It's not cool, or nice, or casual. Gabby slit the throat of the competition and they still look grey and bled out with the tour three weeks away from kick off.

Not to take anything away from Gabby’s title last year but apart from him, Italo and a couple of Julian’s heats did it not seem the most exciting developments were “off the ball”?

The Shark retreat from Margies to Ulu’s, Sophie’s “reversal” on the Tour restructuring, the way a Brazilian beachbreak all of a sudden looked fabulously exotic and new in comparison to the wave tub debut contest, Mikey Wright and Jesse Mendes’ board poke in the North Point carpark etc etc etc.

Know what I mean?

Through the back half of the year an absence stalked the Tour, blowing like Camus “slow, persistent breeze” from the dark horizon of the future. The absence of John John Florence didn’t quite asterisk Gabby’s second title but it did change the stakes. Gabby and John at eight-to-ten-foot Pipe would have elevated the final day of the Pipe Masters into the heavenly realm.

Now he’s back from a long period of exile with a teaser clip from Surf Ranch.

And it’s weird.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu7JoqyB8uY/

Pre-season footage serves a dual purpose of both making a psychological statement of intent and implanting a vision of good surfing into judges minds. The effect of Florence’s surf ranch footage was equivocal on both counts.

I’m not sure Ross Williams has caught on. Italo has dropped clips of a style of surfing completely unrestrained in it’s neo-pagan manifestations. It’s not cool, or nice, or casual. It’s dancing around the maypole in a dioynsian blood frenzy. Gabby slit the throat of the competition in the final stages of last year and they still look grey and bled out with the tour three weeks away from kick off.

It was nice. It was casual. Skate.

But lacking, no?

Lacking: aggression? Innovation?

There was Ross, on the back of the sled. Going over the footage. Coaching. At the only place on earth where a coach can really coach. Maybe the statement, after JJF’s lackadaisical showings at Surf Ranch last year was designed to soothe the nerves of Sophie before season kick off… just to reassure her that her biggest star in the Northern Hemi was still in the game.

Still committed enough to swallow his obvious distaste and get in the Tub for a practise session.

The Game has changed since he’s been gone.

I’m not sure Ross has caught on. Italo has dropped clips of a style of surfing completely unrestrained in it’s neo-pagan manifestations. It’s not cool, or nice, or casual. It’s dancing around the maypole in a dioynsian blood frenzy. Gabby slit the throat of the competition in the final stages of last year and they still look grey and bled out with the tour three weeks away from kick off.

While that was in progress, Ross Williams was in the booth with Ronnie Blakey calling the quarter-final heat between Jordy Smith and Sebastien Zietz.

Fifteen minutes into that heat Ross made the not so astute analysis that lack of aggression was the problem for Jordy. By way of comparison he advanced a view that John John suffered the inverse problem “John tends to be too aggressive” he said.

What? The fuck?

I don’t know what exactly a coach has to do to skin his ten percent off the top, but I assume one of the core responsibilities is to at the least be some kind of conduit to reality.

John is too aggressive?

I can pull half a dozen losses straight off the top of my head where John has been too sleepy, too casual, too nice. So can you: Zeke Lau. Mikey Wright. Jesse Mendes. Jordy Smith. Mick Fanning (J-Bay final). Kelly Slater (Teahupoo final).

Cool, casual and skate will not make judges eyeballs twitch in three weeks time. The most important 30 minutes of John’s professional career awaits. His opening heat will set a tone of intent. There will be no hiding, even behind a talent as prodigious as his. Casual is an indulgence John can afford only at heavy water.

To be objective you would have to describe it as his chief competitive flaw. Maybe his only one.

Cool, casual and skate will not make judges eyeballs twitch in three weeks time. The most important 30 minutes of John’s professional career awaits. His opening heat will set a tone of intent. There will be no hiding, even behind a talent as prodigious as his. Casual is an indulgence John can afford only at heavy water. Failure to present primate aggression will see him flensed by Mikey Wright, a Brazilian or an Aussie rookie.

Wonderful things visit in the night. I dreamt I was at Snapper Rocks, staring into the low slung sun nestled in the volcanic rim. A straggly chin beard aflame with sunlight sat beside me. John Florence.

“Hows the knee?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said.

“Do you read?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What are you reading?”

“Way of the Peaceful Warrior,” he said.

“Why can’t we give love one more chance?” I replied.

Makes no sense, I know, but like years on the Pro Tour, thats the way dreams go.

Meet a man who never rides backside…

It is a winter’s day in Lemoore, California. The day after Kelly Slater’s forty-seventh birthday, if you want specifics, which makes it February 12, 2019.

It’s cold. The air and the water is 48 (nine degrees celsius).

There is quite the pack at Surf Ranch, including Momentum-era vets Kalani Robb and the Weatherley brothers Jason and Benji, commentator and steroidal-tit owner Strider Wasilewski, the photographer Todd Glaser (whose wife will ride a “hot left” from launch to evacuation), a crew filming for Outside magazine and Dan Mann, the head shaper for Slater Designs.

Mann, who is forty-six years old (“Nine months younger than Kelly,” he says), thrills the crowd when he rides a right as a regular footer and, on the return leg, takes it as a goofy.

“The frontside warrior,” says Kelly.

As it transpires, Mann doesn’t know how to ride a wave backside. He became a switch-hitter when he was a kid learning to surf in Hawaii. His pal was a goofyfooter; his dad was regular.

He copied ’em both.

“That was the late seventies, early eighties when Jeff Hakman and co were doing that thing. It was cool. One of the tricks,” says Dan. “And, then, where I live now in south San Diego, the left barrels kinda bend so it’s easier to pull in frontside. When I hit twenty-five I think I realised I’d actually been a regular-footer the whole time. Ever since then I lost my goofyfoot comfort but I can’t go backside. I’m more comfortable frontside both ways.”

Does he identify as a regular-footer now?

“Yeah, that’s what I identify as and that’s what got Kelly all mad at me. He said, ‘You’re missing half the excitement of what it’s like to go backhand!’ I didn’t know what to say. Now I’m old and you can’t teach an old dog a new trick.”

I ask, how many waves have you caught backside in your life?

“Probably a dozen, if that. I would never even think to go backside, especially on a barrel. The only reason I would go backside would be to cutback and go right.”

Can he describe, as a switch-hitter, the feeling of riding backside?

“It’s awkward. Probably how a normal person switching stance would feel. But in that clip, I was faking it on the left. If you watch it again, I’m not that comfortable in that little carve but pulling in, barrel riding, I’m comfortable as a goofy.”

Over the course of the day, Mann was there at the pool’s seven-thirty opening, rode it for five hours until it shut for one hour for lunch, and was still riding waves at five pm, when it was just he and Kelly trading waves.

“I got a ton in that last hour,” he says.

Watch!

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu7E0ApHBnW/

The earth is cooked! So watcha gonna do when the apocalypse comes?

The past week is as close as I’ve ever come to what wankers might call “an existential crisis.”

It was brought on by a perfect storm of fiction and non-fiction. I’ve read two things this week that have violently affected me.

The first was a novel called Under the Skin by Michael Faber. It’s the story of a women who drives around the north of Scotland, on familiar roads, looking for well-muscled male hitchers to pick up. Except it transpires she’s not really a woman, and that she’s working. She’s an alien and her job is to capture humans so they can be harvested for meat.

The specimens she captures are “processed” by cutting out their tongues, removing all hair, then neatly slicing open their scrotums to extract their balls. Then they’re left in pens with straw, deep underground, to be fattened. Eventually, the naked, mute-but-screaming eunuchs are shipped off to another planet to be eaten as a delicacy.

 

The specimens she captures are “processed” by cutting out their tongues, removing all hair, then neatly slicing open their scrotums to extract their balls. Then they’re left in pens with straw, deep underground, to be fattened. Eventually, the naked, mute-but-screaming eunuchs are shipped off to another planet to be eaten as a delicacy.

It’s the most convincing scenario I’ve ever come across for turning vegetarian.

But the thing is, the alien doing the harvesting starts to realise that Earth is really quite beautiful. On her planet trees are tiny things grown in labs under intense lights. Her species spend their time indoors with sex, drugs and other vices because they can’t go outside. They don’t have rain, or ocean, or birds or free oxygen.

The second thing I read was an academic paper about climate change that has gone viral. It’s called Deep Adaption: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy by Professor Jem Bendell.

You can download a PDF of the paper here or you can shortcut to your panic stations and get the gist from this Vice article.

Basically, we’re fucked.

Even in the event of ovenight wholesale changes to culture, attitudes and government policies, we’re probably still fucked. According to the paper, we might have as little as a decade before we start to see the effects of climate change impact the structures of our societies. A short while later, we’ll be hacking up our neighbours for meat to feed our families.

The paper is a little sensationalist in places and perhaps tends to hyperbole. (“You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.”)

But I kind of think that’s fine.

The author concedes this, too. He admits that the language used is “to elicit an emotional response” because the situation we are facing requires us to “communicate emotively.”

I agree.

David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, reports that a study into the effects of air pollution, which is likely to cause of 1.5-2 degrees centigrade of global warming, would cause 153 million deaths.

The equivalent of 25 Holocausts. And that’s just air pollution.

When you start using multiple Holocausts as analogies, you might hope someone takes notice.

The problem with terms like “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” is that they’ve been bandied around since I was a kid. In the beginning they were grand, far-off concepts that were impossible to imagine. Over time they’ve become platitudes. Terms like “mass starvation”, “inevitable social collapse” and “mass extinction” are far easier to comprehend, and far easier to react to.

Global warming is something I’ve always paid lip service to, but never really worried about with any conviction. And I believe 99% of people are probably the same. Everyone has heard of it. It’s just no-one really gives a shit. But conclusive facts are hard to ignore. Like the fact that 17 of the 18 hottest years ever recorded on our planet have occurred since the year 2000.

I’ve got a little piece of land mapped out. There’s a beachie nearby that picks up every swell going, a left and a right point and a couple of other little nuggets. I’ll have an alfalfa patch and a rabbit hutch and some chickens. And the cream on the milk will be so thick like you can hardly cut it. I’m working towards it. Jus’ trying to raise a stake. If the world comes tumbling down then that’s where I hope I’ll be.

So, surfing.

What the fuck has this got to do with surfing and anti-depressive etc?

In the context of civil breakdown and ecological dystopia I think it would be fair to say that surfing probably isn’t all that important.

But what would your Doomsday prepper surf plans look like?

Have you got a spot in mind where you might hole up?

I do.

I’ve got a little piece of land mapped out. There’s a beachie nearby that picks up every swell going, a left and a right point and a couple of other little nuggets. I’ll have an alfalfa patch and a rabbit hutch and some chickens. And the cream on the milk will be so thick like you can hardly cut it. I’m working towards it. Jus’ trying to raise a stake. If the world comes tumbling down then that’s where I hope I’ll be. And if I get to share a few waves with my boys (currently two years and eight months old) then I’ll die happy.

We’ll be rightly judged by our children for our ecological fuck-ups. We’ll be judged for our ugly, capitalist agendas. Our selfishness, our greed and our willingness to step on people.

But I’ll tell you what: the every-man-for-himself-and-fuck-everyone else nature of Capitalism isn’t going to prepare anyone for when it’s every man for himself for food, water and shelter.

There are glimmers of hope. There are inspirational young women like Greta Thunberg. There are the girls from my second-year class who stand outside the school with their banners and their youth and their conviction. They believe they can force governments to take notice, to take action on climate and I believe they can.

When I see kids of 12 and 13 who are so focused, so unencumbered by ego and social pressures and so articulate in communicating what needs to happen, it bowls me over. They amaze me. They are a generation with the wherewithal and the savvy to stand up for what they want.

Seeing them gives me hope that this stupid pastime of surfing can continue to be a stupid pastime and that one day I will get to share a few waves with my boys.