We’re all part of the same tribe, as dear Kenny
Powers once said, and it is true. Sure we may bitch and moan and
complain about crowds, we may appear to actually hate each other
but deep deep deep deep deep deep deep down inside there is love.
We’re surfers. Brothers!
And a brother in Florida needs our help. Let us learn of his
plight.
A Florida surfer’s wife is asking beachgoers to be on the
lookout for her husband’s missing prosthetic eye.
Carolyn Pandolfi told WKMG her husband Raymond Davidson was
surfing at Daytona Beach Wednesday and wiped out when he
encountered choppy water. His prosthetic eye disappeared in the
ocean.
“It would be amazing to find it in the ocean,” Pandolfi
said.
Pandolfi said her husband had the prosthetic for 20 years.
“It is a hazel green color and looks like an Eye he was surfing in
front of the band shell,” she said. “These things are expensive so
if someone finds it can you please message me.”
Daytona beachgoers were sympathetic to their predicament.
One stranger was kind enough to start a GoFundMe account to cover
the cost of the eye. The goal is to raise $1,800.
According to WKMG, Davidson has an appointment with an eye
doctor on October 6.
Do you live in Florida? Can you help? I’m sure it won’t be too
difficult to find just one.
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"Every single wave spat its guts out, sometimes
more than once," says Justin Cote, the slightly more robust and
rugged of the famous Cote brothers from
Encinitas.
Come ride a user-friendly version of Skeleton
Bay!
Two weeks ago, and a day before a surfer was pulled
dead out of the water in the same spot, the Superbrand
team lit up a left that was, how do you want to call it…
Exhilarating? Transfixing? A little Namibia?
The Outer Banks, if you didn’t know, is a fabulous two-hundred
mile stretch of sandpits between North Carolina and Virginia. Real
famous as a shipwreck graveyard. The Wright Brothers got their bird
in the air on the OBX too.
If you surf, it’s where you got to get shallow, sand-bottom
tubes. At the end of September, the Superbrand team flew across the
USA to Virginia to get some of it, waves powered by Hurricane
Jose.
How good?
“Every single wave spat its guts out, sometimes more than
once,” says Justin Cote, the slightly more robust and rugged of the
famous Cote brothers from Encinitas.
This short film is their triumphant account.
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A little tail-whip or throwing the tank? Who deserves
to be lit with nines?
A note to the judges from a former world number
two.
Just two months ago, Shane Beschen, a former
runner-up to the world title and a regular foil to Kelly Slater,
was described here as “the least huggable pro of
all.”
Beschen, who was on the world tour between 1993 and 2005, had a
bit of the Bobby Martinez’ about him – poisoned by the feeling he
never got the deals or results he deserved and quit the tour a few
years too early.
“I feel like a black person in South Africa 50 years ago, and
all the judges are white,” said Shane in 1998.
What we may not appreciate about Shane, who is forty-five years
old or one week older than Kelly Slater if you want perspective, is
how lucid he is about technique and competitive performance. His
two boys, Koda and Noah, are all products of a pappy who knows the
game.
And, yesterday, when Beschen lip up Facebook with a note to the
tour’s judges on how to score backhand surfing, well, it behooves a
man to listen, don’t it?
“I have posted 4 photos starting with the highest degree of
difficulty and working down to the lowest,” wrote Beschen. “Julian
Wilson demonstrating an extreme throw tail where his entire board
is out of the water and only the tip of his nose is touching. This
is an ‘excellent’ backside maneuver with the highest degree of
difficulty.
“The second photo, to the right of Julian, shows a backside
throw tail in which half of the surfboard is out of the water. This
is also an ‘excellent’ maneuver with a high degree of difficulty
and should be the starting point in which a maneuver is deemed
progressive.
“The third photo is called a backside release and as you can see
there is very little if any of the tail out the back of the wave.
This should be deemed a ‘good’ maneuver as the ‘degree of
difficulty’ is much less than the first two photos.
“The fourth photo is a backside carve and although it could
still be deemed a ‘good’ maneuver it is much less difficult than
the first three photos.
“In conclusion. To further push the level and excitement of
surfing within the WSL there should be a points cap on ‘good’
surfing. A combination of ‘good’ turns should never be
rewarded an ‘excellent; score. If competitors know they can reach
an excellent score with good surfing they will not take unnecessary
risk.
“Solution. A cap of 7.5 – 8 points should be set on good surfing
so competitors will push their performance to achieve excellent
scores. An excellent score should have at least one excellent turn
performed during the ride. In turn, the @wsl and all of the fans
will enjoy more exciting performances from their favorite surfers.
This can only be a positive for the @wsl and its loyal surf
fans.
“Please leave your thoughts and keep them constructive.”
Jamie O'Brien's latest offering is perfect. Don't
let the elitist fun police tell you otherwise.
The genius is not in how much Jamie O’Brien
does in “Who is JOB 7.0″ but in how little. This is the work of an
artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot
simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence,
and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to
inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among online surf serials,
“Who is JOB 7.0″ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with
inspiring our awe.
The series creates its effects essentially out of visuals and
music. It is meditative. It does not cater to us, but wants to
inspire us, enlarge us. Bali surf boxing? Poopies’ rodeo? A barrel
contest over eyebrows? The challenges are perfection. Simple,
joyous perfection.
Only a few shows today are transcendent, and work upon our minds
and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling
landscape. Most are about characters with a goal in mind, who
obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. But here we
see genuine fun playing out. Genuine fun minus the strictures of
Venice Beach and also Venice-adjacent.
“Who is JOB 7.0” is not about a goal but about a quest, a need.
It does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it
ask us to identify with the elitist too-cool-for-school
fun police. It says to us: We became men when we
learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand
where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next
step, to know that we live not on only land but among the waves,
and that we are not flesh but intelligence.
I must admit that I am proud to see this 7.0 iteration. Proud
beyond words for it was I, Chas Smith (back when I was a younger
man named “Charlie”), who directed the original
film “Who is JOB” some 7 years ago.
And nearly 7 years after it was made, it has not dated in any
important detail, and although surfing maneuvers have become more
versatile in the modern age, my work remains completely convincing
— more convincing, perhaps, than more sophisticated maneuvers in
later films, because it looks more plausible, more like documentary
footage than like elements in a story.
“Who is JOB” is a classic in the genre, one of the better
surfing films ever made and “Who is JOB 7.0” sets the bar for the
people. For this is what we want, 1% be damned.
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The World Surf League would have us believe that Jordy
Smith stands head and shoulders above his fellow
competitors.
The reinvention of Jordy Smith has been one of
the highlights of this year’s World Tour don’t you think? Not only
his surfing but his shiny more comfortable personality. I look
forward to his every interview with Rosie Hodge, their South
African patois doing a beautiful gumboot in front of the
step-and-repeat.
Seeing him choose a surfboard for Stab in the Dark was
equally fine, the joy he took in both praising but also making fun.
Did you catch all his underhanded pokes? Very funny. Very fun.
Stab went out of its way, just like the WSL, to mention
Jordy’s weight over and over and over again (193 lbs) along with
his height (6’3). I have never hugged Jordy and tried to lift him
off the ground so cannot speak to his weight but I did walk right
past him on the trail leading to Trestles (hereafter known as Ho
Chi Minh in honor of the people) and have questions about his
height.
He was coming down with two board caddies in tow. I was going up
with my Louis Vuitton drivers covered in dirt but spirit buoyed by
the scent of the people.
We passed and I looked down upon his Red Bull hat and thought,
“If Jordy Smith only had wings then he would be as tall as me.”
I am 6’2.
Now, there are many many variables here of course. The Ho Chi
Minh is not even and smooth, we were both walking and in different
directions, he may have stepped into a divot right as we passed,
the moment only lasted less than a second, my Tom Ford sunglasses
were smudged.
But I think there is no way in hell that Jordy Smith is actually
6’3. I think he is falling into the very common trap of adding 2
inches to his height making him 6’1.
Is this a scandal? Only if you place any value on truth. Only if
you care about honesty and hard work.
