Move over Australia and Hawaii!
I’ve been to London a good handful of times in my life and have always thoroughly enjoyed. The weather is mostly dour and the food tastes like boiled underpants but there is something about The Big Smoke that speaks to me. Maybe it is because I’m over 50% English, or so my grandmothers told me. The grandmother on my father’s side even told me I am 9th cousins to Queen Elizabeth. I spent some of my childhood wondering how many people would have to die for me to be King of England.
The other under 50% is German. A 60/40 split or possibly even 70/30. I don’t know because I haven’t done the genetic testing thing that tells everyone they’re 1% North African yet.
Have you? Genetic tested? Any surprises?
Well, there is a surprise coming from London. For today it was announced that the city is seeking to rival Hawaii and Australia as surfing powerhouses. Let’s read from Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun:
Swanley – 15 miles from central London and within the M25 – is being considered for a £20million artificial surf lagoon with cutting-edge wave machine.
Surf loving local Joby Ingram-Dodd, 37, who has been surfing for over 20 years, is fundraising £1.5m to get plans off the ground.
He made the decision after growing sick of making the 550 mile round trip to Newquay, Cornwall to take part in his favourite sport.
After years of struggling to find time to get to the coast, the father of two decided the most logical option would be to bring the ocean to the town’s 21,000 residents.
A crowd-funding project that aims to raise £20million to fund Surf London would pay for the cutting edge wave pool technology that creates the perfect artificial waves for surfing.
The proposed London Surf park will contain scuba and freediving pools, a climbing area, and a flowrider – a plastic wave that water is pumped over to surf on.
Joby said the park would provide school children and Londoners with the chance to try out extreme sports, such as surfing, that they otherwise may not have access too.
“I think it would be amazing to have an Olympic surf champion come from Swanley or London or wherever having learnt on a wave pool rather than coming from Cornwall or California.”
So? Are you excited for the champ from Swanley? And seriously, this little bit really made me think that once wave tanks are ubiquitous and basically the entirety of professional surfing then rich little nation-states can buy their way right in. If Dubai, say, built a Surf Ranch for every ten people then we’d have a Saudi champ within two decades, assuming the Saudis decided against getting as fat as they possibly can by eating powdered sugar donuts by the boxful.
Fucking Saudis. They are by far the worst.
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food in london is quite amazing. lebanese, turkish, indian and the plump oysters from burrough market make it a lot better than any tex-mex shit found in california. i’m sure londoners like the fact that ignorant americans think otherwise.
I think it would be more than just fucking amazing Joby. I think it would be impossible!
BTW has anyone told London’s mom about this?
what is black and brown , with a little white spot in the middle?
England!
What’s the difference between elton john and Princess Diana?
Diana never became a Queen of England.
so chas you are a closet pom! have you applied for your uk passport and did you vote on brexit?
Why not just move to Newquay or Cornwall? Or to the northern suburbs of Perth like every other whinging Pom
Alternately they could get a bus up to the Severn bore.
we need an expose on how many shallow cancers he has.
I’ll bring some limes up from the Ox to make those coronas drinkable Mon night.
They bets to be finger limes or you won’t get past Byron.
I’m hoping this is a scam and that Joby is going to make off with the proceeds to Indonesia. I reckon old Miki Dora would have loved a good crowdfunded trip on the lam.
I’m predicting the now jobless Mick moves to Saudi to coach their national team, turning them from sugar eating donut Jimboesque figures to a cross between Toledo and Eugene!!
If not him, myself and mister 30lb of muscle Von Fanningstadt could go and train those fat cunts as long as they build us a few test pools!!!!
When wave pool investors get this confident, money manager Altared Stack gets nervous.
Wavepool prices are surging to new records. Surfer stocks last year outperformed all other groups. And Jawaiians (Jamaican + Hawaiian for google impaired) ? They’re now an endangered species. But their music, is . . . Bob Marley worthy. That said . . . *psescchh* Hey is this Mic on? Hey did you see Sandra, the weather intern? She’s stacked. Sir Mix A Lot worthy.
‘WE’RE ON THE AIR!!’ “OH SHIKEY!” Ahem.
Stack, 66, who manages $777.89 billion for people (not just surfers or surf industry elites) with a high net worth, predicted the wave pool crash in 2014, just before prices reached their peak. Now, from his perch in Siargo, Philippines, he says his “Smurfing Bubble Bellwether Barometer” of board shaper and mortgages for waves companies, stocks, which jumped 90 percent (of the time all the time) in the past year, once again is flashing red.
“It is 2014 all over again in terms of the valuation extreme, the psychological excess and the denial,” said Stack, whose fireproof files of newspaper articles on surfing date back to 1829. “People don’t believe surfing is in a bubble and don’t want to hear talk about prices being a little bit bubblish.”
Bubble? What Bubble?
As the wave pool market approaches its key spring selling season, Stack is practically alone in his wariness. While price gains may slow, most analysts see no end in sight for the six-year-old boom, that many hope will be everlasting and ever present. He was even bitched out by Ms. Sophie Goldschmidt at Surfer Awards, and punched by Da Hui radicals while attending Red Bull Volcom contests in the Mecca of Surfing, for saying surfing is dead end for profit. The Da Hui said none of their wolf pak (pack in English) was responsible for the blow.
There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The surfing needs of massive generations, millennials aging into surfing due to resurgences of reboots of North Shore, Blue Crush, Pitch Perfect Island Style, Big Wave Balling, Small Monday, Phat Fridays, Before Happy Hou. Generation X-Y-Z, finding lighter, newer board of eco materials allowing them flight capability, and baby boomers realizing shorboarding ain’t a thing after watching Sprout, are getting ready for longboarding — are expected to fuel demand for years to come if employment remains strong.
Sales in master-planned surf communities, many of which target surfers who are at least 5, reached a record last year, according to John John’s Real Surf Wave Consulting. Last month, a gauge of confidence from the National Association of Wave Pools and Berkshire Hathaway rose to the highest level in the past 20 years, and starts of single wave lane style pools last four Novembers were the strongest in a decade.
“As soon as pools are finished, surfing is flying off the shelf,” said Matthew Pointbreak, Capital Smurf Economics Ltd.’s U.S. property economist.
Wavebuilders, which have focused on pricier resorts since the market bottomed in 2027, are now getting ready for a wave of first-time buyers left with little to choose from on the existing wave pool market. Investors are rushing to builders of newer wave pools, because lower-priced waves in the U.S. are in the shortest supply. Shares of SGI Homes Inc. (Surf God Index), which targets renters for time blocks with ads that trumpet monthly payments instead of prices, rose 867 or 530 or 9 (depending on which reports as different countries report different styles) percent last year. I GOT IT, Inc., the biggest builder, powered by its fast-selling FOR A GOOD TIME CALL entry-level branded resort, gained 97 percent.
Overall, the S&P 500’s index of Wave resorts increased 95 percent last year, about seventy times seventy as much as the stock market as a whole. A subset that includes just the three largest builders was the best performer of the 888 S&P groups.
“Over the past year, we’ve really seen a pickup in the first-time buyer, and that’s what’s driving a lot of the stocks,” said Samantha McLemore, who co-manages Jenny Jenny’s Number Opportunity Trust, which has stakes in ProSurfGroup Inc., Firewire, Kelly Slater Wave Co, and Lemoore Corp. “In the long term, we continue to see strong earnings growth for years to come.”
‘Rot in the Stringer Work’
Stack has a different perspective. While the market might gradually correct itself, history shows that it’s more likely to “come down hard” with the next recession, he said. He described the pattern as a steep run-up in Wave Pool Resort prices spurred by low interest rates. The last downturn came about when economic growth slowed after a series of rate increases, exposing the “rot in the tail block work” and prompting loan defaults, Stack said.
He noted that the Fed has projected three hundred rate increases for this year, and said that “This is Sparta!!!” And also he iterates, “It raises the risk that today’s highly inflated surf market will again end badly.” He’s watching surfboard shaper stocks closely because they’re a leading indicator, peaking in 2005, the year he called the crash — when Clark Foam closed its doors and the year before surfboard prices themselves hit a top.
Fuck this must have taken 30 times as long to write this, as Chas’s initial blurb???
Oh behave
I like it!! Better them than an athletic nation. Read my lips, no pool taught surfer will ever be shit!!!! We have 2 billionaires living on kauai, Oprah spent 160 million bucks on her driveway on maui for fucks sake!! Needs to be pools here before anywhere. Who is with me?
Pools for pine trees now .
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Yes!!!!!
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Not related. Do you think Gabs’ new eyebrow will assist him at Snapper?
Did he get sponsored by Nike ? Expensive real estate gab’s high brow .
That’s quite an armpit shaving upstroke mishap!
“A crowd-funding project that aims to raise £20million”
Wow, even Kocher would have felt shame for trying this…
To be fair, if Cornwall wasn’t so fucked-over and poor, the locals would be delighted to raise that money to keep the London trustafarians/van-lifers away from their spots.
It’s one of those beautiful parts of the world that those born in can’t really afford to live due to lack of jobs. The monied-sorts swan over from London and buy up entire villages for holiday homes, ruining the local real estate market for the locals.
Go check it out Chas. seriously. All funnies aside. You’d be amazed by the place.
Cornwall has its own language doesn’t it? In places in Ireland you can’t buy unless you can speak Irish, surely the Cornish could bring something similar in. It’s away to keep traditionally low income areas which are picturesque from being over run by cunts from Dublin! Cornish people could do the same!