and Rip Curl all use
Sheico.
According to Forbes Asia,
“Five years ago Sheico was the first to deliver the material for
Rip Curl’s Flash-Bomb series, validating its claim to be the
world’s fastest-drying wet suit. Within two minutes 90% of water is
drained through the inner layer of the suit or heated up by body
temperature to give the wearer a greater sense of comfort. Years of
exclusive rights to the component were granted to Rip Curl for its
competitive edge. ‘At this point Sheico is making the best wet
suits in the world…. They are definitely the guy,’ says Greg Wade,
president of Xcel in California. What’s amazing, he continues, is
that Sheico contract-manufactures for various top brands but
manages to customize components so that each can have its own look
and feel.”
Jimmicane, Surfing Magazine’s wonderful
personality/photo-editor/photographer, loves all things Florida. He
loves the Jacksonville Jaguars like they are a real football team.
He loves Florida State University like it is a real institution of
higher learning. He loves the state’s population like every single
man, woman, child is not clinically insane. And now he can love
that the Florida Institute of Technology offers Surf Engineering
Analysis for college credit!
That’s right. If you are like Jimmy and don’t mind living with
face eating zombies, you can move to Melbourne, just east of
Orlando, and major in Ocean Engineering and take classes in Surf
Engineering Analysis. What is it? The course description says that
it “focuses on the physics of waves in the surf zone. Students
design a field experiment on their own to collect data about force
balances, buoyancy and hydrodynamic drag.”
The associate professor who designed the course, Robert Weaver,
says, “Ocean engineering has one of the highest graduate incomes of
any of the engineering disciplines. I’m hoping that this class and
this program can help play a role in dismantling the old surfer
stigma that associates surfers with being aimless beach bums.”
Students get a Rip Curl GPS surf watch (at cost), two customized
surfboards with special cutout boxes for measurement instruments
and maybe a GoPro. Then they go to the beach and surf and let all
their stuff work. Class jargon calls it “movement-based data.”
I don’t know what else they do but I hope they drive fancy cars,
once graduating, and go to work for Surfline…those dirty, rich sex
freaks.
Have you ever seen such a foregone conclusion?
An event, sewn up, on day one?
A few hours ago, and as predicted (here),
Filipe Toledo, won the final of the Oi Rio Pro in clean enough
three-footers. He beat Bede Durbidge 19.87 to 14.70 and the only
surprise, if there was one, was that Bede threw up some decent
numbers.
Filipe didn’t drop a heat the entire event, throwing
blitzkrieg-like heat scores of 16.27 (round one, beating Kolohe and
Melling), 15.60 (round three, Wiggoly Dantas), 17.83 (round four,
Banting and John John), 15.00 (quarter-final, Ricky Christie),
15.94 (semi against Italo Ferreira) and a near-perfect 19.87 in the
final.
Filipe is now 550 points behind Adriano De Souza in second
place.
Third on the board, but five thousand points behind Filipe, is
Mick Fanning.
The other title contenders? John John is ten thousand away in
seventh, Kelly is in 13th with exactly half Filipe’s points and the
current world champ, Gabriel Medina is 16,000 points off the pace
in 19th.
A three-way title race between Adriano, Filipe and Mick Fanning
is the obvious play here. And, Filipe, who only turned 20 a few
weeks ago, would become the youngest world champion, ever, beating
Kelly’s record by two months, if he wins in December.
But so much swatting to go between hither and yon! So much can
happen in the warp and woof of competition!
So let’s concentrate our attention on Filipe’s perfect 10, the
cleanest stomp in competition, the not-an-air-reverse, but
clean…clean… rotation. Yeah, they’ve been bigger hits
(John John and Julian, even Andy Irons in Mex, way back).
But moves like this are the springs of competition, of
progression. Look, below, at the way he saws and nails and
measures, lifting and weighting that front foot for speed, an easy
rhythm, and almost without an awareness of what’s to come next.
Power and form and the cleanest and most dignified landing you’ll
ever see. Tens from every single judge.
As the former pro Brad Gerlach, a surfer who was also rated
number one aged 20, told BeachGrit yesterday, “He’s not
thinking. He’s surfing so spontaneously you don’t know what he’s
going to do. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do. And that’s
fucking awesome. What surprises me about a lot of the guys I watch
is they’re confident but they look conservative on the wave.
Filipe’s excited to be surfing!”
Matt Meola is the 20-year-old surfer from Maui
with whom you’ve become acquatinted with over the past couple of
years, mostly from his flips and tweaked spins, but also from his
surprisingly strong showings at Jaws.
It’s a style of surfing he calls el modernismo.
Lavishly contradictory airs that protest the sensibility of
competition-style surfing, Filipe and John John excepted.
Landed two weeks ago, but released today, is Matt’s first-ever
Spindle Flip 540. A Spindle Flip, in case y’aint aware, is like the
ol bodyboarder el rollo, complete with double grab, except spun the
opposite way. The bodyboarder rolls with the lip and towards the
beach. Matt’s is the counterintuitive version. (El Modernismo,
lavishly contradictory… )
And, this with its extra rotation, adds another layer of sugar.
Matt says he was going to backflip but switched the rote to match
the section and ended up SF540.
If your own game is rail and jam, this might leave you cold,
your eyes glassing over.
I mean, those kids!
But get into the minutiae of the hit: see how heavy the section
is, the size of the wave, the utter directness and intensity, the
way Matt recomposes his body, and you might start to become dazzled
by its radiance.
A pod of Great White sharks is winning hearts at
Huntington Beach!
At least six Great White sharks, ranging from
five to eight feet in length, were recently photographed just
outside the surf line in Surfside, California, an Orange County
gated community.
Response to the pictures has been mixed: local residents
expressing emotions ranging from appreciation of the animals’
beauty to baseless fears created by inflammatory media coverage and
lack of knowledge regarding shark behavior.
News of the increased shark presence comes only weeks after a
fatal attack on a 65-year-old woman off the coast of Maui. Leading
sharkologists are currently investigating whether the attacks may
be related, current theories point towards an evolutionary
adaptation that causes greater shark fertility in the presence of
human blood.
With the recent closure of the beaches in Reunion Island to
surfing and a four-year period that has seen more than 35 attacks
in Hawaii alone over the last four years, shark aggression is
rapidly becoming a global concern.
Online sentiment, combined with a rapidly approaching summer
season sure to draw millions of beach-goers to the Golden State’s
sandy shores, indicates a potential for a bloodbath unseen since
the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
Local authorities have probably advised residents to remain calm
and stay indoors until the danger has passed.
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
