Without energy drinks professional surfing would be a memory!
I preach often, like a sweaty fire and brimstone theologian, on the surf industry apocalypse and what precipitated it. “Conservatism!” I shout, a tendril of wet blonde dancing in front of my nose. “Conservatism and fear!” I continue jabbing one crooked finger toward the sky. The brands, our brands, in their hunger to gobble up larger and larger profits watered themselves down, went public, brought in Disney executives and then distressed asset managers to run them all while tanking.
“A ten year fall from GRACE!” I wail as the newly laid off shout “Amen!”
Everyone knows that our major brands, our Volcoms and Quiksilvers and Billabongs, are in deep trouble. These beacons of the surf/skate/snow lifestyle used to throw lavish parties to celebrate films, line releases, competitive victories. They used to sponsor professional surfers for millions of dollars even the worst professional surfers for hundreds of thousands of dollars but no more.
The apocalypse has rendered future Bede Durbidges moot.
I do say, without Red Bull, Monster and even Rockstar it would be nigh impossible for any professional surfer, save John John Florence and Gabriel Medina, to make a living from surfing professionally.
Could this possibly be true? Oh it most certainly is. Red Bull pays good money to Kolohe Andino, Kanoa Igarashi, Jamie O’Brien, Ian Walsh and Carissa Moore but to name a few. Monster allows Conner Coffin, Maud Le Car, Griffin Colapinto, Owen + Tyler Wright to slide the waves. Rockstar fattens the wallets of Albee Layer, Zeke Lau, Nat Young, Clay Marzo, Mitch Crews, etc.
Now, do you think that Nat Young could survive in professional surfing without Rockstar’s stipend? There is no way. Absolutely no way. Without energy drinks professional surfers would be but a memory and professional surfing but a thing Luke Munro once did.
I do think we should show these benevolent giants a little love today. Go now and drink a Red Bull + vodka and smile, knowing that you are keeping dreams alive.
Earth's great secrets are but one Kelly Slater and one Adam Fincham away from being cracked.
Can you recall that daybefore you were aware of Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch? When, in your mind’s eye a “wave pool” meant surge-y pushy whitewash-y nonsense? Mostly meant for children and the Chinese?
I can’t.
Like genetically modified food, wavepools now feel eternal and we can debate debate debate their moral value but it is a pointless exercise because they are the future and since they are the future they are also the past.
Eternal.
But oh the debates are interesting enough. The quality of wavepool versus natural waves. The essence etc. I’ll tell you what, I’ve surfed Surf Ranch and had all my thoughts and listened to the thoughts of others and interesting but nothing has definitively swayed me on the “which is better” discussion until yesterday evening when I was shown definitive proof that there is really no difference between the two.
That’s right. In our human arrogance we think our ”feelings” or “experience” matter. Of course they do not. The only thing that matters is empirical proofs and yesterday I was shown empirical proof that wavepools and nature are exactly the same.
And there you have it. Science took us to the moon. Science is allowing us to mock the earth.
Hahaha stupid earth. Your great secrets are but one Kelly Slater and one Adam Fincham away from being cracked.
Next stop, the human breast.
Take that, Stab magazine!
Are you the WSL or The Surf Ranch? Are you Indonesia or are you Hawaii? Lemoore?
I used to love you but now I am unhappy.
I am confused. I am very, deeply confused. I don’t know what to believe!
There are sharks and wave pools and Olympics and there is of course the World Surf League. I miss the way you used to be. I miss when I could go surfing and just go surfing. I don’t like thinking about the state you’re in because it makes me sad.
But have you changed or I?
I always knew there were sharks. But why do I now spend as much time gazing at my dangling feet as I do on the horizon? I am waiting for a set or I am waiting to die and neither come fast enough. I want ultimate pleasure or I want it all to end. I won’t live in a paradigm of waves and shadows. Fuck anxiety.
I was once utterly desperate for a wave pool in my hometown. I craved one in a similar way that I imagine Barton Lynch craving anything, with froth dripping from every pore of my being. I was sick of getting skunked. I needed infinite perfection.
I just don’t know you anymore, surfing. You’re in a bad place but I think everyone is confused about where that place that is. Fuck the Olympics, right? Fuck corporate competition. In fact, fuck competing all together.
But ultimately he just confused me because I would very much like to surf a wave pool but I would also very much like Kim Jong-Un to point his missiles towards Lemoore.
I just don’t know you anymore, surfing. You’re in a bad place but I think everyone is confused about where that place that is. Fuck the Olympics, right? Fuck corporate competition. In fact, fuck competing all together.
But surfing, you are the greatest competition! You’re Kelly vs. Andy. You’re Occy vs. Curren. You’re Hawaiians vs. Haoles.
Well, At least you were.
From where I’m sitting, you have never been less competitive. You are dull. The tour is boring. Contrary to the suggestions of the commentary team, claiming a chop-hop on a 2ft wave does not count as passion. There are no rivalries. There is only gracious losing and gracious winning and nothing more. Aside from John, there is more talent off tour. And the fact that the waves are shit throughout every contest period is no factor of chance. No, it is a sign from god that something is very very wrong.
So, surfing, who are you?
Are you the WSL or The Surf Ranch?
Are you Indonesia or are you Hawaii? Australia?
Lemoore? God, I hope you aren’t Lemoore.
Are you competitive or are you free?
Are you the Olympics or are you the Volcom Pipe Pro?
A branch of lightning comes to El Salvador's famous righthand point, Punta Roca…
Dirty, tortured, gorgeous El Salvador. Set afire for a dozen years through the eighties and nineties with a left vs right civil war that spawned such fiendish crimes as “death squads” and the interference of the Reagan government for whom communism was worse than any sort of human rights indecency.
Of course, now…now… the smallest country in Central America lives in… well, it ain’t what you’d call peace. Its capital, San Salvador, has the third-highest murder rate in the world, a hundred people killed in every one hundred thousand.
On the upside, the joint is a shortish flight from the US and they use US dollars. And in the not-so-little town of La Libertad there is the righthand, sandbottom point Punta Roca, popular with mostly American surfers since the seventies (a ton of the surf scenes in John Milius’ Big Wednesday were shot there). Earthquakes, shitty water, malaria and so forth complete the picture.
For a kinetic hot-rod like Filipe Toledo, who is twenty two and who owned Jeffreys Bay last year, the soft point is a wave where he can charge to and fro, upturning his surfboard and surfing as fast as a dog racing through a cathedral.
I would suggest, as a primer for how to rip a point wave, you might like to watch this latest edit by Filipe’s filmer Bruno Baroni…
Journalism is the most criminal enterprise that man has ever undertaken Mush. Pure theatre.
My life has become very strange. I wade through the world, one-armed and milky headed even though I’ve cut off the opioids. Sober. Stone cold sober. Everything looks different, not better or worse just… strange. Odd. I watch TV and can’t suss out if they’re really true. I read pieces on the Internet and know they must be false. Like yesterday. Fate found me at The Inertia-lite safe space lifestyle website Stab reading a story titled Exclusive:Stab Interrogates the Man Behind Australia’s First Wavepool.
It featured a baby oil massage with the URBNSURF founder Andrew Ross, who is opening Australia’s first tank in Melbourne next year and my milky head thought, “Andrew Ross?” It sounded familiar somehow and so I dipped into our archives and, yes, there it was from three years ago. BeachGrit was just a naughty little baby then and so you didn’t read but here for you now, from the hand of Derek Rielly.
If you saw the Snowdonia Wavegarden footage that’s been everywhere, you probably thought, when’s that fun little burger coming to my part of the world?
I live in Australia (BeachGrit has bureaus in San Francisco, San Diego, Kauai and Sydney) and got in touch with the former lawyer and investment banker, Andrew Ross, who bought the rights to Wavegarden on my piece of turf.
A few questions, none of ’em real hard.
Is Australia getting wave tanks? When? And where?
Andrew Ross, from what I can tell from the one phone call to Western Australia where he lives and where the company that he set up, Wave Park Group, is based, is an over-achiever whose giddy list of achievements, included some kind of interaction with the billionaire Richard Branson, during a year off he’d taken after running some of the biggest companies in the country.
This is where Wavegarden kicks in. When he had that year off a few years ago, it was because he’d just hit 40, had a kid, wanted to travel, surf and find some kind of inspiration for the next half of his working life.
At some point, he figured he’d like to have a swing at a surfing-based biz.
“I’ve never been associated with the surf industry,” he says. “But I’m a 35-year hardcore surfer, all my mates, we know what surfing is about, we all go to the Ments each year.”
Ross liked the aroma of the new wave pools that were suddenly appearing, in theoretical form, everywhere. He’d seen the Webber pool and got in touch with Greg Webber. Then Kelly Slater’s “people.” When he was over in Europe, he swung by the Basque country to surf the Wavegarden lagoon, its proto testing pond.
He got in and, yeah, it one of those moments he says.
Taj Burrow was surfing the right (stars!), he was surfing the left, he kicked out and told Wavegarden, “I’m writing you a cheque. This is fucking amazing.”
Ross created the company Wave Park Group, brought in pals with various complimentary skills, and made a goal to create 10 Australian Wavegardens in 10 years. Ambitious?
Baby, he’s an investment banker. It seems positively… bearish!
The website, (click here), reeks of corporate-speak, howevs, which stings the eyes. It’s like one of those forms you get when a new CEO swings into your company and he wants to know the company’s mission, it’s vision and values, all those things that are totally mainlined in the corporate world.
Whatever, it’s only the meaningless platitudes companies throw on their sites to fill the obvious gap of not having a product yet. But maybe soon!
Ross, who’s just been to three cities in three days, says he doesn’t want to make any premature announcements, ’cause that leads to disappointment, and he’s right, and won’t until the first site is secured and the Development Approval has gone through whatever regional planning authority it’s dealing with.
That said, “we’d be disappointed if we don’t have something to people within 12 months, potentially quite a bit shorter than that,” he says.
What interests me, is the parks are going to be owned by Wave Park.
He ain’t sub-letting the Wavegarden technology.
They’ll buy or lease the site, buy all the Wavegarden pieces that’ll then be shipped to Australia, it’ll all get put together, a few months of testing, and away it goes.
What did Mr. Ross feel? Well, he came into our naughty baby comments, if you can believe, and said:
Hi Derek, that’s sort of accurate – but I’m not sure I’m “a hardcore surfer” that “knows what surfing’s about”. I certainly haven’t run some of the biggest companies in Australia. But I have loved surfing all my life, I have two young kids that are just learning to surf, and I feel totally stoked to now be involved in a business that, for me, is a bit of a culmination of all the different work I’ve done to this point. I’m happy to have a proper chat if you want to get a better idea about what we have planned. Cheers, Andrew (PS – loved all of the stories you wrote on Aquabumps for Uge’s last Ment’s trip).
To which Derek responded:
…oh, I did feel very grateful to Eugene for sliding me onto that once-in-a-lifetime voyage, on a boat as high as the Sacré Coeur and even more beautiful, at the last minute, hence the time put into those stories.
To clarify those other points, first, about you being involved in some of Australia’s biggest companies, my notes say: “Used to run big ASX listed companies.” I extrapolated from that, one, that if a company is on the Australian Stock Exchange, it’s already among the top 2000 companies in the country. And, add a little oil in the mix, and it’s gotta be top 500. Possibly too long a bow to draw, yeah.
Two, you can blame the other bit on the harshness of the printed quote, the lack of nuance of type on screen. It’s exactly as you said it, howevs.
If there’s more to add to the story, I’ll happily snatch more quotes. Journalism is the most criminal enterprise that man has ever undertaken Mush. Pure theatre.
I spent the rest of the day chuckling to myself. Just doddering around one-armed and chuckling. It’s good, no? Also, I have not read this discussed anywhere but feel it is pertinent. The tank is being built near Melbourne’s airport which happens to be 3000000 kilometers away from Melbourne proper so they should probably say “near Sydney” instead. Just my two cents.
