Keramas is the new big shot on tour!
It was curious, yesterday, to read the extraordinary descriptions of the horrors of a tour minus Lowers.
BeachGrit principal Chas Smith complained of a “broken heart”. What Youth‘s Travis Ferré said he felt “icky”.
It was reminiscent, of course, of the epic tantrums thrown when the WSL threw on a test event at Surf Ranch two months ago. Chas said he hated the pool more, even, than the Apple Genius bar. Travis called it “elitist and weird.”
Calendar-wise, the Lowers event is replaced by five days of Surf Ranch gymnastics. And, here, you can subscribe to sentimentality (Kelly’s dominance of the wave) and existential worries and tie yourself up in contradictory knots and say it’s the end of surfing and so forth, but it ain’t. It just ain’t. (Did the vibrator replace the phallus?)
A more worthy discussion is whether or not Keramas, which swings into the Cloudbreak slot and which now become’s the tour’s high-fidelity event, is better, or not, than Lowers.
And let’s be frank.
Keramas is twice the waves Lowers could ever be. Three times.
Oh, on its day, Lowers delivers ripe, spilling lips, both left and right, which allows a wallow-and-suck orgy.
But only on its day.
How many days does it have? How much blue compared to grey? And that sudden arrival of a Great White colony? That ain’t no fun.
Keramas has push behind its Indian Ocean swells which allows a surgical virtuosity y’aint always going to get at Lowers.
Plus, you can watch the Keramas event from a pool, the bedroom of a five-hundred-dollar-a-night villa, and all through the bottom of a gin and tonic brought to you by a gorgeous indigenous host with honey streaks in her hair, spongy upright tits and skin the colour of an Ubud sunset.
Watch John John and Seabass at Keramas here, the Mad Huey event from last year below that, and tell me Lowers is better than Keramas.
It don’t come close.
