Jessi Miley-Dyer: Surfing’s sweetheart!

What's super cute and rhymes with Miley Cyrus? That's right! Jessi Miley-Dyer!

Kieren Perrow has a better half and her name is Jessi Miley-Dyer and oh if she ain’t just the sweetest thing on earth! I have hung out with her on a few occasions and, if I recall properly, I was in trouble with Rip Curl and she rode for Rip Curl but she didn’t care! She loved my rakish charm, my devil-may-care ‘tude. Or maybe she did care and hated my rakish charm and devil-may-care ‘tude but let me hang out anyway. I don’t recall properly it seems.

In any case she serves as commissioner on the girls’ side and was featured in a wonderful Los Angeles Times profile this morning. Let’s read!

When Jessi Miley-Dyer wakes up Sunday morning, the first thing she’ll do is run to the window and look at the ocean. She can’t see the contest area from her hotel room, but the waves up the beach will tell her if she made the right decision in tabling the most critical heats of the U.S. Open of Surfing to the competition’s final day. 

As deputy commissioner of the World Surf League’s women’s Championship Tour, Miley-Dyer has teamed with Travis Logie to decide the time and day of each heat at Huntington Beach this week.

Miley-Dyer has juggled events for the women’s Championship Tour, men’s Qualifying Series, men’s Pro Junior and women’s Pro Junior — mixing and matching them since last Saturday, trying to give every surfer a chance to catch good waves. She’s read daily forecasts, tracked Hurricane Frank off the Pacific Coast and used her instincts as a former professional surfer to gauge when one swell may die down and the next could come in. 

Considering all of that, she and Logie decided the final eight surfers in the Championship Tour and Qualifying Series events will compete on Sunday, when a new swell is expected.

Now all Miley-Dyer can do is sit back and hope it comes.   

“The thing that makes surfing the most incredible sport can also be a double-edged sword,” she said Saturday. “The unpredictability of the ocean conditions is what makes it hard to schedule and that’s why we’re waiting for so long and trying to get the most information possible.”

Scheduling heats is much like surfing the waves themselves. 

The ocean is fickle, and impossible to negotiate with; even the most calculated decisions can be spoiled by nature. That’s what each surfer faces paddling out for 30-minute heats, and what Miley-Dyer faces when deciding when they’ll take place. 

As a hedge against that unpredictability, Miley-Dyer is constantly on the phone with forecasters at Surfline and talking with a Huntington Beach surfing director who knows the local swell. The daily forecasts she receives show predicted wave heights, approximate times when a swell could come in and how it’s expected to look throughout a given day. 

She’s looking for a tight time period when the swell will drop, because one that is active for a long time will be “slower” and produce fewer waves. 

“It is a lot of responsibility just because we want to give everyone the best opportunity possible to have good heats,” Miley-Dyer said. “There’s nothing worse [than] when you’re surfing and the tide is not quite right.”

The job is not made easier by Huntington Beach, nicknamed “Surf City” but known to be sporadic over the years. Miley-Dyer said that’s because the surf here breaks at different peaks up and down the beach, where a reef break, for example, will produce waves that break at the same peak every time. 

Surfers have mentioned Huntington Beach’s unpredictability throughout the competition, with a strong swell at the start of the week and less giving waters since. 

“I was a bit surprised, we were supposed to have more waves today than yesterday and they were actually a bit smaller,” Sebastian Zietz said  after narrowly winning his fifth-round heat Saturday. “You just have to make the best of the opportunities you get.”

On Friday afternoon, Miley-Dyer and Logie locked in the risky plan to start the women’s and men’s quarterfinals on Sunday. With Hurricane Frank moving away from the coast and the weeklong swell subsiding, all of the forecasts have indicated the next swell is right behind it. The men will start at 8 a.m., so the women’s event will unfold after a high tide that Miley-Dyer said can “swallow the swell a little bit.”

After a week of studying projected wave heights, offshore storms, high tide, low tide, this swell and that one, the puzzle is complete. 

If Miley-Dyer gets to her window and sees a new energy in the waves, she’ll know she pressed the right buttons. If the energy’s not there, she’ll chalk one up for Mother Nature and know she did all she could.

“If we wait until the end of the week and it’s still bad because the new tide didn’t really come, then we gave ourselves the best opportunities,” Miley-Dyer said. “At some point we’re rolling the dice, because the ocean is something we can’t control.”

It seems like her life is a win-win and that makes me very happy because she deserves!

Did she make the right call today? I have no idea. I can’t watch that slop.

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Revealed: Best surf film of the year!

Surfer Poll is still months away but WikiLeaks has obtained a cache of emails detailing which film wins!

Who but Matt Warshaw would think to tie together various clips from various epochs of surfers getting stoked? The man is touched with genius!

It is a shame, sort of, that the uninspired clods at Surfer have him under their lock and key but someday soon your white knights at BeachGrit will ride in and stomp his ginger headed master! We will free Matt Warshaw from his high ginger tower and together we will make music that brings Jose Feliciano to tears!

We will make movies of surfers consuming illegal substances and surfers ogling bikini bottoms and surfers wearing bikini bottoms and surfers dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight.

Not one ginger will be seen (unless there is reason for Chippa Wilson or Mick Short or Cheyne Magnusson or Mick Campbell to appear).

And we will all smile. Just like the surfers here in Matt Warshaw’s Stoke! 

Let’s make surfing fun again!

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Parker: “Open your ass, open your mind!”

The noted Mr. Parker is thrilled to hear Mr. Turpel say, "He's got a tool that vibrates!"

I’m not feeling the surf scene today. Not much going on. Piles of inland trash are flocking to Huntington Beach to grab heaps of worthless swag. Be sure to drop it on the ground next to a trash can before they drive home.

Watched an hour of Joel Tudor’s Duct Tape Invitational yesterday. Beyond the weirdness that comes with running what I thought was supposed to be a souled out bro-down fun times event during the world’s most corpo garbage festival, it was boring. So boring. I’d comparing it to watching paint dry, but in that case you can at least catch a cool buzz from the fumes.

Right now it’s waist high mush, Bino Lopes and Torrey Meister are battling to see who can grovel the hardest. Only bright point is Turpel talking about Meister’s vibrating butt pillow.

“He’s got a tool that vibrates. He can sit on it and it actually is just a total game changer.”

I’m sure it is. Open your ass, open your mind. Stimulate your chakra, or something.

It’s pouring rain on my end. Gonna use the day to run some errands. Serve y’all up a very funny video that is totally unrelated to surfing before I get going.

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Baby, daddy gonna love you forever… 

Love: WSL Stud Holsters Gun!

Sebastian "Sea Bass" Zietz proposes to girlfriend at the US Open…

Have you ever been struck by love? It’s a helluva thing, a mix of anxiety, longing and desperate possession. It can really burn your nuts!

For some, it quickly settles into bland coupledom: lazy sex, petty recrimination and the special wretchedness only known to the married couple.

For others, however, love… soars. 

The Florida born, Kauai-raised surfer Sebastian “Sea Bass” Zietz, who is twenty eight years old, hopes he’ll be in the latter category after proposing to his girlfriend of four years, Krisy Fult, yesterday.

Watch the proposal here! 

From the OC Register:

What’s more romantic than popping the question at one of the world’s biggest surf stadiums?

As a plane passed by with a marrage proposal above the Huntington Beach Pier Friday, most people in the crowd had no idea the romantic gesture was made by pro surfer Sebastian Zietz, a Hawaiian in town for the big Vans U.S. Open of Surfing.

The banner pulled by an airplane above the water read: ““KRISY FULT, WILL YOU MARRY ME?”

At the same time, Zietz got down on one knee while on the pier and proposed to his girlfriend. 

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Did you know the pair already own a gym together? Examine here!  

And, let’s study the bonafides of Ms Fult, in her own words.

As a pre teen I participated in competitive all-star cheerleading on an individual and team level. I found myself a state champion two years in a row for individual jump performance. My love for competitive cheer took me to my next destination, COACHING! I spent many years working as a competitive cheerleading coach to Treasure Coast High School and Cheer Explosion Allstars in my home state of Florida. I participated in competitive hip hop dance as well. Now a days you can find me at the BARRE! Barre really resinated with me, taking me back to my dance roots. I am a barre above certified instructor. My business experience comes from my retail background. I am the former DM of Brandy Melville USA in Southern California and owner/operator of thehoney-shop.com. On my time off I enjoy fishing, a recent interest in spear fishing, country music and traveling. I have been so lucky to have seen so much of this amazing world with the best travel partner around. 
What’s not to love?
Meanwhile, Zietz, who is rated tenth in the world despite being a wildcard and who has won over $150,000 in prize money so far this year, recently featured in a very good WSL profile film.

 

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Dilemma: Knuckle tats and the pro surfer!

The knuckles are wonderful places to advertise a life motto. Which pro surfer has the best?

Many of today’s surf stars wear tattoos. Mick Fanning sports a family crest, Silvana Lima her 2009 Bells Bell. Joel Parkinson has the phrase “Life is better in boardshorts!” on his inner arm and Dane Reynolds the cutest little anchor over his heart.

These are all wonderful but none appear on the Mt. Olympus of inspiration.

The knuckles.

Knuckle tattoos are like very smart tweets. Minimal characters to get maximum hype. Eight single letters, or seven if you happen to be Kala Alexander. His Wolf Pak does the trick very well but what about Filipe Toledo’s Wild Free.

Does the young Brazilian seem overly wild or overly free? No? False advertising maybe?

What about Kanoa Igarahsi’s Cats Meow. Do you like that one?

Taj has Bride Maid. That seems good and Bethany Hamilton has Beth which is elegantly simple.

If you could recommend knuckle tattoos for the rest of today’s brightest what would they be?

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