Could it be? Hope beyond hope? That Kelly Slater will ride for his heart's true home again?
A fresh rumor in the morning is even better than a piping hot cup of coffee. It is a glorious sunrise. Yesterday, for cocktail hour, we had Quiksilver opening a wave park in Las Vegas feat. both Kelly’s and Wavegarden’s technologies.
And today, alongside pancakes and bacon, we have Firewire, the world’s favorite hollow surfboard, purchasing the grand daddy of them all. Channel Islands!
This is a very happy whisper from a source who generally knows about these sorts of things because do you recall who is the majority stakeholder in Firewire? Who owns 70% of the company alongside a new board venture?
Kelly Slater!
Robert Kelly Slater XI!
Does that not make you all misty eyed? It does me! Kelly had his best years riding the tri-hex. He became an icon, a celebrity, a champion XI times over with Channel Islands under his feet. It was weird when he left. Weird like when he left Quiksilver. Some things just go together, you know?
But now he’s maybe back and as majority owner! With the legendary Travis Lee, who left with Kelly to begin the new board company.
I have some questions about the alleged.
Like, did Burton, who purchased Channel Islands one decade ago for many millions of dollars give Kelly a discount because surfboards are a rough biz and not part of Burton’s core?
Because Burton’s creative director, Greg Dacyshyn, is such a complete and utter disaster and has driven the brand so far, so fast and so deep into the ground that they are also having to sell office chairs and paperclips just to make rent?
Seriously, though, I wish surfing had a character like Dacyshyn. Someone so extravagantly out of touch, so epically retarded, so stupendously vain as to be completely comical. He is a towering monument to the sugar rotted ego. The nexus where bad taste meets bad style.

And if Kelly Slater has indeed ripped CI from those sausage fingers? Oh how his legend will continue to grow!
Now I have a headache because I had a fresh rumor alongside my pancakes and bacon instead of a cup of piping hot coffee.