Zach Zuckerberg thinks about surfing.

Scandal: WSL and Facebook’s naughty dance!

By Chas Smith

7 years ago

Professional surfing hangs in the balance!

Not five minutes after publicizing a two year deal which sees Facebook becoming the official broadcast partner of the World Surf League all hell broke loose. It was revealed that Facebook had exposed 50 million users’ data to a firm with political ties that should not have had access. Blah blah blah lots of hang wringing about privacy and nefarious actors willing to “weaponize” information etc. though the best bit I’ve read thus far has been, “On second thought, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to give Facebook access to all my personal information in exchange for seeing what old classmates are eating for breakfast.”

Funny no?

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, took advertisements out in many major newspapers in order to offer The Inertia-like apologies. “So sorry. Our fault. Totally promise to do better in the future.” I don’t like this new era of earnest apology with zero spine. Gimme denials and heartlessness.

But enough reminiscing. The price of admission for future WSL broadcasts will most certainly be access to your personal data, all fine and good, BUT and here’s the thing… I would imagine that Facebook is going to limit what personal information can be sold, in reaction to scandal, which totally and completely renders the deal… silly. Not that professional surf watching data is worth anything but it’s the principle.

Right?

And so the biggest media scandal of the last ten years smacks the beleaguered WSL right in the pocketbook. Maybe. But what I really want to data mine right now is does this latest scandal make you want to not watch professional surfing?

Well?

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Could you bring yourself to make this man cry?

Kelly Slater to BL: “Expect more problems!”

By Chas Smith

7 years ago

Sit down, be humble!

Have you ever utilized a life coach? Some man or woman trained in the art of potential? I clearly have not but feel it might be a wonderful investment. Some man or woman trained in the art of potential sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of my days, telling me where to spend more time, where to spend less time, what my natural skills are, where to focus and where to retreat etc.

My only real question is what sort of life coach I’d want? Would a very positive, gentle and affirmational Stuart Smalley sort be right for me?

Or would I thrive under the tough love, slap you in the face, kick a leg out methods of Kelly Slater?

Kelly has always been a master of the backhanded compliment. The sort that tear down more than build up. Most recently he gave recently laid-off commentator Barton Lynch a little bit of magic.

Barton posted a video on his Instagram, you see, of earth movers etc. doing work at the brand new Surf Lakes site in Queensland, Australia. Surf Lakes, in case you don’t know, is a new tank in the works with non-Surf Ranch technology that will theoretically create eight different sorts of waves. Mark Occy is involved as is Lynch who wrote:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BgnXPFWABI3/?taken-by=barton_lynch

So exciting to visit the Surf Lakes site in Rockhampton today, they have made so much progress since I was last here in September especially considering the amount of rain they have had to contend with and only a few months now and we will be surfing it yeeeew

You can hear Barton’s desperately missed contralto singsonging praise and wonderment for what man can do.

Now, Surf Lakes would certainly be a competitor to Surf Ranch but it is also half way around the world. Still, life coach Kelly Slater weighed in writing:

Good luck to you guys. And expect more problems than you’ll foresee at this point. Hope you guys are successful!

And if this did not send the 1988 world champ into his bedroom, under his pillow, tears streaming down cheeks than I don’t know what ever could. But after he dries his eyes, it is certain Kelly’s prognostication that unforeseen problems might plague will provide low-level depression for weeks if not months. And we all know pain is necessary for beauty. Right?

So I suppose, at the end, I would want Kelly Slater as my life coach, telling me I’m not good enough while I become great. And depressed. Speaking of have you seen I, Tonya yet? It is amazing.

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A rare hit of moonshine at Perth's Trigg Beach. | Photo: swellnet

Dirty Old Perth just Turned into Hossegor!

By Derek Rielly

7 years ago

Meanwhile, fabled sandbottom righthander further south is "fucking unsurfable for civilians!"

Dirty, dirty, waveless Perth. The most isolated capital city in the world. Miles of white-sand beaches shadowed by offshore reefs thereby making rideable waves an exception not a daily reality.

If you can’t shake school or work when the waves are on, you’re screwed.

Well, how about this?

Cyclone Marcus, the same tropical storm that was threatening to turn on those mythical sandbottom righthanders around Yallingup, has delivered a lovely bruise on the Perth coastline.

And, almost as rare as a cyclone swell hitting this far south of the tropics, is the all-day east-to-north-east offshore.

The photo below comes via the Australian surf forecast site, Swellnet. Now, that crowd ain’t a thing to give you a pleasing electrical current, but the waves. If you get ’em, even a couple in an all-day surf, you’d be whimpering with happiness.

So what happened further south? Specifically, that particular beach that was lit up by six-to-eight-foot bombs and Taj Burrow, Jay Davies and Dino Adrian throwing themselves over the cliff seven years ago during Cyclone Bianca?

Well, first. It’s… crowded… down there.

Local newspapers as well as the national broadcaster had been talking up the swell all week (and us yesterday).

The former pro surfer, Mitch Thorson, says the crowds are “overwhelming. More than I’ve ever seen. Seventy guys out at Yallingup, forty guys out at another joint I normally go to where the waves are four-to-six-foot and pretty joy. But everyone has been sucked into that vortex where Taj surfed during Bianca. All week there’s been footage of Taj surfing it so everyone’s fucking down there.”

The rub, says Mitch, is it’s “fucking unsurfable” for civilians. An hour or so ago, Jay Davies and Jack Robinson were paddling it and a couple of guys were towing.”

The swell didn’t hit at the same perfect angle as Bianca either, a little too west in the direction. “Still there’s a few guys pulling into radical closeouts. I saw a goofyfooter get a stand-up barrel at one spot, come out and do a soul arch. I heard his screams from the carpark. But the crowds… man… it was fucking out of control. “

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Just in: Longboarder gets a parade!

By Chas Smith

7 years ago

And the key to his city. Does it make you want to trade teams?

Longboarding is something I generally spend 0.05% of my life thinking about. Maybe when I go to the beach and a woman on a longboard does a neat spin on the nose or something I think about it. Or when I see a longboard tumbling rail to rail straight for my head. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about it a little more and all thanks to Devon Howard. The La Jolla local is very famous amongst those people and I enjoy his candor and quick mind, not to mention debonair vintage California good looks.

We had a chat a week ago about longboarding and other things and while I will never touch one, save violently kicking, he opened my eyes to the complex stratification in that scene. There seems to be a cold war between traditionalists and modernists. Interesting, maybe, because no such thing exists on the real surfing side. Right? I mean, surfing is always and only about progression. Even fishes etc. feature fancy new templates.

I read today that the United States won team gold at the 2018 ISA World Longboard Surfing Championship at Riyue Bay in Hainan, China all thanks to a man named Tony Silvangi.

He lives in Florida and when I read about him helping Team USA win gold I had a two thoughts.

The first, why was this news popping into my feed? Has enjoying Devon Howard’s candor, quick mind and vintage good looks poisoned my well?

The second, Does Devon Howard know him?

I am a little reticent to inform you of that second thought because it feels a little racist, no? Like, if you meet an Korean-American man and wonder if he knows the other Korean-American man you know.

In any case, Tony Silvangi is getting the key to his city today. He is from Carolina Beach, North Carolina. And he is also getting a parade in just a few short hours.

Has anyone ever thrown you a parade?

Me neither.

Should we have a BeachGrit parade later this year? Who should it be for?

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If this wave lights up tomoz, and chances are it will, and you get to ride it, you'll feel like a little angel snatched up by god. | Photo: Jamie Scott

Listen: West Oz is going to be insane tomoz!

By Derek Rielly

7 years ago

The rarest of birds – a one-day cyclone swell!

You like rare, beautiful birds? Tomorrow morning, all over Yallingup, Gracetown and Margaret River, surfers are going to wake up to that most sublime of west coast gifts – a cyclone-generated north swell. If Cyclone Marcus stays on its trajectory, and it’s looking like it will, sublime… miraculous… sandbottom righthanders with notes of the Supabank are going to fire tomoz.

Seven years ago, the Margaret River photographer Jamie Scott shot Taj Burrow, Jay Davies and Dino Adrian inside impossibly perfect, and often impossibly hard to get into, six-foot sandbottom tubes.

“You’re just looking at each other with your mouths open and you’re shaking your head and nothing comes out, you don’t know what to say. I’d lost my voice by the end of the day,” Taj said of a wave that has only appeared, in this sort of form, twice, and only for a few hours each time, in the past 20 years.

That was Cyclone Bianca, when clean two-foot runners turned into eight-foot bombs by the afternoon.

“You’re just looking at each other with your mouths open and you’re shaking your head and nothing comes out, you don’t know what to say. I’d lost my voice by the end of the day,” Taj said of a wave that has only appeared, in this sort of form, twice, and only for a few hours each time, in the past 20 years.

Tomoz it could be on again.

“It’s crystal ball stuff but everything’s looking good for it,” says Jamie Scott. “The wind looks good, the swell looks good. It’s going to be like Snapper down here tomorrow. Everyone’s onto it. Crew are flying over from the east and, obviously, the pro’s have got nothing on until Thursday at Bells.”

And it’s a one-day thing.

“Monday is crap. The wind goes (onshore) north-west and the swell goes more west (straighter).”

Jamie says he’ll be up at five, even though it’s not exactly…light… until seven, but he’ll load up his water housing, his drone, his long lens, stick his jetski on the back of his four-wheel-drive and meet up with the old gang, Taj, Jay and Dino.

“I’m fucking set,” says Jamie.

It’s a neat symmetry that Jamie, who was working his stand at the Dunsborough markets when I called, had just sold the photo that appears here.

“People love it,” he says. “I hope I get a better one tomorrow.”

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