"It's like cutting through butter with a hot knife,"
says Mr Domke, of surfing big waves on a skim.
Brad Domke to skim giant Nazaré
By Derek Rielly
Fifty-foot waves on a skimboard?
Who can be indifferent to the charms of Brad
Domke, the 25-year-old skimboarder from Wabasso in
Florida? The last couple of years have offered all the excitement
of Brad riding his skimboard at Teahupoo, Puerto Escondido, the
Right in Western Australia and, in the next few days, the most
photogenic big wave in the world, Portugal’s Nazaré.
This is Brad at Teahupoo, Tahiti, in September this year.
And Puerto Escondido, Mexico, last year.
And a little tumble from The Right in Western Australia.
Do you have awareness of the great Nazare trench in Portugal?
Oh, it’s something. Five thou’ metres deep, 230 clicks long. It
shovels swells into a stretch of beach whereupon mongo peaks are
created.
Friday’ll be thirty or forty or fifty foot. Who knows! Who can
judge such things?
A new article points to a troubling trend in higher
education. Don't worry boys! It don't effect us!
Would you like to know the best part about
co-owning a li’l surf website with the great Derek Rielly? Lazily
passing along unsubstantiated rumors! Would you like to know the
second best part? Reading something amazing that is only very
tangentially related to surfing yet posting about it anyhow!
There is, you see, an amazing article that just came out in
The Atlantic called The Coddling of the American
Mind(give yourself a gift and read here).
It begins:
Something strange
is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A
movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to
scrub campuses clean of words, ideas,and subjects that
might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk
wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law
students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape
law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in
“that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In
February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University,
wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher
Education describing a new campus politics of sexual
paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after
students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent
filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor
protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox
describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal
Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said.
A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped
performing on college campuses. Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have
publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying
too many of them can’t take a joke.
In short, it discusses the fact that college students in the
United States have turned into giant sissies, vindictively lashing
out at concepts they disagree with and, at the same time, wanting
to be protected from them by their complete removal from the public
sphere. The authors of the piece, Greg Kukianoff and Jonathan
Haidt, give an exhaustive account of this phenomenon and attribute
some of its birth to kids, now college-aged, who grew up as
“natives” of social media where, “(It) makes it
extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and
outrage, and shun traitors.”
This social back and forth has been a part of surf media since
the very first message board popped up and has continued, unabated
across multiple platforms like FaceBook, Twitter and below
BeachGrit’s always fascinating posts. What was
refreshing to me, though, as I read, was surfers still feel ok
about being racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, jingoistic,
small-minded, prejudiced, awful across these multiple
platforms. We lob grenades back and forth all day long.
Brazilians vs. Australians, old vs. young, fans of the WSL vs.
detractors, Adriano de Souza haters vs. Other Adriano de Souza
haters etc. And while the discussion is often base, it is very fun,
no? And maybe closer to some kind of meta-truth than a clean
scrubbed utterly inoffensive narrative. The Atlantic
article points out that the way college students think today
mirrors patterns that cause depression and anxiety. As shit as
surfers can be, we ain’t that and I hope our dialogues stay
loose, fast, generally uneducated, ill-informed, wildly opinionated
and, above all, fun.
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Hawaii’s Refugee Crisis!
By Rory Parker
You want to be a refugee in a tropical paradise?
First, you gotta learn some rules.
How fucked is this photo? Mooching off
aloha, living true to the stupid fucking haole stereotype.
Come to our islands (I’ve lived here for eights years! Super local
status! You should hear my affected pidgin!), take take take, then
bounce back to the mainland when you’re done taking advantage.
I get the desire to live the hippy trip. I really do.
I love being naked. Drugs are great. Anonymous sex is the
tits.
And you can make it work. I’ve met more than a few spacy weirdos
who get along just fine. Work some menial part-time job, spew a lot
of spiritual mumbo-jumbo while sipping kombucha at the beach
park. It’s not for me, I like hot water and fast internet and
enough money to pay my bills on time. But shine on you crazy
diamonds! If you can follow a few rules we’ll get along just
fine.
Wash yourself: Even raccoons wash their
hands, and those fucking trash pandas are filthy by nature. When
you’ve got a million streams, the ocean, and a multitude of public
showers available to rinse the dirt off your greasy body there’s no
excuse for hands so grungy it looks like you’re wearing a pair of
gloves. This is basic fucking hygiene we’re talking about. The type
of stuff that should come standard with a pair of opposable
thumbs.
White people dreads are disgusting at the best of times, in
humid tropical weather they’re little more than fetid petri dishes
hanging from your scalp. You may as well collect a pile of cat shit
and staple it to your dome. Equally fashionable, equally
disgusting.
Wear deodorant: I don’t care if you think
it’s unnatural. Get one of those crystals to run on your pits, I’ve
heard they work. Smear berry juice on yourself, or mud, or
whatever. I don’t really care.
If you think you can rock up smelling like a pile of onions and
be treated decently you’ve got another thing coming. Yes, I know,
if everyone smells then no one smells. But that doesn’t change the
fact that you fucking stink.
Cut your hair: White people dreads are
disgusting at the best of times, in humid tropical weather they’re
little more than fetid petri dishes hanging from your scalp. You
may as well collect a pile of cat shit and staple it to your dome.
Equally fashionable, equally disgusting.
Cut that shit, shear it short. Stop pretending that smearing
patchouli in your shit-locks is the same as a proper wash.
Don’t beg: Sharing means giving as much as
you take, maybe more. If you have no job, no money, are always
bumming rides and not contributing you’re a leech. If you beg and
borrow but have a safety net in the form of mommy and daddy back
home you’re an actual thief.
You see these fuckers on a semi-weekly basis slouching through
the streets of Kapaa. They hitch a ride down from Princeville,
where they live illegally in the bush. Act like they’re a part of
nature rather than the environmental scourge they really are.
Shit on the ground, steal fruit from real humans.
Worse than the feral cat plague, fed by the same type of
moron.
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Just in: Energy drinks really work!
By Chas Smith
Boom boom boom!
It has been a long time coming but,
alhamdulillah, science has finally handed down an opinion on this
decade’s hottest trend. Energy! Researchers from the famed Mayo
Clinic, one of America’s finest clinical institutions, assured a
restless population that Rockstar, at least, really works.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a team of cardiovascular
researchers tested sixteen ounce cans of Rockstar and a placebo on
25 healthy volunteers aged 25-29. They had their blood pressure and
heart rates measured before sucking both the Rockstar and the
placebo (they had no idea what they were getting) and also allowed
the researchers to nip a little blood. The tests were repeated 30
minutes after the cans were consumed. And guess what?
“The volunteers started out with heart rates and blood
pressure readings in the normal range. After consuming Rockstar,
their systolic blood pressure rose about 6%, from 108.4 millimeters
of mercury to 115 mmHg, on average, and their diastolic blood
pressure rose nearly 7%, from 64.3 mmHg to 68.5 mmHg, on
average. By contrast, systolic blood pressure rose just 3% and
diastolic blood pressure was flat after drinking the placebo
beverage.”
But better even:
“The biggest difference was in blood levels of
norpinephrine, a precursor of epinephrine (a.k.a.
adrenaline). After consuming the real energy drink, the average
amount of norepinephrine rose from 149.8 to 249.8 picograms per
milliliter of blood. That compares with an increase from 139.9 to
178.6 pg/mL after finishing the placebo drink.”
Hyped!
According to the LA Times, the findings caused the
researchers to “fret” because the people may later develop
cardiovascular problems due to spiked levels of boom boom boom.
Have those researchers ever danced with the devil under the pale
moonlight, though? Have they ever gotten really super barreled?
Have they ever had to drive from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California to
Phoenix, Arizona after just a few hours sleep because a certain
two-year-old insisted on getting up at 5:00 am? Give us us
norepinephrine!
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Ain't no happy endings in Ballina. Here's Sam Morgan,
20 years old, who was hit by a shark, abruptly, late yesterday
afternoon.
Ballina Pro Surfer Attacked by Shark!
By Derek Rielly
Sam Morgan in induced coma at Gold Coast Hospital
after being hit by a 10-footer…
Do you remember when shark attacks were
one-offs? Curios?
Not so much anymore. And Ballina, on the North Coast of NSW, and
part of the zeigeist-y Byron shire, has become the epicentre of
shark strikes.
Late yesterday afternoon, the pro surfer Sam Morgan, 20, was hit
on the thigh by a Bull shark at Lighthouse Beach, Ballina.
Richmond LAC Inspector Nicole Bruce said Sam was in the
water alone at Lighthouse Beach when the attack occurred at about
6.20pm.
“A person on the beach heard him scream and saw him stumble out
of the water,” she said. “He’s come out of the water with a
large bite wound to his left thigh. A passerby has
administered first aid, ambulance and police were on scene soon
(after). It was quite a large bite, but at this stage he seems
to be stable, so hopefully he will be okay. “
Sam is currently in an induced coma at Gold Coast Hospital.
I was surprised when I heard about the attack. Not cause of
sharks. Those sons of bitches ain’t leaving. I just didn’t know
anyone surfed at Ballina anymore. Everyone I talk to up there has
pretty much shelved their boards, surfing only when the sun is
high, and there’s enough of a crowd to reduce what have become high
odds.
Anyway, I received this email from a local surfer and surf
industry worker Shayne Banks last night. Seems to sum up the mood.
He gave me permission to reprint below.
Hi Derek,
You may have already heard but there has been another shark
attack at North Wall, Ballina late this afternoon. The victim was
young local guy Sam Morgan.
I am feeling sick and wanted to write something so here you
go; even before this last attack, twice on Saturday 7th November
the North Wall crowd was sent in due to a 3-4 meter Great White
swimming under people.
I work at Alkali Fins in Ballina and had my life all set up
around surfing, now it centres around work. I knew and surfed
with Tadashi and we fixed his dings at Alkali. I have known Matt
Lee for 15 years and spent countless hours surfing with him and
many couch session with his solid crew of mates. While he was a
bodyboarder at heart he stood up on fibreglass and surfed pretty
well whenever the waves were not slabbing.
Leelee’s attack really rattled me; the last surf I had had
before that happened ended with me being chased in at Broken Head.
A shark fin appeared in the wave and was moving very aggressively
left to right and then right again about 20 meters in front
of me. By the time I had processed what I had seen the wave was on
me. I turned and rode that sucker to the beach. The next day I was
on my way to surf fun little lefts at Sharpes, I was just out of
Lennox when over Triple JJJ I hear that there has been another
attack at North Wall. Sharpes is looking really fun as I drive past
but is completely empty with only two guys looking like they are
about to paddle out. I drive to work and don’t even stop. At work I
learn that the victim is Matt Lee and that he is
critical.
Seeing him at the pub the other day for his fundraiser was
great but also pretty confronting as I could see first hand tooth
mark scars on his legs.
I have surfed twice since Matt got bitten. Once was when my
dad was up from South Oz and keen to head out for a wave. It was a
full-moon and we surfed in a sea of bait fish and dolphins. One
other day at Broken Head I got a few fun little peaks but it was
still spooky. I don’t even know how long it has been and I don’t
care to count. After living at North Wall for 5 years and surfing
it pretty much every single morning that I could between 2001
-2006, surfing in Ballina may well be over for me.
I don’t know; I could write more but I am kind of trembling
as I type. Please feel free to contact me if you want to talk
further about the situation here and the atmosphere among the
surfing community.
