Surfing's stenographer thrilled that America is
great again!
Last week Donald J. Trump pulled the United
States out of the Paris Accord. The international environmental
agreement had been signed by 196 countries last year including then
President Obama and sought to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. It
was non-binding and considered generally flawed but also many found
it a positive step toward recognizing the dangers posed by climate
change.
As Trump stood in the White House’s rose garden on a cloud
dappled day he said, “We are getting out. We want fair treatment.
We don’t want other countries and other leaders to laugh at us
anymore. I was elected by the citizens of Pittsburgh not
Paris.”
And the globe melted into a collective puddle of bewilderment
and rage. Tesla founder Elon Musk withdrew from Trump’s advisory
council in protest. The deposed president of the Maldives declared
that Trump had sentenced the planet to death.
Halfway across the world, though, on the bucolic islands of
Fiji, professional surfing’s favorite stenographer adjusted his red
Make America Great Again hat and applauded. He is not from
Pittsburgh nor is he from Paris. He hails from La Jolla, California
but took to Facebook in praise of his supreme leader. After noting
various Trump’s accomplishments…
3.3 trillion added to the economy already, recent overseas
trip netted 350 billion in investment creating 1000 of new jobs,
repealing crappy healthcare… PK turned his eye toward the
Paris Accord.
(Trump) saved America by getting ripped off in the pointless
Paris Accord. Funny that not many people know that ONLY OBAMA
signed us into that deal. No congress, no voters… Under that
agreement India would double their coal mines and China can build
hundreds more…but we are supposed to get rid of ours? Makes
sense…it doesn’t eliminate coal, it transfers it to other
countries…complete scam…
Before going on to write about the 100 billion dollar fund the
United States was supposed to pay into and other problems he has
with not only the financial burden but also the suppositions
underpinning the environmentalist argument.
Later, on his feed, he posts a YouTube video of energy theorist
Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,
disputing the notion that scientists are in agreement as to what
actually causes global warming.
It’s a classic blood feud! Peter King vs. Climate Change!
But what do you think? Do you believe, like Elon Musk, that the
United States of America and its industrial revolution has polluted
for more, and far longer, than any other nation on earth or, like
Peter King, do you feel the US was fed a bad deal under the Paris
Accord and if China and India get to keep their coal mines we
should get to keep ours too?
Are you a fossil fuel fan? Do you argue their moral case?
Is America officially great again?
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Oliver Kurtz embraces the stoke despite a Middle
Eastern shake-up!
Help: Surfers Stranded in Qatar!
By Michael Ciaramella
This one hits close to home...
Imagine you’re a pro surfer, or, fuck it,
imagine you’re just you. Imagine having (quickly) heeded
yesterday’s
advice and booked a ticket to the world’s best wave on the biggest
swell of the year. Imagine the money you spent. The
indignation of your bosses and spouse. Imagine your excitement.
This was almost me. I spent days looking at forecasts and
tickets, tickets and forecasts. I was anxious, barely sleeping, and
my behaviors were those of a fiending addict. I’d built my whole
year around visiting the jewel of west Africa, and this could very
well be my chance.
At the last second, I pulled out. A combination of a dicey
forecast (the swell jumps up and dies very quickly due to its
proximity to the coast, and during the one day that it appears to
be big enough and west enough to surf, it could
potentially overload the joint) and relationship pressures
(“You were just in Mexico” (…fair)) forced me to pull the
plug.
Since that moment, I’ve been praying that the swell isn’t so
great. That it’s too big or too small or too
something, meaning that I made the right call by
waiting for the next one.
Since then I’ve seen evidence of multiple pros headed that way.
Anthony Walsh, Cory Lopez, Brett Barley, and Oliver Kurtz just to
name a few. Their committal to the trip increased my FOMO
exponentially, but a recent occurrence has changed my
perspective.
Just this morning, Oliver Kurtz made a plea to his friends on
Facebook.
And… holy shit! Doha, Qatar was the very place where my flight
would have connected. In fact, Oliver had taken the same plane
that I was planning to board. Now he’s stuck in the throes of
a Middle Eastern
brouhaha, something that should probably be scary but
at the moment is likely more infuriating for the Floridian
goofy-foot.
Oliver has (to my knowledge) never been to Skeleton Bay,
meaning, much like with me, this trip was a longtime dream. To have
it squandered by such a shitstorm would be utterly
heartbreaking.
I can’t tell you how happy I am that I pulled out.
I’ve yet to see updates from the other surfers listed above, but
considering they all left from different parts of the U.S., there’s
a decent chance they avoided the Qatar kerfuffle with connections
through other parts Africa or the Mid East.
Will Oliver (and perhaps many other surfers) find his way out of
this stronghold? Who knows? But his most recent update is
telling:
If anybody knows anything/anyone in the area that would be able
to help Mr. Kurtz, please let us know in the comments! I’ll update
as the story unfolds.
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Kelly's number five, looking damn fine!
List: Kelly Slater’s Favorite Travel
Zones!
By Michael Ciaramella
Not included: Lemoore, CA
Outerknown is rolling out all the stops for its
2017 #OKFijiPro. There are fresh ads, hourly Instagram updates and
now original web content!
Just this morning I stumbled across a slideshow on the
Outerknown
IG, featuring five drone-captured coastlines. I
recognized two or three but the others remained a mystery. The
caption poked at my curiosity with a big stick.
A post shared by Sustainability, Style, Travel (@outerknown) on
And my fingers have never moved so fast! Two clicks later and I
was face-to-screen with a picturesque breach into Kelly
Slater’s life and history. A snippet, here:
5. Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa
Our last few times to J-Bay we’ve spent lay days at nature
reserves. I’ve been part of an anti poaching initiative there
that’s protecting Rhinos. The wildlife in South Africa is pretty
insane in and out of the water. This past summer right after I lost
my semi final heat to Mick Fanning he was hit by the shark during
the finals, I had just reached the beach after having surfed right
there for an hour. It’s probably the first final I was happy not to
make as that could just as easily have been me in the encounter.
It’s not the first attack at J-Bay there and it surely won’t be the
last. The raw nature makes this part of he world so special and
unpredictable.
4: Anglet, France
I stayed in Anglet and surfed Hossegor with Tom Curren when
I was 17 (1989) and we were on the same team. He took me around to
every good spot in the region for two weeks and showed me the
ropes. Pretty cool to have your surfing hero take you into his home
and share his secrets with you. In 1992 I won my first ASP event at
Hossegor and because of that it’s always been a special place for
me. You can’t compare the food in southwestern France to anywhere
else in the world; I’ve definitely eaten the best meals of my life
there.
And don’t you love these lessons on Kel’s past and
present influences? The list goes on to divulge his three
favorite places in the world, at least one of which may surprise
you.
Wigg Dantas and poofs of spit! | Photo: WSL/Kelly
Cestari
Fiji Pro, Day 2: “Poof of spit on doggy
door!”
By Longtom
Bye-Bye Gabby, Bye-Bye Owen.
I clicked on this morning and got a nappy
commercial. I think they are called Diapers in the US
of A.
That was the first of many cognitive dissonances for the day.
Cloudbreak was serving up another confusing mixed grill of
over-cooked and under-cooked ingredients. Short-period waves that
went nowhere, mid-period, west swell waves that closed out the
lineup and the odd wide open one that steam-rolled the reef.
Not an easy read for anyone. The kind of surf that would see a
boatload of aging alpha male dentists from Manhattan Beach back in
the boat after one set to surf waist-high Restaurants. As a rec
surfer you’d watch the boatmen deep-throat a few juicy peaches
while copping donuts all day long.
Ace inexplicably dropped his bundle against the Italian
Stallion, paddling around like a headless chook in the last ten
minutes when he was well ahead. A series of blunders gave
Fioravanti priority and he duly iced the heat for his first heat
win of the year. It was a heat Ace should have won all day, every
day.
Rosie spent most of the next heat between Kelly and Ethan Ewing
bigging up Ewing, continually comparing him to AI. That hype
eventually took on the dimensions of an entirely separate reality –
Rosie’s World? – as Ewing surfed a heat I could’ve smashed him in.
Kelly was just solid, without being amazing. It was a walk through
for him. How did that idea that Ethan Ewing surfs like AI take
hold?
And why did Volcom, flush with cash after the sale to Kering
group, “let go” the Fiji comp after two of the most successful surf
comps in history? Two thousand and twelve’s big-wave guerilla
insurrection in twenty-foot tubes and Kellys 2013 masterclass
back to back.
You’re flush with fashion cash and you let that go? Why?
Richard “Wooly” Woolcott, I spend the day trying to track you
down without success. I know you are reading, so why did the Stone
hit the eject button on Fiji?
Web journalism is a derelict little cubby hole to crawl down
into. Web surf journalism might be the nadir of human creative
endeavour. It could easily be. I feel like a turd for
insinuating that Joey Turpel might shuffle off and be a coach and
spare us the verbal treacle. And he did. But his absence got me
thinking: about the lack of a distinct lexicon related to pro
surfing. Joey was inventing that for us. For good or ill. The
sled
reset euphemism for shark attacks, the
high-line wraps and other linguistic treats he laid down
for us. For a sport supposedly rich with it’s own inpenetrable
jargon the cupboard can seem bare for commentators supplying
colour.
As Owen got obliterated on the shish-kebabs section going for
broke on a final manoeuvre needing a nine, Rosie came up with this
piece of gold. “There is a little poof of spit as he finds the
doggy door.” No further comment.
But I’m overjoyed to report that Rosie Hodge has made an
incredible contribution to the pro surfing dictionary of phrases.
Sometime during the Ian Gouveia/O-Dog heat, a heat that supplied
genuine drama as Owen got obliterated on the shish-kebabs section
going for broke on a final manoeuvre needing a nine, Rosie came up
with this piece of gold. “There is a little poof of spit as he
finds the doggy door.” No further comment.
Excuse while I clean up this little poof of spit on my computer
screen.
Ian Gouveia looked like Italo did a couple of years ago when he
beat Kelly. Totally at ease, frothing. He beat Owen easily, really.
Owen carried on the Aussie goofyfoot meltdown that Ace had started.
He fell when he should have been standing and ended up pasted and
bleeding. More cognitive dissonance.
It took the last couple heats of the day, with a few goofy foots
led by Matt Wilko to really crack the day open.
Wilko….sizzled.Then Italo stayed down the reef from Gabe
Medina, destroying his tactical advantage and threading high tide
shish-kebabs tubes all day.
Bye-Bye Gabby, Bye-Bye Owen. Weird though.
Barton asked Kelly about World Ocean Day, about what the ocean
meant to him.
“Everything,” he said. But it didn’t ring true.
Not when you put Nick Carroll’s summation of the next moves for
the WSL into the equation.
“This chunk of the main game is all about Kelly’s wave pool, the
2020 Tokyo Olympics, and the doors that the WSL board thinks will
then open up to wave pools and associated events in both
traditional and ‘new’ surf markets. By ‘new’ read places where
there isn’t a surf culture yet – Korea, China and the like.”
So the ocean isn’t “everything” at all.
Even a day in Fiji at Cloudbreak now carries this haunting
shadow with it.
What is the main game, if this ain’t it?
Outerknown Fiji Men’s Pro Remaining Round 2
Results:
Heat 2: Joel Parkinson (AUS) 10.66 def. Yago Dora (BRA) 10.33
Heat 3: Sebastian Zietz (HAW) 18.43 def. Bino Lopes (BRA) 9.53
Heat 4: Leonardo Fioravanti (ITA) 12.26 def. Adrian Buchan (AUS)
11.87
Heat 5: Kelly Slater (USA) 12.90 def. Ethan Ewing (AUS) 4.27
Heat 6: Joan Duru (FRA) 13.00 def. Conner Coffin (USA) 10.30
Heat 7: Wiggolly Dantas (BRA) 14.77 def. Jadson Andre (BRA)
12.27
Heat 8: Jeremy Flores (FRA) 17.57 def. Nat Young (USA) 11.10
Heat 9: Stuart Kennedy (AUS) 10.74 def. Ezekiel Lau (HAW) 9.10
Heat 10: Ian Gouveia (BRA) 15.10 def. Kanoa Igarashi (USA) 7.13
Heat 11: Miguel Pupo (BRA) 12.00 def. Jack Freestone (AUS) 9.23
Heat 12: Bede Durbidge (AUS) 13.10 def. Josh Kerr (AUS) 9.90
Outerknown Fiji Men’s Pro Round 3 Results:
Heat 1: Ian Gouveia (BRA) 15.66 def. Owen Wright (AUS) 15.26
Heat 2: Julian Wilson (AUS) 15.04 def. Frederico Morais (PRT)
10.20
Heat 3: Matt Wilkinson (AUS) 16.84 def. Miguel Pupo (BRA) 5.67
Heat 4: Italo Ferreira (BRA) 15.83 def. Gabriel Medina (BRA)
15.47
Upcoming Outerknown Fiji Men’s Pro Round 3 Match-Ups:
Heat 5: Mick Fanning (AUS) vs. Michel Bourez (PYF)
Heat 6: John John Florence (HAW) vs. Leonardo Fioravanti (ITA)
Heat 7: Jordy Smith (ZAF) vs. Joan Duru (FRA)
Heat 8: Kelly Slater (USA) vs. Connor O’Leary (AUS)
Heat 9: Joel Parkinson (AUS) vs. Jeremy Flores (FRA)
Heat 10: Kolohe Andino (USA) vs. Bede Durbidge (AUS)
Heat 11: Sebastian Zietz (HAW) vs. Wiggolly Dantas (BRA)
Heat 12: Adriano de Souza (BRA) vs. Stuart Kennedy (AUS
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Reno Abellira is one of my surf heroes. Reno, Jock, BK,
Hakman, Nuuhiwa – my Big Five, during the formative years. I have
style inflections to this day that come straight from Reno. There’s
a Peter French shot of Reno at Ala Moana that is the backside
bottom to which every one of my backside bottom turns has aspired.
| Photo: Peter French
Warshaw: “Reno is my surf hero!”
By Matt Warshaw
Surf historian Matt Warshaw replies to Reno
Abellira's Instagram tirade!
Reno Abellira is one of my surf heroes. Reno,
Jock, BK, Hakman, Nuuhiwa – my Big Five, during the formative
years. I have style inflections to this day that come straight from
Reno. There’s a Peter French shot of Reno at Ala Moana that is the
backside bottom to which every one of my backside bottom turns has
aspired.
Reno and I met in person while I was at SURFER, probably in
1988. He is a chilled out motherfucker, intense and quiet-voiced
and formidable, and I was so nervous just sitting across from him.
But evidently I passed muster, as we worked together on two feature
articles the following year: “Performance: the Hot Pursuit,” then
“Whatever Happened to Hawaiian Style? The Rise and Fall of
Surfing’s Aloha Spirit.” The second piece was especially good, with
Reno lamenting the fact that modern Hawaiian pros seemed to be
losing sight of their surfing roots. Read this, and see if it
doesn’t move you the way it did me when it first came across my
desk:
Someone forgot to pass the calabash. Others were no-shows at
their own initiation. That scares and saddens the hell out of me,
for within the calabash lie all the vital legacies and knowledge
important to our great surf heritage. With a symbolic passing and
receiving of the bowl from generation to generation, the connection
stays alive—the connection which threads its way up from the days
of the ancients—and with it, the meaning of Hawaiian
Style.
Reno’s articles were clean, concise, delivered on time, easy to
edit. He and I talked on the phone during the edit process, going
over drafts. He was stoked on how they came out in print. We had
plans to do some more pieces during the upcoming winter, but Reno
dropped out of sight, or at least dropped off the media radar, and
that was it as far as the two of us go. I left SURFER the following
year, in 1990.
I tried no less than six times to get in touch with Reno in 2000
and 2001, while researching the print version of Encyclopedia of
Surfing. I had a basic questionnaire that all the surfers in EOS
filled out (all the living surfers): birth date and place, school,
year started surfing, most notable accomplishment’s, etc. I
couldn’t find with Reno. The number I had for him was disconnected,
my emails got no reply. The fallback in such cases was to do
research from sources at hand. For Reno, that meant about two-dozen
magazine articles. I had a Duke Boyd profile on him from 1968, one
from Drew Kampion in 1975, one from Phil Jarrett in 1979. Most of
what’s in Reno’s Encyclopedia of Surfing page is taken from
those three articles, including this bit from Kampion’s 1975
profile:
The year before [1965], Reno’s father was shot and killed in
a pool hall fight. “Being a boxer,’ [Abellira said], “he had
underworld contacts. He used to strong-arm gambling games in the
downtown Honolulu environs.”
I had no reason to question this part of Reno’s bio. It didn’t
come up in any subsequent surf mag interviews or profiles, and Reno
and Drew connected again for a chatty Surfing conversation
in 1979.
Reno’s Encyclopedia page has been out there, in print or
online, since 2003. This is the first I’ve heard that he was
unhappy with it. Attacked by my childhood hero. I won’t pretend it
doesn’t hurt.
