Easter weekend looming, crap forecast. Had to greenlight the start in weak gurgle at Winkipop. Some highlights.

“Planet Earth is blue” said David Bowie, “and there’s nothing I can do.”

Kieren Perrow, who seems to have been shuffled sideways from Comissioner to old-fashioned connest director was forced to a similar conclusion.

Easter weekend looming, crap forecast.

Had to greenlight the start in weak gurgle at Winkipop. Nothing he could do. 

It was QS surf and in QS surf, CT level surfers looked worse than QS surfers. I would have put good money on Matt Banting winning any heat or any one of the Brazilian kids who looked amazing in onshore two-foot surf during the Aussie QS leg. It was a day for Jadson Andre to shine, and he did. Distinguishing himself with fast, flat turns that threw clean halos of large droplet sprays. 

This new round one is now the “seeding round” which I don’t quite understand. I don’t understand Joey Turpel’s insistence that it now brings “better surfing as a result, with way more pressure”.

It just don’t, Joe.

The official line that it brings us closer to man-on-man surfing seems odd, too. Twelve heats of round one, four heats of round two before we get to man-on-man round three.

That’s 16 heats. We used to get there in 12 heats.

Sure, a last place is now a heavier consequence, but seeing as only four people get it, versus 12, you could argue the pressure is less, because fewer people get to feel the sting.

Jordy looked insane, that big swallowtail getting up on the plane like a Cuban cigar boat on a night run from Havana to Miami. I think I downplayed his surfing on the Gold Coast, being distracted by the shiny things that Brazilian goofyfoots were laying on the table.

No more chipping.

But it is a hard day to write about.

Jordy looked insane, that big swallowtail getting up on the plane like a Cuban cigar boat on a night run from Havana to Miami. I think I downplayed his surfing on the Gold Coast, being distracted by the shiny things that Brazilian goofyfoots were laying on the table.

Jordy is 30 now, is that too young for a lifetime achievement title, to be totally rude? He is one the few, maybe the only one on Tour, who can physically block Gabe Medina. Hard to imagine Jordy sustaining that level of aggression for 10 months, but if he could…

Do you think there are similarities between Kelly Slater and Tiger Woods? Ronnie Blakey claimed their stories “were very similar”. I’m not so sure that is complimentary to Kelly. Also, maybe not very true.

Kelly has been a great champion, greatest ever, who has suffered a gradual decline, exacerbated by contrary board design decisions and a foot injury which defied description by somehow being healed when an event was held in the Champ’s own domain. Whether he has a great comeback victory in him, a World Title seems ludicrous to suggest at this point, is an unknown and increasingly contingent on very many ducks lining up perfectly for him. A Final Gift from the Universe. 

Tiger was a great champion who indulged sexual vices, endured public humiliation and scorn and overcame severe back injury and surgery to make his comeback. 

So, apart from being great champions, not very similar storylines, at all. 

Again, a small-to-non-existent crowd watched the champ in white in his round three heat with Filipe Toledo and a kid they dragged off the footy park yesterday as a wildcard to replace the injured Griffin Colapinto. The wildcard, a solid ranga with the very post-modern name of Xavier Huxtable, started strongly. He had the heat in a squirrel grip until Toledo started to catch waves. 

Kelly sat.

The strategy looked dismal in onshore dribblers.

“I feel like I can hang,” said Kelly in a segment. In a live Q and A in Byron Bay last week he said “whether I win or not, it’s not going to change my life”. The lack of hunger looked palpable, despite the post-last place presser on the Goldy where he claimed he needed to be hungrier. 

The sixteen-year-old  backyard footy player bombed two finishes which, in the final analysis, would have put Kelly into last place. Kelly found some corners and manufactured a score – a flat six – with deft speed work and edgy, tail focussed turns. The highlight of the heat, apart from Filipe’s surfing, came in the dying seconds. Xavier paddled into a wave, needing a score, Kelly, down the line, paddled towards the kid to throw him off and jinx his line.

It worked, and the kid fell. Kelly beats a sixteen-year-old kid.

“Got to beat someone,” he said, and dodged a bullet. 

Yellow jersey, yellow-haired leader Italo Ferriera looked shakey in heat four. There seems to be some issue with emotional regulation. With the world at his feet last year post Keramas he underwhelmed at Ulus and at Surf Ranch.

Is he flying too high now? Too close to the sun.

As noted on the Gold Coast, in his enthusiasm to launch he lost touch with traditional lines. Did he leave you behind? A common theme I heard was alienation, people couldn’t relate to it. Even Peter Mel made mention of the disconnect with traditional lines in Italo’s surfing today. 

The defending Champ squeaked through. Second to Zeke Lau and relegating a hapless Caio Ibelli who has looked lost ever since he took aim at the injustice of Slater getting the injury wildcard over him. 

Filipe bought the edge-work and air game, Gabriel brought very many variations of a disaster slide against crumbling coping, preceded by a voluptuous bottom turn which found easy speed on boards which he somehow had managed to add more width and thickness to from the Gold Coast.

Julian Wilson brought a repertoire as luxurious and diverse as a Jakartan nightclub to heat five and still came runner up to WA wildcard Jacob Willcox. Despite the continual assertion that war is peace and the new format creates a more consequential round one it’s obvious watching heats that once first and second have settled in, the pressure is off. As Julian and Willcox demonstrated. 

Filipe bought the edge-work and air game, Gabriel brought very many variations of a disaster slide against crumbling coping, preceded by a voluptuous bottom turn which found easy speed on boards which he somehow had managed to add more width and thickness to from the Gold Coast.

Gabe has changed the parameters of CT surfing. Over-powering thin boards is passé. I’d love to see Kelly add a half-inch to the width and a quarter-inch of thickness, just for the hell of it. What a thrill that would be, to see the GOAT take the twitchiness out of his surfing. 

Hard to embellish or dress up the last few heats. It was dross. Lot of dead air to plow through and the commentary did, I thought, an excellent job. Just for once though, I’d love to see one go off script. Ronnie is practically apoplectic with the pressure to hold inside what he sees and processes. 

Brother skipped away during his heat. Called by guest commentator Mason Ho as our 2019 World Champ. His eighth year on Tour. When he said that I felt the chill of death creeping up my spine.

Where does the time go?

It slips away quickly, far too quickly, both watching and being part of the greatest show on Earth. My favourite language, bar none, is Californian Therapy Speak and Kolohe nailed it textbook style when he parlayed a question from Rosie about the loss to Italo on the Gold Coast when he said he “took the blame 100%”. 

Total responsibility. What a philosophy!

Dreadful, and yet so terribly terribly attractive for the ambitious. 

A sly bet, waiter, just fell in my soup. 

Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach Men’s Round 1 Results:
Heat 1: Jadson Andre (BRA) 12.23 DEF. Jeremy Flores (FRA) 9.97, Owen Wright (AUS) 8.20
Heat 2: Jordy Smith (ZAF) 10.26 DEF. Adrian Buchan (AUS) 8.07, Jack Freestone (AUS) 7.84
Heat 3: Filipe Toledo (BRA) 15.87 DEF. Kelly Slater (USA) 10.63, Xavier Huxtable (AUS) 10.23
Heat 4: Ezekiel Lau (HAW) 10.57 DEF. Italo Ferreira (BRA) 10.06, Caio Ibelli (BRA) 9.73
Heat 5: Jacob Willcox (AUS) 13.74 DEF. Julian Wilson (AUS) 13.73, Joan Duru (FRA) 11.00
Heat 6: Gabriel Medina (BRA) 13.70 DEF. Ryan Callinan (AUS) 13.00, Harrison Mann (AUS) 7.87
Heat 7: Conner Coffin (USA) 10.77 DEF. Leonardo Fioravanti (ITA) 10.60, Michael Rodrigues (BRA) 9.56
Heat 8: Kolohe Andino (USA) 10.77 DEF. Seth Moniz (HAW) 8.67, Soli Bailey (AUS) 8.37
Heat 9: Ricardo Christie (NZL) 11.83 DEF. Yago Dora (BRA) 10.10, Wade Carmichael (AUS) 8.04

Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach Remaining Men’s Round 1 Matchups:
Heat 10: Michel Bourez (FRA) vs. Reef Heazlewood (AUS) vs. Deivid Silva (BRA)
Heat 11: John John Florence (HAW) vs. Willian Cardoso (BRA) vs. Jesse Mendes (BRA)
Heat 12: Kanoa Igarashi (JPN) vs. Mikey Wright (AUS) vs. Peterson Crisanto (BRA)

The VAL apocalypse comes to Santa Cruz!

The name Jeff Clark rings some bells, don’t it. He was the first person to surf Half-Moon Bay, or Mavericks as it would later be known, and not just ride it, but keep it secret it and ride it solo for fifteen years.

(It wasn’t until a story in Surfer magazine in 1992 called Cold Sweat, which was written by BeachGrit habitué and pest Ben Marcus, that American surfers knew what monster lurked in their backyard.)

In this short clip, which you can examine below, we see Jeff Clark on his SUP foil at Cowell’s, a popular beginner’s wave in Santa Cruz.

Clark catches up to and attempts to pat Skyler the Surfing Dog before an almost catastrophe.

Skyler Valentine Henard you might’ve heard of too, she’s a world champion (everyone’s a world champion in 2019!), and her pilot and surf-buddy is the nineties pro Homer Henard.

Guerin Myall aka @myallsnaps, a noted filmer of surf, skate and punk rock since 1986, shot this fabulous little moment.

What happened, here, says Myall, was that Jeff was a hundred or so yards up the beach and therefore invisible to Homer and his dog (an eight-year-old Australian red heeler, if you’re wondering). He caught up to pat the dog, but the docking sequence was made incomplete by a beginner on the inside.

This was a close call but Jeff made a skilled bail. He saw the guy at the last minute, knew he had to bail out to the left and push his foil vehicle to the right. When you watch in slow motion, you can see that jeff landed on the guy on the board.

“A lot of people were commenting that the dog dropped in. Bullshit, I got the video footage,” says Myall.

The man who nearly loses scalp to SUP foil?

“Jeff was aware of him. That’s a beginner’s spot, the people don’t know what the hell to do, how to get out of the way. That guy didn’t know what direction to go. A lot of them just sit there and turn into speed bumps. This was a close call but Jeff made a skilled bail. He saw the guy at the last minute, knew he had to bail out to the left and push his foil vehicle to the right. When you watch in slow motion, you can see that jeff landed on the guy on the board.”

Despite Clark’s tremendous avoidance skills, there’s heat on foils in Santa Cruz at the moment.

“I mean, shit, the foils can go anywhere they want. They’re meant to ride ripples and ocean swells,” says Myall. “You don’t need to be around other people surfing. A couple of ’em rip through the lineup like they’re having their own video game.”