"You don't have to be a surfer to love
BeachGrit!"
The Surf Ranch Pro in Lemoore, California
couldn’t be any closer and excitement crackles in the
bovine-scented air. Athletes and sports fans from around the world
will soon descend upon the small agricultural town some 120 odd
miles from the nearest beach. They will meet at the Tachi Palace, a
largish hotel and casino, order whiskey sodas from one of the two
bars which will be served in delicate plastic cups, whistle though
their teeth at the marvel.
At the future of professional surfing.
Surf Ranch, just down the street and around the corner from the
Palace, represents the hopes and dreams of so many with its
patented plow technology and secretly contoured bottom. With its
control tower where buttons blink and an operator trained in the
fine arts of pleasure presses them to create waves out of nothing.
Out of simple agricultural run-off.
It is a technological marvel and I oftentimes wonder what the
locals, living nearby, think of it. Are they thrilled to possess
land and double-wide trailer homes within spiting distance of the
future of professional surfing or do they feel ignored? Locked out
and confused by this behemoth that moved into town under the banner
World Surf League?
Well BeachGrit, as you know, is a place for the people,
all people, for locals and sports fans alike, and the Sydney bureau
came up with a plan on how to reach everyone coming to Lemoore with
our benevolent message.
I wasn’t there for the brainstorm between Derek Rielly and James
Prier but can recall exactly what I was drinking when the text
message came through.
“We are getting a billboard between the Tachi Palace and the
Surf Ranch itself.”
A billboard.
And I poured myself another vodka coconut water as the sheer
genius washed over me. Of course, a billboard, and in this future,
in this day and age of technological marvels sometime the simplest
tool is the most effective. A note handwritten. A record played on
turntable.
But what would our billboard declare?
After some back and forth it was decided.
“You don’t have to be a surfer to love BeachGrit.”
And a photograph of the World Surf League’s brave Chief-Marketing-Officer Beth
Greve, enjoying a day at the beach with her surfboard
fins inserted backwards.
Yes, you don’t have to be a surfer to love BeachGrit.
You can be a cow farmer, a kid who lives with salt in her hair,
Kelly Slater, a satanist or a progressive CMO trying new and
wonderfully different methods.
We are a big, beautiful family stretching from sea to shining
sea and the lands in between. All those driving from the Tachi
Palace to the Surf Ranch itself will be warmed, I think, by this
message of inclusivity.
By this great embrace.
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Ain't nobody can tell a story like Bruce Irons. |
Photo: @RVCA
Revealed: Why Bruce Irons Missed Maldives
Invitational. “A story so outrageous I wouldn’t believe it if
someone told me!”
By Derek Rielly
Ain't nobody tell a story like the great, the
beautiful Bruce Irons…
Two weeks ago, the Australian Josh Kerr won the Four
Seasons invitational contest in the Maldives, an event
that tests the savvy of surfers on singles, twins and
three-packs.
Also in the event, and in order of placing, were Alejo Muniz,
Fred Pattachia, CJ Hobgood and local wildcard Abdulla
‘Fuku’ Areef.
A sixth competitor, Bruce Irons, was a notable absentee.
Earlier today, I spoke to Bruce, who is thirty-eight years old
and living in Salt Creek in southern Orange County, about the chain
of events that led to his withdrawal from the event.
I tell him I’m the now the biz partner of a best-selling author
(buy Coke and Surf here, free
worldwide delivery); Bruce says he’s had two
months out of the water, all of June and July, after laser
eye surgery. A pterygium made it feel like “someone had spit in my
eye. Last winter, I’d drop in late, pull up and all of a sudden
lose my balance. I looked like a fucking kook. I spent thirty years
not realising it. It was like looking through a glass bottle.
Towards the end it was really bad, like, does she have fuzzy skin?
Do you have…scales?”
As for missing the Maldives, well, that’s a three-pronged
story.
The last time Bruce was in the Maldives was with old pals Chris
Ward and Shane Beschen.
“Chris tried to do a Muay Thai kick and he slipped over and
split his head in front of me,” says Bruce. “I went to kick in his
face and slipped and got a huge bump on my elbow. He got up in the
morning and we got into it again because he thought I’d punched
him. He broke my boards and my mini-DVD player, back when they were
a thousand dollars out of Singapore. It was Beschen’s Bombay gin
that started us.”
So what happened on this trip?
“It was a string of fucking…okay…it’s partially my
fault. I was moving out of my place, I was hotel hopping, I had all
my fucking stuff in storage, a car full of shit, and I got my
boards sent to a friend’s place in Venice. As I was driving up
there, I grabbed all my stuff. And I open it all up and I’ve only
got a double board bag. It was, like, shit, crunch time. Plane to
catch. I needed to open up the bag, go boom, boom, boom.
Oh my fucking god. This is not going to work.”
Bruce’s Lost quiver for the event.
(Flight to Dubai missed.)
“Next day, I get there three hours before the thing opens. I
call this service on Yelp where they come and pick up all your
luggage so I don’t have to sit there with all my stuff. (Later), I
call the guy and I say, ‘Alright, boom, drop off my shit,
I’m over here.’ The guy comes up and tells me he doesn’t take
credit cards. Cash only. I have a credit card, that’s all I’ve got.
I tell him, ‘Fuck, I’ve got stuff I can give you, what the fuck?’
He doesn’t budge. Me and this dude are going back and forth… for
fifty dollars. Everyone was losing. I’m going to miss my flight,
he’s going to lose his fucking job. I tell him I’ve got GoPros,
sunglasses, shoes. He asks me if I have any perfume.
Per…fucking…fume! I gave him a GoPro to get my stuff. And
I missed my fucking flight. Now…you’re not going to believe
this.
“The third thing.
“So I go back to the motel. Next day, I get a taxi to the
airport, my luggage is in the back. The driver gets into me for
going so short a distance. A twenty-buck fare. He’s mumbling shit.
Want me to get out? Right before we get out he tells
me he’s from Ethiopia da da da. Whatever, all good, he’s talking,
talking as I get out and then he takes off with all my luggage. Are
you fucking kidding me? So I Uber back to the taxi bull pen. Eight
lines. Fifty cars. They’re all yelling at each other. And I tell
’em, one of your taxi guys has my shit, the Ethiopian dude. The guy
there says there’s so many cars and so many different races and I’m
standing there going fuck, fuck, fuck. Then, because my iPad was in
one of the bags, I tracked it to Hollywood. I go to my car and I’m
flying towards Hollywood where this fucker is and then he comes
back to the bull pen, turns off my iPad, but I’m already back
there. I’ve fucking got him. The motherfucker. I tell him,
what’s up motherfucker! You turned off my iPad!
He said he didn’t know whose it was.
“(The trip) just wasn’t meant to be. It sucked. Those stories
seem outrageous don’t they? I wouldn’t believe it if someone told
me. Really? Really? So I’m sitting there, baffled, the
fight leaves at one in the morning, the cops are there, and I grab
my shit and get to there (check-in) with fifty minutes to go. The
chick doesn’t let me on. Then it’s two in the morning and it’s like
the Twilight Zone. I gotta get back to my car with my board bag,
the car is filled with shit, and on top of it, I’m looking for a
hotel in fucking LA, and everywhere is booked out. I find this one
place, drove up to it, and there’s a dude on the porch,
this full trap house, holding
a bottle of hard alcohol, full gangsta, and I just did a full
u-turn.
“I blew it. There was a string of events but you know how it is.
I’m justifying it to myself. If I had a chick, this probably
wouldn’t have happened. They’re all organised. I’ve been running my
own shit. At the end of the day it’s my own fucking fault. I spent
a lot of money. The first fight they paid for. I spent probably
spent six grand and didn’t fucking go anywhere.”
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Champagne time: The surf industry
apocalypse is over*!
By Chas Smith
It's a great day to be alive!
It was a miracle of modern economics. The surf
industry, which first began to fall out of the sky some 20 years
ago kept up an extremely impressive nosedive even through the
longest bull market in history.
That’s right. While global markets have added trillions and
trillions of dollars, especially during the last decade, surf has
bucked all trends, going its own way, down, down, down.
Companies like Billabong, which used to be worth well over a
billion dollars, shed value like it was the hottest game in town.
Scratching its balding pate as the money dried up, collaborating
with Andy Warhol, money drying up, collaborating with Iggy Pop,
money drying up, scratching its balding pate, very confused until
given to onetime rival Quiksilver for free.
The same Quiksilver that had just exited bankruptcy protection
under the guiding hand of Oaktree Capital Investments. A firm
specializing in “distressed assets.”
There were few bright spots. A brutal bloodletting. But now, 20
years on, it’s time to pop the even more vintage bubbly because
according to Apparel News and Lost’s Joel Cooper WE’RE BACK
BABY!
Let’s waste no more time with Andy n Iggy. Let’s get straight to
the good
stuff!
ActionWatch’s findings are good news for the surf business,
which over the past decade has been pummeled by high-profile
bankruptcies, changing tastes in youth fashion and a new retail
landscape.
The tough times paved the way for a comeback, said Joel
Cooper, chief executive officer of Lost International, the parent
company of the popular surf brand …Lost.
“The great thing about the surf industry is that it never
goes away. It’s cyclical,” Cooper said. “We’ve gone through bad
times. It is slowly improving.”
Some reasons for a rebound is the fashion cycle is turning
back toward surf and more women are interested in the category than
before, Cooper said. Bankruptcies of major surfwear companies,
including Quiksilver and Billabong, have forced the bigger
companies to streamline operations and work more
efficiently.
After Quiksilver emerged from bankruptcy, it renamed the
company Boardriders Inc. and acquired the troubled Billabong
surfwear brand.
With bigger companies working to save their businesses,
there was more room for entrepreneurs to introduce new brands,
which paved the way for more variety at surf shops, Cooper
said. “The business is coming back at a core level. Maybe we’ve
turned a corner,” he said.
Lost might be benefiting from better tides for the surfwear
industry. It recently opened its second boutique in Hawaii, giving
the company seven full-price boutiques.
Quick question here, are you going to have your champagne with
OJ, a peach purée or straight?
Oooee!
*”Over” is a relative term.
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Author relaxing while a hail of unread text messages
fly overhead.
Board review, Maurice Cole Protow, “a
specialist surfboard that gives satisfaction of a different
order…”
By Longtom
Relax and catch sets. Sit deep, carve hard. Let it
swing.
This has been a king hell biiiiatch to write, this
review. Not because I have nothing to say about the
process of ordering and receiving a custom surfboard off Maurice
Cole, a 6’3″ Protow round-pin designed for good-to-excellent Point
surf, but because the whole last week and while Derek Rielly has
been busting my nuts every day to get the review done, the surf has
been relentlessly pumping.
The exact same surf I envisioned the board to ride in.
Double-overhead Point surf, high-speed racetracks. Every day I’ve
broken contracts with myself.
Today I write it.
Today ends in a blur of surf stupefaction and a blank
screen.
Right now, I fight the strongest impulses to down tools and get
out there again.
One quick lap around the internet surf forums, or in real life
carparks puts the vexed issue of surfboards front and centre.
The list of horror stories when trying to order custom equipment
is long and never ending. My mate ordered a single fin and got a
thruster, from a shaper who has spent a career railing against the
hegemony of the three fin. You’ve probably got your own scenario
where you looked at the freshies in the rack and thought “that
can’t be it”. Fuck, it’s got my name on the stringer.
Particularly custom vs stock.
Generalist vs specialist.
I favour the specialist. It’s my belief the working gal of an
intermediate or beyond skill set can gain ground, tortoise and hare
style, over the more naturally gifted through the development and
acquisition of superior equipment. Which is custom surfboards.
That view was formed by tutelage under North Shore resident and
Cherokee Indian Craig “Owl” Chapman, who continually stressed the
importance, the advantage conferred, by having the “best board in
the line-up”.
How to get the best board in the lineup. The list of horror
stories when trying to order custom equipment is long and never
ending. My mate ordered a single fin and got a thruster, from a
shaper who has spent a career railing against the hegemony of the
three fin. You’ve probably got your own scenario where you looked
at the freshies in the rack and thought “That can’t be it”.
Fuck, it’s got my name on the stringer.
Self-knowledge, or lack of is the biggest obstacle. The line up
is full of the surfer stinking the joint up on the wrong sled. No
activity engenders so much self deception. BeachGrit’s own
Chas Smith wrote an article in Surfing Life where he
detailed some of the struggle and outsourced the knowledge to his
pal D. Rielly. Rielly identified the strengths and weaknesses in
Smith’s approach and they got to something that worked.
My prior experience with Maurice wasn’t quite so chummy.
I’d had an epic Tom Curren inspired 7’3” reverse-vee sometime in
the nineties which circumnavigated the globe and ended up left
behind in Guam as rental payment on a house. In the interim me and
Maurice had beef, sometimes epic beef on the internets. The
specifics escape me. I was a Maurice fan since he took aim at
racism in Australian politics. Maybe we came to virtual blows when
Rory Parker ended up in conflict with Cole and I got caught up
somehow. Sometime during a particularly toxic exchange I had to
take stock.
I drove a gal to the airport. Maybe she could sense my rage. She
pressed a little card into my hand when we parted and said “read
this”.
In calming shades of blue and green was written a series of
compassion exercises.
Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in
his/her life. Just like me this person is learning about life.
And so on and so forth.
It did stop me in my tracks. I recalled Owl’s vision of himself
as a surfer, “It’s a better me”.
And, then scant few months later I am in email exchanges with
Maurice about a custom board.
The second great obstacle to getting the best board in the
line-up via custom equipment is what I call a category error. Every
shaper/designer has their trip. Run with it and get a great board,
if it’s dialled in correctly. Ask a shaper to go too far outside
their area of expertise and you get a version of the famous “Hold
the chicken” scene from 5 Easy Pieces. Jack Nicholson’s character
wants to fuck with what is on the menu and it all ends up in
tears.
Don’t be the gal asking a shaper to hold the chicken.
Maurice Cole specialises in concaves. It took a few emails to
nail things down. I let him know I wanted the board well and truly
in his area of expertise. A board for OH+ down the line point surf.
In his words, “A very fast surfboard that carves at high speed,
with deep concaves and hard edges”. The whole process was civilised
and painless. Confidence was high we understood each other and the
board I received would not be found on any surfboard retail
rack.
Fast and trustworthy. There’s something to be said for going out
of your own comfort zone and riding different stuff. It’s fun to be
unhinged. But when something made especially for you feels so good
right out of the gates that is a feeling of satisfaction of a
different order.
The sled arrived, via courier truck. The nose had been busted
off. I patched it up. In three months of solid abuse, that is its
only wound. Sleek lines, a nose-to-tail tucked rail edge that is
distinctive. No volume measurements but it felt very right on. The
concave was noticeable but not pronounced.
I put fins in it, waxed it up and rode it. Straight away. The
Point was a windy four-to-six foot. Paddling into twenty knots of
sideshore wind with current felt fine. The very first turn on the
very first wave felt smooth. Fast and trustworthy. There’s
something to be said for going out of your own comfort zone and
riding different stuff. It’s fun to be unhinged. But when something
made especially for you feels so good right out of the gates that
is a feeling of satisfaction of a different order.
Down-the-line point surf for
testing.
Further follow-up emails with Maurice occurred. I gave him
feedback. He asked questions. There’s no other sporting goods
manufacturer in any other sport who would do the same. No golf
clubs, no tennis racquets, no fishing rods. Surfing is unique in
that regard.
Even in a dud winter like this the surf gets good around here. I
rode it whenever it did. Replaced the stock fins with fibreglass C
drive fins. At slow speed they feel grabby and tight. At speed, on
a down-the-line wave, a hydrofoil effect comes into play. The board
seems to lift up, the wetted surface disappears and you feel like
you are sliding on ball bearings. The rail, with its edge, feels
active. Sensitive, not at all neutral like a modern shortboard
rail.
I claim the sensation to be both highly functional and
unique.
Final thoughts fresh out of five-star point surf. The problem
for the working gal in perfect surf is panic at the disco. The
mirror ball starts flashing and limbs are splaying everywhere. The
generalist short board is redlining. The solution is do to less,
the panicked mummy or daddy tries to do more.
On a better board, one made for this eventuality, you can relax
into it.
Let the board go up and down in the trim line, at least to
start. You have a better paddler than the typically underpowered
work-a-daddy or Euro lower intermediate in thrall to the latest and
greatest and industry sizing. Relax and catch sets. Sit deep, carve
hard. Let it swing. Try not to laugh (inside) when you see someone
panicked and spazzing out on the generalist board du jour.
Just like you this person is seeking to fulfill his/her
needs.
Revelation: “I no longer want to bomb the
Pacific Northwest!”
By Chas Smith
It only took two plus decades!
When was the last time you went home? I mean
home home. The place your parents raised you home. I don’t do it
often enough and blame a burning rage in my childhood heart. I’ve
written about this before, and don’t mean to bore, but I was raised
in the state of Oregon in a depressed coastal ex-logging town named
Coos Bay.
I hated it.
I hated the grey skies, the rain, the people, the oppressively
green trees, the rain and also the people who smelled like mint
flavored Skoal. It drove me crazy that I didn’t get to be from
California, just to the south, with its warm surf and its Gotcha
and its sun.
California was everything to me. It was surfing and I conflated
the two, dreaming only California dreams and hating Oregon. I vowed
that if I ever struck gold that I’d use some of the money to buy an
old airplane, fly north and unload a payload of Vietnam-era
warheads all the way from Medford in the south (where my cousins
lived) to Seattle (not in Oregon but still Pacific Northwest and
where my grandparents lived).
Time has mellowed my ambitions and age has made me fond of my
Oregonian roots. I am a forever outsider thanks to them. A man
still wildly in love with surfing, with what surfing means and more
importantly what surfing should mean, precisely because he never
belonged.