Suspect seen walking.
Suspect seen walking.

Surf travel in the age of terror!

Chas Smith

By

Will you think twice before boarding your next flight?

I am in New York with wife and child, staying in a beautiful re-purposed seminary two short blocks from where a bomb tore apart a dumpster and injured twenty-odd people two nights ago.
It was a surreal, warm Saturday evening when it popped. Sirens wailed. Helicopters whirred overhead. People stumbled around, some in fear but most just happily weekend drunk.
My little family was cabbing home from the lower east side at the moment of detonation so did not hear. Cross-town traffic became impossible so we walked.
And surreal. I used to chase these sorts of thrills in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Ukraine etc. Nothing electrifies like chaos.
Yes, I used to chase but now the thrills have come home to roost and as I cradled my young cherub of a daughter, while walking, I realized this is her world. Terror is no longer a foreign concept. It has become normalized.
And how will it change the way she dances? Will she think twice before visiting Paris, Rome, Belgium or Minneapolis? Will she want to move to some isolated bomb shelter off the grid?
Or will she not care and be electrified herself?
How has it changed the way you dance? Surfers are one of the most mobile segments of the population, chasing swell to distant lands with neither worry nor care. Do you still book trips, board planes, leave home with a completely light heart?
Or do you look over your shoulder and slide away from the bearded man on the bench?
This morning, an unprecedented alert appeared on my phone. New York sent it out to people in the city, I assume, and it asks for  help finding Ahmed Khan Rahami.
I’ve spent far too much time in the Middle East, and am bros with far too many Mohammeds, Abdullahs, Rahmans to feel that we now exist in a war between Christendom and Islam but damn it all if the narrative isn’t becoming difficult to shake.
Brad Pitt
You're in Hawaii, why would you leave the house? Lay down on the couch all day long. Pester your guest for weed he doesn't have. Eat and eat and eat and eat. Don't clean up after yourself. Be sure and do a half assed job when you are. Maybe scrape the bong for resin then leave that shit smeared across the kitchen counter.

How to couch surf around the world!

Rory Parker

By

The five habits of highly successful houseguests!

Lists are fun, right?

Wrong! Lists are lazy! Easiest possible way to pump out “content” for your website. A preponderance of lists is a sure sign of low pay, low motivation, and lack of talent.

But they’re useful, sometimes. They an make for fun little bite-sized pieces. Good filler when you’re feeling lazy. Or when you’re packed to overflowing with a simmering rage that you can’t unleash without sending someone to the hospital.

Like a bowl of mac and cheese. Gets the job done, nothing to take pride in.

5 Ways to be an amazing houseguest

1. Smoke a half ounce of weed in three days: Yeah, your host said his hookup is off island for a while, and it’s not as easy to get decent pot in Hawaii as everyone seems to think. But that’s no reason to pace yourself! Just get as retardedly high as you can, then complain when you run out.

“Hey, can we get some more weed?”

“No, this is it.”

“Don’t you know anyone?”

“No, I told you that. We’re out. You smoked it all.”

“I told you I wanted to buy my own.”

“We bought everything they had left. That was it. There is no more.”

“You have to know someone!”

“I don’t. I’m thirty-six. I don’t know many drug dealers anymore.”

2. Don’t lift a finger to help unless you’re asked: Then be sure to huff and puff and bitch and moan about it. You’re on vacation, why should you do any cleaning? Leave that shit for the maid. Oh, there’s no maid?

“I told you, I’ll do it later.”

3. Eat everything: When you’re invited to a barbecue, it’s important to bring something tasty. Like a pie, or a nice dish of mac salad, or a big ol’ bowl of pulled pork.

Delicious shredded pork simmered in shoyu and garlic and pineapple juice! So succulent it’ll make your mouth water.

Here’s the important part. While the grill is running, and everyone is distracted with beers and friendship and conversation, sit your ass down and eat the entire bowl! Like, seriously, four fucking pounds of pork. Make sure to leave a tiny scoop’s worth so you can say, “But I didn’t eat it all.”

4. Don’t leave the house: You’re in Hawaii, why would you leave the house? Lay down on the couch all day long. Pester your guest for weed he doesn’t have. Eat and eat and eat and eat. Don’t clean up after yourself. Be sure and do a half assed job when you are. Maybe scrape the bong for resin then leave that shit smeared across the kitchen counter. It’s not like people prepare food on it.

5. Don’t pay for anything: Don’t even offer.

For extra points, use your host’s credit card to buy your ticket home. Hopefully they’ll trust you to understand purchasing plane tickets online and not supervise the transaction. Use a sketchy website no one has ever heard of, then get their card flagged because of the fraudulent transactions. Everyone loves calling their credit card company and explaining that their card has not been stolen, they merely allowed a guest to give the number to a website which no one in their right mind would ever trust.

Don’t pay them back for the ticket until they’ve asked you a hundred times. If you ignore them long enough you may never have to pay them back at all!

Religion: Kelly Slater wants cult of Spock!

Chas Smith

By

Gets busted for superimposing face over departed legend (again)!

We’ve said it before, so many times, and I’ll say it again right now. Kelly Slater is so much fun on social media! He has no handler, for one, no person moonlighting as “Kelly Slater” doing his Instagrams etc.

He is opinionated, for two, spouting his genuinely held ideas into the most shallow of pools.

He loves to engage all manner of hater and troll and fanboy, for third, penning serious responses to half baked splatter.

He’s weird, for last.

Like, way weird!

Today, or maybe yesterday, he wondered out loud which two people you would base a belief system upon. Let’s read his exact phrasing.

Amen, #Spock… Ahead of our time. If you were to create a belief system for people to follow, which two people would it be based on? Mine would be Spock and #BruceLee. I think that’s a good blend of philosophy between pacifism and martial arts. #VulcanDeathGrip

screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-10-44-18-am

It struck me, initially, because why two? Why not just one? All belief systems are, of course, a melange but why did Kelly want a combo of specifically two people?

Then it struck me because Spock was a fictional character and Bruce Lee was real. Strange? Like basing a belief system on the living ideals Superman and Ralph Nader? Or Wolverine and Don Johnston? Or Casper the Friendly Ghost and RuPaul? Or Scooby-Doo and F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Or L. Ron Hubbard and ummm L. Ron Hubbard?

Odd.

And finally he super-imposed his own face on that of Spock’s, covering Leonard Nimoy’s mug. This is the second time in as many months that Kelly Slater has placed his face over a dead man’s.

What is he telling us?

Also, If you were to create a belief system for people to follow, which two people would it be based on?

Watch: These kids’ dad invented Wavegarden!

Derek Rielly

By

Think they're getting some on-court practice?

What a dramatic situation surfing finds itself in now that wavepools are better than most of our realities. And if there was proof still needed that the duplication of waves will result in technically perfect surfers, well, here it is.

Kai and Hans Odriozola are two tweens from San Sebastian in the heart of Basque country just across the border from France, and close to Europe’s best wave Mundaka. Kai and Hans’ daily surf reality is radically different to yours and mine, howevs. Their pops, the engineer Josema Odriozola, and their mammy the economist Karin Frisch invented… Wavegarden, the first of the new generation of commercially available wavepools.

Every day, Kai and Hans get to surf the Wavegarden prototype.

Accelerated learning? Yeah, it is. One hundred and twenty waves an hour, each wave between eighteen and twenty five seconds long. Think you’re going to refine your game with those stats?

So how good do these two sub-ten year old’s surf? Watch ’em ride the NL Surf Park, a Texas Wavegarden that’s ready to open but is still chasing permits from Travis County who say the tank has to be filled with chlorine like a swimming pool for health reasons.

(Read that particularly bloody feud here.)

And here’s how the sometimes dazzling, sometimes not, but always good for an interview, former WCT-er Mitch Crews approaches the same pool.

What Your Wetsuit Says About You!

Derek Rielly

By

Are you Rip Curl, Patagonia or Billabong? Bear, otter or twink?

My first wetsuit was a long-sleeved spring-suit of dark brown with lighter tan panels. The suit created the optical illusion that I was a five-foot-three turd, moist though the middle and dry on the flanks. It cost seventy-seven dollars and was chosen, not because of the fit or the price, but because a soon-to-be world champion had modelled the item in a magazine advertisement.

But that’s what do when you’re twelve. Life is pure affectation.

Now that you’re all grown up, do you buy your wetsuits based on a rational examination of the facts or are are you still cuckolded by marketing?

Let’s analyse surfers and their choice of wetsuits.

Billabong: Years ago, a very generous pal was shocked to learn that the the four-thousand-dollar Dior dive watch he’d bought his father had fallen apart. It was a lesson in the essential nature of a company’s expertise, or if you prefer marketing-speak, its DNA. If you want the best of something you go to a specialist. In the case of watches, you don’t go to a fashion brand, you go to Rolex, Omega. This is a lesson you haven’t learned.

Quiksilver: If that suit is older than one year, you were, quite correctly, hypnotised by the voodoo of Craig Anderson and Dane Reynolds. If it’s a recent buy, the voodoo has metastasized into something far more powerful, something to make behave even more irrationally, given that you now wish to emulate Quiksilver’s number one teamer, Matt Banting.

Hurley: What price those two stripes on the right quadricep? When you’re not uploading footage of yourself surfing to the Hurley surf club you’re googling “John John’s Mom” or “Brett Simpson wildcard” and exciting your own nipples with thumb and forefinger.

Rip Curl/O’Neill: You’re a traditionalist who would buy one of their suits even if Mick Fanning and Jordy Smith weren’t being paid millions to inflate ’em. All you want is a suit that keeps you warm,  that ain’t a straitjacket (it grips the parabola of your stomach beautifully) and won’t peel apart after one good season. You’re immune to marketing. Inoculated from the whims of fashion. Which is also why you wear Birkenstocks and cargo pants.

Patagonia: You like your studs big, hairy, to take charge, and who like to maul otters like you, your skin raked by dirty fingernails. You like to camp. You like beer breath. You like to feel fur against your body. Brown is your favourite colour.

What does your surfboard say about you? Click here! 

Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by @theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
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