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.
