Scottish locals are thrilled to surf!

Arms race: Scotland to get Wavegarden!

Chas Smith

By

Another territory ceded to Spanish innovation!

There was a time, not too long ago, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a race in building their nuclear arsenals. It was an amusing game with fun results though eventually the Soviets couldn’t afford to keep up and the whole country collapsed. We are now seeing a similar drama play out but this time between surf tank giants Kelly Slater Wave Company and Europe’s Wavegarden.

Which will win and which will collapse? Very difficult to say at this point. The KS Wave Co. seems to have a much better PR machine for it is Surf Ranch that gets millions of views online. But while people are watching Surf Ranch they are going to Wavegardens from Wales to Austin and now Scotland too.

For it was revealed today that Wavegarden Scotland is being developed in an old rock quarry near Edinburgh. Let’s learn!

Wavegarden Scotland View 03

The £10m project has been designed by landscape architects HarrisonStevens, with engineering and technical consultation provided by WSP, and planning and development advice by Colliers International.

Alongside a world-class surfing facility, Wavegarden Scotland also includes a surf school, self-catering luxury guest lodges, a waterfront café and restaurant, retail spaces and a snow-sports training jump.

Andy Hadden, the co-founder of Tartan Leisure, which is developing Wavegarden Scotland, said: “We believe that this facility will deliver many benefits for the local community and for Scotland by offering world-class adventure leisure amenities alongside a wonderful country park, for walkers, runners and cyclists to enjoy.

“Another very exciting aspect of Wavegarden Scotland is the opportunity to nurture surfing and sporting talent. With Scotland’s own surfing team starting to make a mark on the global surf scene, we hope to inspire the next generation of surfers, life guards, and active outdoor enthusiasts.”

So I am very excited about the snow-sports training jump, for one, and love the name Tartan Leisure, for two, and am very curious about Scotland’s surfing team which is starting to make a mark on the global surf scene.

We have a famous Scottish surfer here at BeachGrit, Mr. Chazz Michael Michaels, and do you think he is on Scotland’s surf team?

Very curious.

By the way, I went to Edinburgh once and liked the whisky and the creepy castle in the middle of town and… liked… the overall aesthetic.

Monster Energy: “We’re not against the War!”

Chas Smith

By

Leading action sport drink gets political!

Branding and marketing are both funny exercises, don’t you think? For every iconic Nike “Just Do It” or Apple “Think Different” there is a soap commercial featuring a black woman washing with Dove until she becomes perfectly white…

…or McDonald’s featuring a boy wanting sex with a double cheeseburger.

Oh I completely understand. It is a rough business always trying to pry into the subconscious and affect purchasing decisions but Monster Energy drink has outdone them all with its latest Monster Energy Assault.

Remember, we live in the day and age of gun violence and unwanted sexual aggression. “Assault” might have been a… not great decision in the first place but the Monster marketing department doubled down by adding a short novel to the can. Would you like to read? Well duh!

At Monster we don’t get too hung up on politics. We’re not for “the War”, against “the War” or any war for that matter. We put the “camo” pattern on our new Monster Assault can because we think it looks cool. Plus it helps fire us up to fight the big multi-national companies who dominate the beverage business. We’ll leave the politics to the politicians and just keep doing what we do best — make the meanest energy drinks on the planet! Declare war on the ordinary! Grab a Monster Assault and VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

Ok first I thought Monster was against any war so why are they declaring one on “the ordinary” and “big multi-national companies who dominate the beverage business”? Second, Monster Energy is distributed by Coca-Cola. Third, what the hell is “the War”? Why is “the” lowercase and “War” capitalized?

Can you help?

Watch: Remake of surf movie classic Mad Wax!

Derek Rielly

By

Forty minutes shrunk to three!

Thirty years ago, or thereabouts, the surfing company Quiksilver released a kooky little fantasy surf flick called Mad Wax.

In that movie, the Australian surfer Ross Clarke-Jones, who was twenty, found a recipe for magic surf wax in a second-hand store, cooked it up, and used the wax to transport himself around the world.

The throwaway skits of Ross cooking the wax in his backyard and being transported hither and yon, stitched together footage of Ross, Tom Carroll and Gary Elkerton pursuing swells Australia and Hawaii. The band Gangajang provided a soundtrack that would become, if not iconic, recognisably Australian.

As well as providing the inspiration for the Adam Blakey-Ozzie Wright-produced film Doped Youth, Mad Wax has spawned this mini-spin-off by the soda company Red Bull.

The twist is clean enough.

Ross is fifty-one now, and looking like he hasn’t slept for one day in all of those intervening years. The magic wax is given to the teenager Caroline Marks, Nippon-Americano Kanoa Igarashi and the rutting Italian Leonardo Fioravanti. Marks provides footage from Trestles, including a fin-throw-to-reverse, Leo is in Hossegor and Kanoa is filmed around Ericeira, Portugal.

It ain’t a patch on the original, of course, but what can you accomplish in two-and-a-half minutes?

Big Brother: The WSL is watching you!

Chas Smith

By

Watching you watch professional surfing!

Can I be very honest with you all right now? I am not a smart man. I spend the vast majority of each day bumbling around in a fog of surf tangents and narrative nonfiction book ideas that feel like pure genius for ten minutes. Like a book about all the different white supremacist groups in the United States and what sorts of parties they throw, how they let their hair down and cut loose called White Knights: Racism After Hours!

Etc.

And so it is with great awe, and complete bafflement, that I “read” an interview this morning with the World Surf League’s Vice President of Marketing Mr. Chris Culbertson. Would you like a snippet?

What’s unique about surfing from a marketer’s standpoint? How is it different than, say, marketing football?

We don’t know when we will necessarily run an event. We’ll host an event over a two-week window and during that two-week window, we’ll probably run four to five days and it’s really dependent on weather, wind and wave quality. So the commissioners look at the conditions every morning and decide if they run or not. We don’t typically know until 15-20 minutes before an event that it’s going to happen that day.

Imagine the head of marketing for NFL not knowing until 15 minutes before the coin toss whether they’ll play a game that day. Because of this, we absolutely had to connect with our fans through digital channels and create a one-to-one connection in real time to let them know what was happening with competitions.

What was your business need?

We needed a way we could triangulate around all of that data, but there had to be this consolidated view. Our partners AnalyticsPros introduced us to Google’s BigQuery, which is where we could pull all of the data into an unstructured data lake with Google Analytics at the core of it.

So you’re creating your own attribution play in a sense.

We started to pull all the data into BigQuery from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, ad-serving partners – anywhere we felt we could inform strategic business decisions if we had that social data, as well as behavioral data from fans.

In many cases, you can’t understand within the walled gardens how the consumer behaves across those platforms, but what you can see are different variables that match up – such as time a certain campaign ran. Then there are looser variables you can match up that allows us to get a sense for how our fans are behaving in all these different places based on what’s happening with our products and marketing plans.

Why didn’t you go with a marketing cloud or more traditional data management setup?

I think for a traditional marketer or ecommerce company or retailer, [marketing clouds] have a framework set up that’s probably really easy to work in, but being an unpredictable digital media and sports-focused business, we needed a little more flexibility.

Whoa.

I am part owner of an online business (stop laughing) and did not understand one word of this because of my not smart problem. But it seems maybe like the World Surf League is catching our data? And… something?

Is this why there is a new and fabulous partnership with Facebook? Are we professional surf fans but Xs and Os? Or wait, I mean 0s and 1s? Not passionate evolved spiritualists?

 

Shark “knocks” surfer from board at Main Break!

Derek Rielly

By

Margaret River? Another day, another shark hit… 

Knocked, swiped, hit, bit. Another day in Margaret River, I suppose.

At around one pm today, Rob Bruce, who is sixty, was paddling out to Main Break, the site of the probably gone-forever Margaret River Pro, and “knocked” off his board by a shark. (Species unknown.)

From Perth Now.

“I wasn’t a long way from shore, maybe only 100m, and the shark just hit me from my right side and knocked me off my board,” Mr Bruce said. “I could only see the back half of it but I could see the fin and the tail fin so I definitely knew it was a shark. It thrashed around a bit but the whole thing only lasted five seconds. I was terrified and screaming and trying to alert surfers I could see in the distance.”

Mr Bruce said he immediately paddled in and was followed by some of the 15 other surfers in the water.

After watching from the shore for an hour as others returned to the water he decided to get back out there but admitted he did not feel entirely comfortable.

“I was shocked,” he said. “It felt like I’d had five cups of coffee and it was hard to relax when I got back out there.”

The impact of the shark’s hit left a small crack in Mr Bruce’s 2.5m board. He credits the size of his board and the black and white stripes as possibly keeping the shark away after the initial blow.

“The black and white stripes are meant to deter sharks,” he said. “Maybe it changed it’s mind at the last second. It might have saved me.”

Mr Bruce said until recently he had only seen a shark out surfing about every 10 years. In the past two weeks he has seen three out in the surf.

He said the protection of great white sharks was something that needed to be looked at along with smart drum lines and and GPS tagging.

Yesterday, authorities closed beaches from North Point to Ellenbrook after a teenage surfer was “swiped” by a twelve-foot White at South Point just across the bay from another Margaret River Pro site, North Point.

The closure created a ruckus among local surfers who were very unpleased the coastline north of the Box was going to closed, with fines threatened etc, just in time for the arrival of classic autumn swell.

From Perth Now.

“As far as the surf goes tomorrow, I can’t speak for everyone, but a couple of guys I have spoken to, we will be going surfing,” shaper Mat Manners said. “I’m not sure where we will go yet. It doesn’t seem like the Government is going to do anything any time soon, so what do you do? Do you just stop what you are doing and wait for them? It is my livelihood as well.”

The State Government all but ruled out drastic action to manage shark numbers last week, despite a shock decision by world surfing’s governing body to cancel the Margaret River Pro.

Mr Manners said there had been an “awful lot” of white shark sightings off the local beaches recently.

“How many people need to be taken before the Government does something?”

Augusta-Margaret River shire ranger co-ordinator Mick O’Regan said people who ignored closures could be fined.

“Given we know the surf is looking good for tomorrow and there’s a lot of visitors in our region … we feel another temporary closure is warranted,” he said.

Of course, today’s knock, and yesterday’s swipe, come just one week after two Great White attacks on the one day that caused the cancellation of the Margaret River Pro. 

I asked one local surfer about the mood in the south-west and he said “Some guys are taking a break or going up north or to Indo. But most guys are, like, ‘Fair bump, play on.'” (It’s an Australian football analogy.)

After today’s incident, two rangers from the Department of Fisheries stood at the top of the stairs at Main Break advising surfers not to paddle out.

At dusk tonight, the surf had pulsed to eight-to-ten feet and fifteen guys were still out.