No free crown land for wavepool developers in Perth, Western Australia.

Four years ago, the former investment banker and self-appointed “hard-core” surfer Andrew Ross announced a masterplan to dot Australia with Wavegarden-powered pools.

The first of the ten pools, which is being built near Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport, is going to get its tank filled in a few weeks with testing to  follow before it opens to the public in time for the southern hemisphere summer.

It’s an interesting play. The tech, Wavegarden’s Cove, has never been built to this scale.

Will it work?

Will it thrill?

Nobody, not Wavegarden nor Ross’ company Urbnsurf, knows.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvoKmOLHo2v/

A second pool, which was going to be built in the Perth suburb of Alfred Cove and, importantly, a few hundred metres from my parents’ house, has hit a potentially fatal roadblock.

The state government has refused to kick Urbnsurf a chunk of crown land for the build.

From the national broadcaster,

Lands Minister Ben Wyatt announced yesterday that a proposal by the City of Melville to utilise a portion of Crown land for the project had been rejected.

Urbnsurf founder and executive director Andrew Ross said he only found out via a phone call from Mr Wyatt yesterday afternoon.

“We have been progressing with this project for a number of years now and I think the reasoning that has been given, I don’t know that it makes a lot of sense to me,” he told ABC Radio Perth.

“They felt that the Crown land needed to remain available to the general public.

“We are deeply disappointed that we have put so much time and effort and money into this, to have it all sort of end at this point.”

Mr Ross said Perth was “screaming out” for the wave park.

“We need to have big, clever ideas about how to reinvigorate Perth,” he said.

“Perth has a wonderful climate, we have a huge surfing population of 80,000 people, but we do not have a dedicated surfing facility.”

The waves in Perth, of course, do suck. It’s unimaginably bleak.

Blown out and small in summer; blown out and small in winter.

Question: should the Western Australian government turn over a parcel of land owned by the citizenry for the profit of a private company if it gives pleasure to the aforementioned citizenry?

And, if you live in Perth, does the idea of getting out of the reach of the many Great Whites that patrol those waters thrill you beyond measure?

Matt Damon shucks #VALlife for aggressive localism.

I was wrong about Matt Damon. Recently converted surfer. Byron Bay fiend. Friend of Thor.

I tarred you with the VAL brush and I was wrong, wrong, wrong. 

What we saw at the Pass was just a show. It had to be a show.

What else could explain this? 

Matty D was recently paparrazi’d wearing a hat emblazoned with the postcode of Carnarvon, Western Australia. For those not familiar with the area, Carnarvon is base camp to some for some of the heaviest waves in Australia.

Turns out he and Thor just got back from a trip out there to the desert North West. Where death comes in a thousand forms.

Sharks. Cyclones. Gun-swinging locals. Lips as thick as Ben Affleck’s post J-Lo waistline.

Tombstones. Motherfucking Tombstones. The place even pros fear to tread

And our boy Damo tamed it all.

Just look at the hat.

According to the Newcastle Herald:

The hat is branded with Carnarvon and its postcode 6701. This reflects the concept of localism in surfing culture.

“We do that on T-shirts as well. Locals love it because they can get shirts with their own postcode and images of their surfing breaks,” he said.

Did you read that? Jason Bourne is a local. Possibly grumpy. We cannot confirm. But a Carnarvon local, there’s no doubt.

So what does the hat tell us?

It tells us he can take two wave hold downs like you or I take a morning dump. It tells us he could send in apex predators with the faintest of sideways glances.

It tells us he would look down the line at a triple ledge with the insouciance only a lifelong shredder could possess, shoving his middle digit upwards at mother nature.

Look at my hat. Read the post code. Six seven oh one. I’m a Tombstones-adjacent, Carnarvon local.

So what’s left for Damo’s transformation to be complete?

I do feel he’s overplayed his hand. The first rule of the North West is you don’t talk about the North West.

It worries even me, a low-level purveyor of nostalgic surf twaddle, to mention it online. So that bridge may already be burned.

But he is obviously keen. Byron is taken (Hi, Thor!).

How about he goes a little further south?

Lets get him to Iluka. There’s plenty of property around there. Nice and cheap.

Or if he wants to, he could move into an onsite caravan at the local trailer park. Like any true grumpy local closing on to the wrong side of 50 would do.

Maybe he can buy an excavation business called Damo’s Demo’s (sic) to run into the ground, wasting his time checking the Wall but never actually surfing, complaining instead about the tide/wind/swell, while slowly but surely dismantling the few truly genuine and good relationships left in his ever-dwindling circle.

I can see it now. Damo. Old. Leathered. Faithful healer bitsa by his side. Playing out his evenings there at Sedger’s Reef bistro, drunk on cheap port and wine, worrying about the lump in his neck and the pterygium in his eye and wondering where it all went so fucken wrong.

John John discovers the joys of girth.

In the event that John John Florence appears at the Quiksilver Pro in April, he will ride a surfboard shaped by the hands of Jon Pyzel, and finished by artisans amid the gentle whisper of country Oahu.

Pyzel has been making boards for John John Florence, who is twenty six, since the kid was five; since his mama Alex brought the boys to see him at his old bay at Sunset Beach and gave him two-hundred dollars for materials to build John a board.

The yellow four-six with  halo of orange rails is “hideous to look at” but now exists as a memorial to a boy destined for greatness.

John John is six-feet two-inches tall and weighs 175 pounds or 188cm and 80 kilograms. His surfboard, which is called the Shadow and originally made for Stab magazine’s blindfold test in 2018, measures  6’0″ x 18 7/8″ and is 2 1/2″ thick.

“It’s still roughly based off the Ghost but it doesn’t have such a refined rail, that super domed deck and the foam isn’t as far forward. It’s a pretty traditional looking outline, a straight-up hi-fi outline,” says Jon.

Other notes: the wide-point is at the exact middle of the board and not a little back, which you’ll find on most super high-performance shooters. It’s around 29 to 30 litres, if you’re into that sorta thing, and it has a single concave through most of the bottom which is loosened by a double concave within.

“I like the double concave because it splits the bottom in half and let’s you roll rail to rail a little easier without taking away any speed. If you have too much single concave, while it’s really fast it tends to get a little sticky. A double concave through that helps. It’s like a vee bottom without the slowness of the vee.”

Rocker?

Roughly the Same as the Ghost, says Jon, although a deeper concave gives it a straighter centreline rocker and it has a little more nose rocker from 18” back to the tip for a hi-fi curve.

Technical, yes? Did you know? That concave creates two different curves? The curve of the rail and the curve of the centreline?

The width of the tail, twelve inches up, is 14 1/2″ which is pulled in via a little hip.

Because Jon didn’t make John John any boards for six months during the Champ’s injury convalescence, he worked especially closely with his new signing, Jack Freestone.

“It was trippy for me,” says Jon, “because I’d been making boards for John for twenty years. At the same time, I started working with Jack. And Jack is a similar size to John, but a little heavier, so he rides a bigger version of everything that John is riding. And that convinced me to get John to try boards bigger than he’d normally ride. Getting Jack on those boards helped John’s direction.”

As for the name, it’s part of his “creepy family.”

Y’know, Ghost, Gremlin, Phantom.

“The Shadow fit right in there,” says Jon.