Hurricane coming to eat up Hawaii!

Big waves, big winds!

The first hurricane of the season is bearing down on the Hawaiian Islands.

(Click here!)

I’m not a fan. I’ve been living here for eight years and I’ve never gotten used to the potential for kill storms. I’m SoCal beach cities born and bred, desert makes sense to me.

The ground can shake ’til buildings fall down and I’m not gonna blink an eye. But gale-force winds and torrential downpours scare the shit out of me.

Our old place in Haleiwa had a mango tree growing up through our lanai, supporting our roof. It was pretty kick ass. Except for teeming mass of rats that fed in it then spent whatever spare time they had playing tag inside our roof.

When the wind would start howling the entire house would set to swaying and it seemed like the roof would peel off and going flying into the void at any moment. Toss thunder into the mix and I’m a nervous wreck shivering on the couch while my french bulldog tries to figure out what the big deal is.  Mr. Debs doesn’t understand we could snuff it at any moment.

Living on Kauai doesn’t help, the specter of Hurricane Iniki hangs over my head whenever the weather forecast nerds go into hype overdrive.

“It’ll probably be no big deal, Rory, relax. Of course we thought Iniki was going to pass by and it destroyed everything.”

The 2011 tsunami didn’t help my nerves. We’d evac’ed to high ground and set to drinking when someone pulled up the footage of Japan getting smoked. It was on its way to us. I passed out in a folding chair on the side of Kam Highway, woke up expecting a wasteland.

Nothing happened. That time.

Prepping is kind of fun though. Buying up all the water and toilet paper you can. The water for obvious reasons, the TP because that’s what people do here and I figure they know what’s going on.  And it’ll be a good luxury to barter if times get hard. Other than that… strike anywhere matches, glow sticks, alcohol, tons of non perishable food like Pop Tarts and cases of chili. Candles if I can remember.

I’ve got a veritable arsenal of spearguns, which I understand aren’t as good as real guns, but are all sorts of intimidating. Hawaii doesn’t have high gun ownership rates anyway, so if I equip my end times war gang with ’em we should be able to get some business done.

One thing that really kills me though, I’m not getting my Picc line (a catheter that punches antibiotics into a man) removed until Wednesday, so I’m going to miss the bomb east swell that lights up all the spots near my house.


Robbie Maddison Teahupoo
The Australian stunt biker rider Robbie Maddison, 34, has successfully ridden good-enough sized Teahupoo on a motorcycle.

Robbie Maddison actually rides Moto at Teahupoo!

…actually rides a fucking moto at Teahupoo… 

As first reported on BeachGrit (click here), it looks like Robbie Madison actually rode a fucking motorcyle at Teahupoo.

I don’t understand how it’s possible, and I won’t be surprised to learn it’s some sort of hoax, but I’ll be damned if it ain’t rad as all hell.


Australia to get 10 Wavegarden pools?

A 10-year-plan to fill the vast continent with man-made waves… 

If you saw the Snowdonia Wavegarden footage that’s been everywhere, you probably thought, when’s that fun little burger coming to my part of the world?

I live in Australia (BeachGrit has bureaus in San Francisco, San Diego, Kauai and Sydney) and got in touch with the former lawyer and investment banker, Andrew Ross, who bought the rights to Wavegarden on my piece of turf.

A few questions, none of ’em real hard.

Is Australia getting wave tanks? When? And where?

Andrew Ross, from what I can tell from the one phone call to Western Australia where he lives and where the company that he set up, Wave Park Group, is based, is an over-achiever whose giddy list of achievements, included some kind of interaction with the billionaire Richard Branson, during a year off he’d taken after running some of the biggest companies in the country.

This is where Wavegarden kicks in. When he had that year off a few years ago, it was because he’d just hit 40, had a kid, wanted to travel, surf and find some kind of inspiration for the next half of his working life.

At some point, he figured he’d like to have a swing at a surfing-based biz.

“I’ve never been associated with the surf industry,” he says. “But I’m a 35-year hardcore surfer, all my mates, we know what surfing is about, we all go to the Ments each year.”

Ross liked the aroma of the new wave pools that were suddenly appearing, in theoretical form, everywhere. He’d seen the Webber pool and got in touch with Greg Webber. Then Kelly Slater’s “people.” When he was over in Europe, he swung by the Basque country to surf the Wavegarden lagoon, its proto testing pond.

He got in and, yeah, it one of those moments he says.

Taj Burrow was surfing the right (stars!), he was surfing the left, he kicked out and told Wavegarden, “I’m writing you a cheque. This is fucking amazing.”

Ross created the company Wave Park Group, brought in pals with various complimentary skills, and made a goal to create 10 Australian Wavegardens in 10 years. Ambitious?

Baby, he’s an investment banker. It seems positively… bearish! 

The website, (click here), reeks of corporate-speak, howevs, which stings the eyes. It’s like one of those forms you get when a new CEO swings into your company and he wants to know the company’s mission, it’s vision and values, all those things that are totally mainlined in the corporate world.

Here’s a taste from the site.

Values

Our Values serve as a compass for our actions.

Innovation and Creativity We are leading innovators in the delivery of man-made surfing experiences
Service We satisfy and delight our guests
Authenticity We create real surfing waves in a safe and welcoming environment
Quality What we do, we do well
Passion and Teamwork We are committed to serve our guests in heart and mind
Integrity We will exhibit fairness and honesty at all times
Prosperity We will generate wealth by growing an economically sustainable business

Whatever, it’s only the meaningless platitudes companies throw on their sites to fill the obvious gap of not having a product yet. But maybe soon!

Ross, who’s just been to three cities in three days, says he doesn’t want to make any premature announcements, ’cause that leads to disappointment, and he’s right, and won’t until the first site is secured and the Development Approval has gone through whatever regional planning authority it’s dealing with.

That said, “we’d be disappointed if we don’t have something to people within 12 months, potentially quite a bit shorter than that,” he says.

What interests me, is the parks are going to be owned by Wave Park.

He ain’t sub-letting the Wavegarden technology.

They’ll buy or lease the site, buy all the Wavegarden pieces that’ll then be shipped to Australia, it’ll all get put together, a few months of testing, and away it goes.

 


Impotent Rage: The fake history of fake surf brand

Hollister gets its due (kind of) in the New Yorker!

Dave Eggers, not the one who used to win surf competition but the one who is a famous observationalist, wrote a story about Hollister in the newest New Yorker and it is good.

He begins, “The year I turned forty-three, I woke up one morning and thought it would be a good day to go to Hollister. I’d been seeing those hoodies around, and the place had been on my mind.”

The piece meanders, quite beautifully, behind Eggers as he travels through inland agriculture California, juxtaposing the fortunes of the town named Hollister, a mere 42 miles east of Santa Cruz, with the brand.

The town is a fairly depressed, yet historically quaint, thing of 36,000 Latinos and aging whites founded in 1868.

The brand is way dumb, and not historically anything, founded in 2000 by Abercrombie and Fitch. It is completely unrelated to the town and Eggers discusses how it came to be named “Hollister” in the first place.

“For years, employees of Hollister stores, during orientation, were given the story…” he writes “…and it goes something like this: John M. Hollister was born at the end of the nineteenth century and spent his summers in Maine as a youth. He was an adventurous boy who loved to swim in the clear and cold waters there. He graduated from Yale in 1915 and, eschewing the cushy Manhattan life suggested for him, set sail for the Dutch East Indies, where he purchased a rubber plantation in 1917. He fell in love with a woman named Meta and bought a fifty-foot schooner. He and Meta sailed around the South Pacific, treasuring ‘the works of the artisans that lived there,’ and eventually settled in Los Angeles, in 1919. They had a child, John, Jr., and opened a shop in Laguna Beach that sold goods from the South Pacific—furniture, jewelry, linens, and artifacts. When John, Jr., came of age and took over the business, he included surf clothing and gear. (He was an exceptional surfer himself.) His surf shop, which bore his name, grew in popularity until it became a globally recognized brand. The Hollister story is one of ‘passion, youth and love of the sea,’ evoking ‘the harmony of romance, beauty, adventure.’”

He continues for a bit, poking at Hollister (the brand) in an old-man-not-realizing-he-is-old sort of way, suggesting, for example, the same sweatshirt can be purchased from Wal-Mart for $14.95 and is only $44.95 at Hollister because the word “Hollister” is stitched on. It is the same low-level rage parents have had for “youth brands” since the mid 1950s.

And then moves on, capturing what is happening to small town California with regards to immigration, racial relations, upward mobility etc. leaving Hollister (the brand) behind.

I only wish he would have gotten in a few more digs. Hollister is even beyond way dumb. Coopting surf lifestyle is one thing. Who really cares about that. But stealing Robb Havassy’s art, telling nursing mothers that it ain’t allowed in store, the systematic search of employees, discriminating against Muslims, people in wheelchairs, British veterans and South Koreans is entirely another.

Fuck Hollister.

(And read Eggers here!)


Compelling: LA Lifeguard Hammers Drunken Kooks

…after being jumped…

I’ve no real love for LA County lifeguards. I understand that they save countless denim-clad behinds during summer months, but my interactions with them were rife with blackballs and bullhorns.

Yesterday in Venice one of our red clad lifesavers had to lay the hammer down on a couple drunken val idiots. It’s a pretty entertaining scuffle, and the aggressor gets put down hard.

Like, unconscious for long enough that you’re gonna be a bit dumber when you wake up.