Future: “The thrill of surfing without the effort!”

Chas Smith

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It's easy to master and a hell of a lot of fun!

We’ve all been caught up in Surf Ranch and BSR Waco and etc. fretting over how the creation of genetically modified waves, wondering how these genetically modified waves will poison or benefit our DNA. Losing sleep at night just wondering about how the future will look. How our children’s children will surf. How our children’s children’s children will surf. Etc.

But while we’re distracted by waves and their creation the intrepid reporters from international wealth magazine Forbes know that surfing requires effort, even surfing perfect artificial waves, and the march of technology always seeks to limit effort.

Have you not watched Wall-E?

And let us read now, together, from Forbes.

Surfing is without a doubt a very fun sport, but not only is it difficult to master, it’s pretty tiring, too. You can sometimes be paddling for what seems like forever before you’re ready to catch your next wave, and even then it might not be worth the effort.

So, what are the alternatives out there? Well, I got the chance to try out a brand new innovation that looks to catch the eye of those that either already love surfing and fancy a change, or can’t quite master it and want the thrill without the effort.

That innovation is the Lampuga Boost, and it’s essentially the birth child of a surfboard and a jet ski, or in other words, an electric surfboard.

I can hands down say it’s one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done out at sea and by far the best watersport that I’ve ever tried. Why? Well, from the video below you’ll see it doesn’t look like I’m going that fast, right? But in reality, when your feet and stood precariously on a board in the ocean and you have the addition of the natural movement of the sea under you; 32mph feels a lot faster. As a result, it can sometimes feel like you’re holding on for dear life. This fear, though, is easily translated into excitement because you’re in control of how fast you’re going at all times thanks the board’s speed-variable trigger, which at the flick of a thumb, can slow things down a bit, or equally speed them up.

After a few attempts, I found myself using this control to my advantage, skillfully releasing it to slow down slightly when I wanted to carve into the sea and turn direction. It’s the little things like this that instantly make you feel like a pro. This was my second time on the board, and my fourth time ever surfing, and already I felt like I knew what I was doing. It’s easy to master and a hell of a lot of fun.

And there we are. The future. You children’s children’s children’s children’s other favorite thing to do besides drinking calories.

Can you imagine yourself as CEO of the WSL? I would feel…exuberant! I would pass rhinestones for diamonds and stucco for stone and make the WSL a living, breathing biz! WSL

Surf quiz: You’re the New CEO Of the WSL. What next?

Derek Rielly

By

How would you turn the damn thing into a profitable biz?

Y’seen the forecast for J-Bay? Oowee, the volume is hot. A brisk start on Tuesday, a sizzling overhead middle and a reasonable enough back end for the finals.

Even Kelly Slater is back. Will he crack? Will gravity finally bring the famous ego to earth at last?

But, tell me, real talk etc, how do you feel about day one? Those twelve, thirty-minute, three-man heats where no one is ejected from the event? Six hours of pointless surfing and twelve passive interviews with handsome dumb men turning their profiles this way and that to look best on the webcam.

How do you feel about that torturous first half of day two, watching B-listers jerking through six heats? It don’t get good, in that heart-belting, slap-your-forehead, sports way until round four, sometime on day three or four.

Sixteen surfers left.

Round four til the final. One day of surfing.

That’s an event. 

Therefore, if I was the CEO of the WSL I would draw my battle axe and cut down one score of surfers, leaving us with the magic sixteen-man, one-day event. One glorious  highlight reel.

“But what about monetising the whole damn thing?” the reader asks.

Fuck knows.

Do you?

Because that’s the thing ain’t it.

It’s why a non-surfing former tennis exec, who once helped broker an $88-mill deal for the WTA, is running the joint.

So.

What would you do if you were handed the reigns to the WSL?

How would get the League to turn a profit?

How would you drive traffic to your Facebook Live broadcast?

Would you broadcast your events on Facebook?

Would you turn contests into pay-per-view?

What sort of tour would you construct?

Would you do it?

Could you do it?

And would you let John John Florence quit the tour?

Meet: Your new surf hero!

Chas Smith

By

The brave woman who stood up to leading surf website!

They say that you should never meet your heroes. That they won’t live up to the expectation. That they will let you down and leave you with a hollow emptiness that you will later try to fill with cocaine and booze. Well, I met my hero today (via the phone) and call bullshit on the commonly held notion. She exceeded my lofty imagination and I do believe she should be your hero too.

Her name is Demi Boelsterli and she is a Santa Barbara local, one-time pro, artist and coach. She also tattooed “Fuck Surfline” on her foot.

I wrote about this in the new book Cocaine + Surfing (buy here in America, here in Australia, here as an Audible and here as an iBook)! Shall we read together?

I go to Surfline to see what is happening in the water even though it means that damned Marcus Sanders gets my click. It’s calling 3 – 5 occ. 6 “Primary/peaking WNW swell blends with some smaller SSW swell this morning. Many spots throughout the region offer broken-up and fairly peaky, waist, shoulder-high surf with occasional head-high sets.”

Basically gibberish.  Surfline only speaks nonsense, so much nonsense that some amazing woman just tattooed “Fuck Surfline” on her heel. Can you imagine the frustration that it would take to do that? Fuck Surfline, but from the accompanying webcam I can see it’s good or at least fun.

A little backstory. I had been sent the Instagram post of the tattooed Fuck Surfline foot a while back and it stuck with me. I wondered, “Who is this magical woman?” But knew that I would likely never find out. She would stay there in the mists of my mind.

Well, just two days ago the great Jen See was reading the book in Morgan Maassen’s Santa Barbara coffee shop, stumbled across the passage and texted me, “ha ha the “Fuck Surfline” girl is my bestie!”

I immediately begged for an interview and today I got!

Chas: Please tell me all about Fuck Surfline!

Demi: I grew up in Santa Barbara and there’s this joke my friends and I all had about Hoatio Spoonbender (Horatio Spoonbender is the name associated with many Santa Barbara photos that appear on Surfline). We would laugh and say it was an alias for people to submit photos of Sandspit and other more local breaks that we didn’t really want blown up. It became this big thing where we’d start going on to Instagram and if anyone had a picture of the more local breaks we’d put an emoji of a spoon on it. I think some people started getting mad but it was just this big joke to us. Anyhow, Morgan Maassen (one-time BeachGrit principal!) told me that he’d pay me $100 bucks to get “Fuck Surfline” tattooed. We happened to be at a buddy’s house who had a tattoo gun so I had him do it on my foot. “Fuck Surfline” on one and “Go Home” on the other.

Chas: Do you still have?

Demi: There are just a few dots now but I’m thinking about getting it again this winter.

My hero. And yours.

See her art here and buy some!

A healthy left in a flat river!

Watch: This outrageous (little) left breaks from 7am to 10am every day!

Derek Rielly

By

A wave every ten minutes. And it ain't a wave pool!

Who doesn’t love novelty? A new board, a loose pair of shoes, a tight pussy (or ass), a different wave?

The joint pictured, Gasolines, is a shreddable little left created by the commuter ferries that ply the Tejo River between the crummy old fishing town of Barreiro and the Portuguese capital Lisbon.

Every morning, between seven and ten am, the ferries leave Barreiro Port, hit the juice, and, depending on the tide and the wind, create a wake that foils down a gorgeous, if hard to read, sandbank. The size of the wave depends on the speed, the boat and how many commuters are on it.

“Sometimes there’s no wave at all and sometimes they turn into Pipeline,” the German surfer Nico von Rupp told Surfline.

In this clip, we see the Portuguese surfer Joao Kopke snatch a runner underneath his pal who looks like the bell boy sent off for a toothbrush for his master.

Confused!

#gasoline is a wave that happens due to a huge boat that takes people from #barreiro to #lisbon. Everyone that’s in the boat is going to work and the wave size that the boats generates (you have one every 10min during two hours) varies according to the number of people that are going to work. A full loaded boat generates a bigger wave! But there’s a lot of other elements to have in mind if you want to surf this river wave generated by this boats, like tides and winds… We (me and @joaokopke ) had the pleasure to be guided by Ricardo “P1”, the guy who discovered this amazing phenomenon. So, while, #portugal was in a flat spell this day, we scored perfect and long lefts in a river! And of course I had to drone it to get the best angle! #mavicpro #ridingportugal @wsl @kswaveco @tapairportugal @gasoline_acd

A post shared by White Flag Productions (@whiteflagproductions) on

 

Disgraced WSL: Equal pay for equal work!

Chas Smith

By

Worldwide outrage grows!

It is time, friends, to break out the pitchforks and begin our march to a town that is very near Venice, California. Oh, I am not speaking of Gardena or Hawthorne, the respective homes of twin incel + surf lifestyle blogs Stab and The Inertia. No. I’m speaking of Santa Monica and the official headquarters of the World Surf League.

Rage is swelling globably over the very clearly sexist snafu that occurred earlier this week in South Africa. You recall? That a man and a woman both won a surf competition and the World Surf League decided it was a good idea to take their picture with the man holding his winnings of 8000 rand and the woman holding her winnings of 4000 rand?

Criticism was swift with your own humble surf journalist declaring that the WSL’s equal pay schtick was a corrupt lie based upon a silly algorithm and that they should all burn in the hottest fires of hell but only after I write a Pulitzer prize winning expose in the vein of Rogers and Hammerstein.

A more important journalist, The Sydney Morning Herald’s Clementine Ford, declared very much more eloquently:

The impact of sexism on women’s careers is about so much more than legislation and formalised pay grades. By repeatedly sending the message that certain pursuits are masculine and that women trying to involve themselves are just obnoxious interlopers, society enables the continued disadvantage of those not privileged by gender. It’s not good enough for large corporations such as Billabong to need the public to point out these obvious inequalities, nor does it reflect well on the general make-up of those institutions that discrimination like this is seen as so standard that literally no-one thinks to challenge it.

And a group in South Africa has taken it upon themselves to right the World Surf League’s horribly sexist wrong. Let us learn about the WLS.

The Women Love Sport (WLS) campaign is a collaborative movement of ordinary people seeking to respond to the incident in which a young teenage girl won half the prize money of her male counterpart in a surfing competition in South Africa.

The question is: Can public outcry lead to positive change?

We think it can.

Let’s do more than just criticize, and show the world that women, and men, are willing to show up for women in sport.

This Women Love Sport (WLS) campaign specifically aims to contribute funds to women’s surfing in South Africa.

If you stand with us please make a donation to this movement.

We will ensure that the money is used in one of or all of the following ways:

1. Make a donation towards the female winners at the Ballito Pro 2018.

2. Make a fund available to supplement women’s contest winnings in other local surfing contests.

3. Make a donation to SurfingSA to further their existing work in women’s surfing development.

This is a community initiative showing SUPPORT for all existing investment in women’s surfing – from sponsors to event organisers – and is an act of solidarity with female athletes who battle to voice their frustrations in their competitive fields.

Please note: We pledge to make all financial contributions and dissemination of funds available to public.

I support fully, especially the public outcry part, and think we should still march to Santa Monica. Will you join?

Donate here!

Photo: Jack English
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