@boardporn
@boardporn

From the heart-an-empty-hole Department: Surfline plays the role of Mr. Grinch this holiday season!

No big waves for you!

This morning arch-conservative (in its political leanings not wave measurements) surf forecasting website Surfline delivered its Christmas calculation and it is very bah humbug if you are the sort that craves big waves and/or craves watching big waves.

Are you that sort? Are you like the World Surf League President-elect of Content, Media and WSL Studios who is in Fiji right now (I think) at #kalamakamp surfing the monster waves of his young life?

Well, Surfline says screw you and let us read from their report.

“It’s a really tough very long range/winter forecast in the North Pacific, in what has been a peculiar past five to six years. As mentioned above, weak to moderate El Nino’s are all over the place in terms of North Pacific surf (and West Coast precipitation). Add the anomalously warm water in the Gulf of Alaska and it doesn’t make me feel great about our surf on the West Coast this winter (especially Southern California).”

“If I had to give a prediction, I would say first and foremost, it’s very low confidence — Southern California will be below average for surf size, we’ll probably see warmer than average air temps, and more days than normal of light wind/clean conditions. Northern California may also see smaller than normal surf and below average number of XXL days…”

We are apparently in a weak El Nino and this of course means no big waves for you and it also means no big waves for John John Florence and Kelly Slater at the just-around-the-corner Billabong Pipeline Pro in Honor of Andy Irons.

Do you care?

Or are you wiping your brow while waxing up your 5’2 fish?


Noah-Symmans-shark
Bodyboarder Noah Symmans, happy as a trout, despite shark bite to leg. | Photo: 9News

Bloody but unbowed: Western Australian bodyboarder “stomps on shark!”

Don't run, don't hide, fight back!

It’s almost summer in the southern hemisphere. And in Australia, that means shark season. Hello you fragile, dreamlike creatures.

The count so far. Three attacks in the same harbour in the Whitsundays, one fatal, and, yesterday, a bodyboarder was hit with “traumatic leg injuries” while surfing at Mandurah, one-and-a-half hours south of Perth.

From The Australian.

‘Super sharky vibes’ before attack, says WA surfer Noah Symmans. The West Australian surfer who was attacked by a shark yesterday morning said he “stomped” the animal until it let go of his leg.

Noah, 20, was surfing with a friend at Pyramids Beach, south of Perth, when he felt a shark biting his calf at around 8.40am.

“I was surfing with another mate at a known break in Mandurah and it was fairly eerie vibes, a couple salmon were about and it was overcast,” he said. 

“We were mid conversation waiting in the line-up when I felt something grab my left leg and try and pull me under, so with my other leg I stomped the shark until it released me and we gunned it for the rocks.”

Mr Symmans was flown via helicopter to hospital after being treated at the scene by lifeguards and paramedics.

It’s third attack at the same beach since 2014 .

And, two years ago, the surfer Ben Gerring was killed by a shark two clicks away. 


Revealed: BeachGrit’s Instagram a sleeper cell of easily triggered social justice warriors!

"This is so disrespectful. You’ve lost my follow."

I spend a good 50% of each day laughing at The Inertia and Stab. Maybe not 50% but at least 5%. I laugh at the safe space, big tent, quick-to-apologize-with-tears-in-eyes-but-slow-to-ever-do-anything-even-remotely-meaningful of The Inertia. I laugh at the trying-super-hard-to-be-edgy-but-constantly-missing-the-mark-because-it-takes-a-little-spine-to-actually-be-edgy of Stab.

I laugh mostly looking at their social medias. Both The Inertia and Stab grew in the digital age where robust followings could be bought/built and those numbers sold to advertisers. It’s a nice model, if you launched forever ago/have money, but there is so much strange hurt feelings and misunderstandings in robust social media followings and these regularly spill into the comments on Facebook or Instagram.

I look and laugh and think, “It’s a good thing we never had money to build a robust social media following. Who needs that sort of headache?” I assumed that those who followed BeachGrit came organically and were in on the joke or at least understood the joke.

That assumption was shattered this morning. Apparently our Instagram account is a sleeper cell of easily triggered social justice warriors even more full-throated than any that populate The Inertia or Stab.

I posted a little ditty about Surf Snowdonia building a Nazi-esque hotel that was causing some consternation when I woke up and advertised the story on our Instagram with a little screen grab from the cult classic Surf Nazis Must Die then went about my business.

When I checked in a few hours later, though, all hell had broken loose. Message after message declaring:

cassellpeter You have 109K followers and you post someone with a Nazi symbol? Irresponsible. You’ve lost a follower. Thought you were better.

d1242w Go fuck yourself you fucking white boy racist.

kbskaleidoscope This is so disrespectful. You’ve lost my follow.

lalhavali This symbol should not be used . That’s not funny!

k8beauchene WTF?!

sllewhsa On remembrance day, really?

danielvaie Hate this picture😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡SHAME SHAME STUPID STUPID

hindiana530 Whoops…this was an awkward post

noprogress 😮

ralphteriitaohia Bulshit 😢😠

dr_portugez_4_ 👎👎👎

jcvsolari Unfollow!!

Etc. Etc. Etc.

Now I know how those boys at The Inertia and Stab feel. They feel good! Triggering the easily triggered is like riding a good rollercoaster. All the thrill, none of the danger. I now wish BeachGrit had a robust social media following but it appears everyone unfollowed.

Maybe next year!


Controversy: Surf Snowdonia at odds with National Park over “Nazi hotel for dumb surfers!”

A planned expansion has come under heavy fire!

Imagine you are Surf Snowdonia, the very first of the next generation wave pools. You swung wide your gates and let the world in almost four-years-ago. An eternity before Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, a lifetime before Waco’s Cable Park and Australia’s Surf Lakes.

You were the crowning achievement. The kick-off. You made people see the possibilities but does the surf universe care? Does the surf universe even know you are still around?

No. You are a relic. You are the Apple II so what do you do?

Build a hotel, activity center (centre) and zipline, of course.

Yes, the owners of the pool there in bucolic Wales have planned for an expansion but it is being objected to by nearby Snowdonia National and let us turn to the BBC in order to understand why.

Surf Snowdonia faces opposition to plans for a 106-bed hotel and activity centre offering 100 new jobs.

Community councillors in Dolgarrog back the £10m plans at the artificial lake, sited on a former aluminium works.

But opponents, including Snowdonia National Park, fear traffic congestion and the scheme’s visual impact.

Planning officers said concerns about flood risk and contaminated land should also be addressed before Conwy councillors approved any scheme.

A zip wire, over the existing surf lagoon, stretching from the proposed five-storey activity building would also be included, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Snowdonia National Park said it objected because it felt the building design was out of character and that the size and capacity of the scheme was excessive, complaints mirrored by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales.

And there we have it. “Snowdonia National Park said it objected because it felt the building design was out of character and that the size and capacity of the scheme was excessive.”

Let us study the building design.

Very stern, I think. Very Templehof Airport in Berlin which is a classic example of the Nazi style, best described as a stripped-down neoclassicism and/or a utilitarian style for major infrastructure projects and industrial or military complexes.

The size and capacity issue is understandable, I suppose. Would you want lots of dumb surfers coming to your back yard? Dumb surfers staying in a Nazi hotel?

Understandable indeed.


Strider-Point-Dume-house
Strider in his living room with the 18-foot high ceilings, as photographed and appeared in the New York Times.

Strider Wasilewski’s Malibu beach house destroyed in California Wildfires!

Star of the WSL's broadcast team loses house featured in NY Times…

Three years ago, the New York Times made a visit to the Point Dume home of WSL commentator Strider Wasilewski and his family, which includes one wife and three sons.

It’s a gorgeous story of a Venice surf rat and his real estate agent wife creating a rich reality, a lifetime home for their precious family.

Peel open the Times. 

As a 14-year-old surfing prodigy, Strider Wasilewski used to hunt the crowded Southern California coast for quiet surf spots. One of his favorites was Little Dume Beach, near Point Dume in Malibu, a crescent of sand half-hidden in a cove at the bottom of steep bluffs.

“It was an untouchable area,” gated off and accessible only to local residents, Mr. Wasilewski said. But he heard about a family that kept their gate open. “They lived right by the trail,” he said. “I used to run through their yard. They would yell at me.”

Lily Harfouche, a real estate agent and occasional surfer who spent part of her childhood in Malibu, ran through the same yard with her teenage friends to get to the beach. “You go down there, and it’s you and a handful of people,” Ms. Harfouche said. “It’s so incredibly beautiful.”

These days, Mr. Wasilewski, 42, and Ms. Harfouche, 36, are married (they met at a reggae concert on the Santa Monica Pier) and live with their three young sons on Point Dume, in a simple open-plan house they call “the barn.”

strider-wasilewski
The front gate mural featuring Saint Mary Magdalene emerging from trunk of car.

The couple bought a place on a one-acre lot on Point Dume, took it down to the studs and created a dream home on the hillside — which turned out to be too big. “I remember texting Strider from the bedroom upstairs and asking if he wanted to watch a movie,” Ms. Harfouche said. “I thought, ‘This is nuts.’ ”

They often picnicked on a flat part of the property, and they began to envision a new house there. It would be small — around 1,300 square feet, plus a loft — and would reflect how they really lived as a family. The big house, which they still own, is now rented out.

The total budget was around $1.8 million, though that figure is a bit deceiving, because Malibu is a difficult, costly place to build. In reality, the house looks rustic and funky. The exterior was built using old barn boards, and the exposure to the ocean air has further weathered the wood and corroded the metal surfaces. “We just love that rusted, beat-down beach kind of energy,” said Mr. Wasilewski.

Little Dume Beach is a short walk from the house, through a quiet neighborhood of homes set back from the street and down a trail lush with vegetation. But Mr. Wasilewski and Ms. Harfouche no longer have to sneak through someone’s yard to get there, as they did when they were teenagers. Now they have a key to the beach gate.

Yesterday, California wildfires, driven by hot Santa Winds gusting up to a hundred and twenty clicks an hour, tore hell through the celebrity enclave of Malibu.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Lady Gaga. Caitlyn Jenner. Robin Thicke.

All of ’em hitting panic buttons.

And Strider’s house?

The chicest of ’em all. The only one that wasn’t a temple to the depravity and excess of celebrity?

Gone.

(But not forgotten. Click here for a photo gallery.)

All safe etc.