I had a long discussion with wonderful friend
David Lee Scales, just the other day, about wetsuits. Hollow fiber,
seamless, zipperless, wetsuits. Carbon woven, heat sealed,
thermonuclear wetsuits. Psychofreak, psycho one, psycho tech
wetsuits. And I thought, on my drive home, “You know, we really
don’t think about wetsuits enough. They are surfing’s unsung hero.
Our Stephen Breyers. Our Tenzig Norgays. Our Georg Konrad
Morgens.”
Without wetsuits surfing would be, for most of us, an
uncomfortable pastime during most of the year. We take for granted
that we can surf in any temperature water thanks to 3/2, 4/3,
straight 5 wetsuits. We don’t even think about being warm or
warm-ish when we surf.
A fantastic product by any account. Maybe even more important
than wax. Definitely more important than leg ropes.
Yet still unsung.
Until now.
Mic drop.
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Filipe Toledo surfs as if some higher tyrant has
elevated his ability. Jesus Cristo!
A short film featuring Filipe Toledo with cameos by
the ever-wonderful Jesus Cristo!
It’s no secret that Filipe Toledo, like ninety
percent of his fellow Brazilians, is powered by the divine hand of
a Christian god. If you were to examine his right deltoid and bicep
you’d be pleased to see a slightly scaled down portrait of Jesus
Cristo, the son of god etc.
In this two-and-a-half-minute short by Bruno Baroni, and which
features Filipe in Portugal, it begins with enough Biblical imagery
to swing even a fallen apostate like me. The purity of the nun, the
silhouette of Christ, the monks…
…but here comes a beat…
Filipe arrives at a beach.
…and full rote, almost full rote, backside tube, rote, big
lay-down carve, tube, straight air, lofty rote, hack, hack, hack,
hack, rote, fast spin and so on.
It isn’t Mean Streets but it does give a
momentary rush.
Did y’see it coming? Half-an-hour ago, the WCT
announced the not-so-surprising news that a little cotton farming
town four hours north-east of Los Angeles would become a stop on
the 2018 WCT schedule.
Lemoore, or L’Amour if you believe in love, is the home, of
course, to Surf Ranch, the Slater-Fincham wave pool. As per the
presser,
Since coming online in December 2015, the WSL Surf Ranch
Facility in Lemoore, California has undergone constant refinement
and evolution of its technology. A test event this year in
September delivered very positive results in terms of competitive
experience and the overwhelmingly supportive feedback from surfers
training there throughout the season has encouraged the WSL to
pursue an event at the facility in 2018. “The experience of competing at Surf Ranch is pretty
extraordinary,” Adrian Buchan, CT competitor and athlete
representative, said. “What the team has created is hard to fathom
at first – a perfect, 400-yard-long, bi-directional wave in the
middle of rural California. I have no doubt that both the quality
of the wave and the experience is befitting of hosting a
world-class CT event.
“We’re only scratching the surface of how this technology
can be applied and it is completely game-changing for the
sport,” Sophie Goldschmidt, WSL CEO, said.
The rest of the 2018 tour will be announced next week and,
meanwhile, the ocean, which I believe still has some validity, will
host the tour finale, the Pipeline Masters.
Come and be accidentally and totally seriously
inspired!
I was made aware of this story last week but
somehow, between making fun of Stab, making
fun of The Inertia
and even dusting off ol’ Paul Speaker
and making fun of him, it fell through the cracks. For this, I am
deeply sorry. Rip-Current Rory exhibits the can-do spirit, the
anti-depressive joie de vivre for which BeachGrit is
known around the world.
You recall the basics. A
young Scottish man (henceforth known as Rip-Current Rory) went for
a surf at his home break. He was caught in a rip-current and pulled
all the way to Ireland, spending many hours clinging to his
yellowed board in the freezing seas and pondering death. Eventually
he was saved and he vowed never to surf again, such wonderful
advice for every surfer except for you and for me.
Later, he caveated his “never surf
again” pledge by saying he would only go surfing IF he
was with a large group, wearing a GPS tracking device and having
someone waiting for him on the beach.
The good people at Surf Snowdonia, Wales’ most famous wave which
also happens to break in a swimming pool, thought, “What if we
invite the young man here? The farthest he could get pulled would
be Cardiff and that’s only if he hopped a cab…”
Well, miracle beyond miracle, Rip-Current Rory accepted their
offer! How was his time? Let’s turn to Welsh News Now:
When asked how his first experience back in the water was,
Mr Bryce describes it as “fun”. “Nothing’s changed, it’s still
surfing and that’s something I’ve been enjoying for four years,” he
says.”What happened was because I was reckless. I went out on my
own, it was poor planning, there was bad conditions – it was
frankly just reckless.
“This is safe – I’m with people, it’s not in the open sea.
There’s no reason to be scared of it because it’s like a
pool.
Changing his tune, Mr Bryce now sees the pool as the first
step in his road back to the ocean. “That will be with people, in
safe conditions and it’s just going to be building it back up,” he
says. “I could never go back into the sea on my own. That’s not
changed, I could never do that. One, it’s unsafe, people shouldn’t
be doing it anyway.
“And two, it’s terrifying. It would be terrifying for me to
do that. Whereas this in the sea with friends, I think will be
fine.”
Wipe those tears and watch:
Wow. I was still in making fun mood but now I feel like a
complete asshole. That was, very seriously, the most inspirational
surf short I’ve maybe ever seen. I’ve tried to cut out all the soft
spots in my heart but, damn it, Rip-Current Rory got me good.
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Melbourne surfer Rob Henry, eight years living in the
Ments. Went there to film, ended up farming coconuts. "I learnt so
much, I learnt how little is needed to be happy. It certainly
doesn’t come from anything material. It’s really within yourself
and your relationships with family and friends, and I think with
any Indigenous culture that’s why they’ve been able to survive for
tens of thousands of years."
What’s your experience of the Mentawai
Islands, those beautiful objects unveiled to the
world by the surf pioneer Martin Daly and the retinue of famous
guests on his boat, the Indies Trader, back in the early
nineties?
Let me guess.
You get waves. You drink beer.
If it’s flat the skipper takes you up river to see how the
little brown fellas still live. You’re delighted by how primitive
it all is, throw a small amount of cash at souvenirs you don’t want
(Who can say no to those pleading brown eyes?), and scurry back to
the air-conditioning and movies of your floating palace.
I remember, once, throwing a terrific tantrum when the waiter on
my vessel attempted to serve my afternoon gin and tonic with the
portions askew. (Too little gin, an abundance of warm tonic.)
One surfer who didn’t follow the usual behavioural pattern of
visitors to the Ments was Rob Henry, a surfer from Melbourne. He
went there filming, met a local and was entranced by the whole
indigenous trip, went native himself.
“There was a young Mentawai named Andy who had been working at
the resort for a year, and he just had this incredible connection
to the land and what I thought might be to his culture and freedom
in his eyes that was something I had not seen in a long time.”
Rob soon found himself in a remote village farming coconuts,
living with a community who didn’t speak English.
“I was interested in finding a village that was as far removed
from the tourism as possible. At the time I didn’t know much about
the culture or the area.
“I didn’t know the language either. I was directed to this
particular village, so I arrived there and it was incredibly
overwhelming and frightening and challenging.”
Rob eventually learned the native language and embedded himself
in the community. He learnt more about the tribe’s traditional
belief system, Arat Sabulungan.
“They believe that all natural things have a spirit and if a
human was to pass away, their spirit would go out into nature and
become part of nature.”
The Mentawai culture became threatened after 1945, when
Indonesia gained independence. The new Government forced the
Mentawai to abandon their traditional beliefs, and select one of
its official religions instead: Islam, Christianity, Catholicism,
Hinduism or Buddhism.
The decades that followed eroded away the traditional Mentawai
way of life, creating a new generation of Mentawai without the full
knowledge of their Indigenous culture and beliefs.
“It is being lost,” Rob says, “It’s still alive within the
elders, and it skipped one or two generations, a lot of Mentawai –
particularly the elders still have this knowledge – and they want
to pass this on to the next generations.”
Mentawai are now able to live freely, but the effects of a
“skipped generation” have been profound, Rob says. He hopes his
documentary As Worlds Divide, filmed over eight years,
will help to shine a light on the Mentawai community.
“I learnt so much, I learnt how little is needed to be happy. It
certainly doesn’t come from anything material. It’s really within
yourself and your relationships with family and friends, and I
think with any Indigenous culture that’s why they’ve been able to
survive for tens of thousands of years.”
