The Party unveils its own version of the Western imperialist wave machine!

Five months ago, what appeared be some sort of computer-generated vision of a Chinese wavepool did the rounds.

There were no surfers on the waves and readers, understandably, responded with a dynamic contempt.

“My immediate impression,” wrote Nick Carroll,  “is that it’s a hoax. How come the wave is running ahead of the foil? How’s that even possible? And how come there’s a wave on both sides but a foil curve only on one side?”

There ain’t a lot the Chinese can’t do, of course.

Clever and beautiful and with robust hair that will dull even the sharpest scissors, it’s a country that has mastered the art of imitating anything that comes out of Europe or the US.

(And with the added bonus of inbuilt government surveillance.)

Now, here, revealed for the very first time, are surfers riding China’s first wavepool, which you’ll find in the ancient city of Anyang (population five million) in Henan province.

It ain’t KS, more Wavepool mach 1, Surf Snowdonia etc.

#haoleshaka

You could never fail the eleven-timer on his progressive bona-fides. From his one-man war against flat-earthers to various leftist agendas, Kelly Slater is a man who ain’t afraid to comb the velour of society to reveal its dirty brown underbelly.

Today, it’s the hang-loose sign, a friendly hand gesture popularised by Hawaiian actor David “Lippy” Espinada, the “king of pidgin” who also added the “Shaka, brah” to the greeting.

Kelly told his one million followers on Instagram, “My friends and I have decided to stop shaka-ing cause there are too many #Haoleshakas out there. Send this to someone who Shakas too much.”

Notable was the response of his fans, seventy-one percent who disagreed, a shock loss for the Champ.

Does the issue of cultural appropriation excite you as it doesn’t me?

Read more about “Surf Culture’s Continued Appropriation of the Shaka” here.

Erin Monahan is a writer who “focusses on detaching from the commitment to the construct of Whiteness” and in this story gives hell to white devils for throwing shakas.

Excerpts:

“Cultural appropriation happens specifically when the dominant culture (in our country White europeans), takes aspects of a non-dominant culture completely out of context and uses these symbols for their own benefit. There is no exchange or mutual benefit when this happens. It is a demonstration of an imbalance of power that still exists between the colonizers and the colonized

…It is not enough that White privilege allows us to have access to oceans and lands all over the world.

…When White people consider if their actions are appropriative, it is important for us to not center our own selfish, and ultimately, harmful and violent, desires. We really need to examine this question of what is our culture? Because the bargain that our settler ancestors made, which has been passed down to us in 2018, is that in order to be considered “White” we had to trade our cultures of origin for the culture of White supremacist patriarchy – a culture of entitlement, force, and domination.

And so on.

Poorly laid spinnaker almost drowns all-children crew…

Sailing out of Ensenada felt like an accomplishment in and of itself. We had beaten a bureaucratic trap and even though it had been self-laid, more or less, we were moving once again.

Over our decades of Middle Eastern and East African travel, movement had become a drug.

We had to be moving, moving, always moving. From point A to point B. From point Y to point Z. From one impossible task to another. Through Middle Eastern and East African bureaucracies and anarchies and tribal structures that make Mexico’s version look like well-ordered Switzerland.

The more time we spent in the region, the more we simply had to move. It became our raison d’être.

And now we were moving away from blood coffee water that danced disco green at night to bluer pastures, teaching our children that movement equals joy. They were learning the lesson, each happy and playful even though they had been ravaged by beastly mosquitos in Ensenada’s port. Even though they’d been trapped for three full days and three full nights.

They’d run from bow to stern bouncing with the crossed swell, hair blowing in the increasingly strong wind.

Forty miles out we decided we needed more speed in order to make up for the lost day and a half, the most speed, so set out to hoist the spinnaker. The skies above were grey but not menacing. The wind was howling but not fierce.

It unfurled like a gorgeous rainbow, like a symbol of modern ambiguous sexuality and why are all spinnakers so damned colorful? Would a black spinnaker bring bad luck? Would a purple one really turn off the high seas?

It took the both of us thirty minutes to drag the massive nylon beast up to the deck, secure the knots, figure the clew and tack, run the rope through the proper whatever-they’re-calleds and hoist up the main.

It unfurled like a gorgeous rainbow, like a symbol of modern ambiguous sexuality and why are all spinnakers so damned colorful? Would a black spinnaker bring bad luck? Would a purple one really turn off the high seas?

Whatever the case, our multicolored monster filled full and I looked back to the helm to see if we were sprinting. From the look on Captain Josh’s face things were not right. If he adjusted slightly from one way to the other, we’d spill.

We weren’t flying as fast as we should and our children’s lives now depended on him keeping the yacht between 5 degrees of movement. We’d stopped caring about ours long, long ago.

We ran back up to the stern and saw that a rope that should have been brought in tight right away had whipped furiously, eventually tying itself around the radar, bending it at a grotesque angle. To bring the spinnaker down would bust the radar loose. To leave it up threatened the entire ship with capsizing since it was flapping the water.

Our children were having a dance party below. High as kites on Mexican Coca-Cola made with pure cane sugar.

Gusts of powerful wind would fill it full and send me to safety lines, my cream-colored Vans against them. The only thing between bobbing in a lifeboat fifty miles off of central Baja and… I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how to fix the problem which became hypnotic. It was exactly like old times. Like being in a Hezbollah dungeon with Josh who was making me laugh while we sweated on bloody mattresses.

I did my best to grab handfuls of it to hold on deck. Captain Josh tried to keep the yacht moving in a straight line as any slight adjustment could send us heeling so hard that we’d dip all the sails.

Gusts of powerful wind would fill it full and send me to safety lines, my cream-colored Vans against them. The only thing between bobbing in a lifeboat fifty miles off of central Baja and… I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how to fix the problem which became hypnotic. It was exactly like old times. Like being in a Hezbollah dungeon with Josh who was making me laugh while we sweated on bloody mattresses.

After 30 minutes of pure terror somehow, someway, the rope came loose and we hauled the spinnaker down to the deck, collapsing in a heap on top of it.

My body has never ached like that. Every muscle. Every brain cell. My fingers couldn’t stop shaking due the pure tension. Fingernails bent backward with bizarre white creases in their middles.

It took a while to haul back to Captain Josh. With no spinnaker it would be impossible to make it to Cabo in under four days and impossible to make it back in under a week.

The decision was made just north of Baja’s Turtle Bay, to flip and head home. We had moved so far off the coast that we were able to tack all the way back to Ensenada. Even though she was a classic downwind sled we matched our knots going against it and that also felt good.

My six-year-old daughter did a two-hour shift from near sunset to sundown and then another nearing midnight, moving from cute kitten t-shirt to ski jacket and my stocking cap to unicorn onesie and unicorn slippers under ski jacket at the end.

Five days and five nights after leaving we arrived back in Newport Beach.

It should seem like a failure but it doesn’t. All I want to do is figure out what went wrong with the spinnaker and fix the problem.

All I want to do is break the record from LA to Puerto Vallarta with a crew of children.