#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.

What's it gonna take for you to yank the curtin closed on your surf career?

How close have you come to yanking the curtain closed on your surf career? 

One surfer, who recently moved to Wilmington in North Carolina, the site of the US’s only coup d’etat, announced on Craigslists that the joint has driven him to resign from surfing and therefore he was selling his five-one fish and his Banks wetsuit.

His explanation warrants examination.

Why’s he out?

Because it’s not worth my personal effort to surf in Southeastern ‘North’ Carolina. I must’ve came off as a non-local show-off so they turned the waves off every time I’d go surf.

And/or keep me broke so I had no energy to surf.

And/or make me paddle to masonboro every damn time so I’d be too tired to actually shred.

And/or insist that I should be an actor because I’m so good at pretending to be miserable.

And/or wouldn’t hire me or just straight fire me so I couldn’t possibly make money to drive to the beach or really survive at all or fucking leave for Christ’s sake.

And/or claim I’m too old to surf (15 or younger).

And/or I’m too gay to surf because all the (of-age) hot girls were kept strictly off limits.

And/or because monkey junction urgent care straight up willingly would not heal the rash on my shin.

And/or because Blacks tire fucked me with shit auto service every time.

And/or because I wasn’t born in North Carolina so everyone working a cash register would overcharge me thinking I had money from the NE.

And/or because CUSTOM COLORS paint store opened 4 new locations since I moved here and never have me a fucking decent discount or respect.

And/or because every house I estimated to paint I had to deal with a jealous husband who thought I would fuck his wife.

And/or because I received 6 speeding tickets 4 on lumina alone for not speeding at all.

And/or because North Carolina girls don’t know how to flirt.

And/or because Ogden skatepark won’t spend $15 dollars to patch the holes leaking in the pools or just build a completely shit design and pocket half the money.

And/or because you have to be sponsored to be allowed to surf good.

And/or the old Annex surf supply was way better. AND MOST importantly because I failed at bringing a genuine southwest coast Real Fish to the east coast and local surfshops because I didn’t have the bare minumim finances and space to shape boards/fins adequately.

Peace out you dumb (no intellect) fucks. 

How would you pen your I quit-from-surfing note?

(And thanks to @sandwichjones for snatching this piece of poetry from the pages of Craigslist.)

Kelly boldly claimed wavepools would democratize surfing. After four years that call looks staler than the August air at Lemoore.

Did you read about Greg Webber’s latest ideas, the V-walls and V-reefs with all their beguiling artist’s impressions, and think, like I did, “Wow, he just put the stake through the heart of wavepools?”

Which would be a bizarre act of hari-kari seeing as Greg has been hard on the spruik as a wavepool designer and IP holder since, forever. It must’ve been twenty years since he first filmed trawler wakes running down the side of Dart Island in the Clarence River in Yamba and the idea for a plough running through water to create surfable waves was born. He will demur, but it looks stillborn.

Four years ago, people were losing their nuts on the brave new world of artificial waves when Kelly dropped the first Lemoore edit the day after Adriano won the World Title.

Pools, we were told breathlessly, would be popping up like mushrooms.

Less than six months later, Paul Speaker and the WSL gobbled up a majority share and became owners of the Kelly Slater Wavepool Company. Sophie G said WSL, owners of Kelly’s wavepool company, would build six or seven to hold comps in. They were so confident they even invited gaggles of surf journalists to show up and make man soup in the spa post rides in late 2017.

I count the day before the big reveal, when the NDA’s lapsed, as Day Zero for the death of the current dream of wavepools. They had the whole world on their side on one day and on the next a trickle of high profile dissidents ready to piss on the dream.

Nick Carroll was subdued, damned it with faint praise and our very own Chas Smith reckoned the only just ending for Lemoore was nuclear annihilation. It was a strategic blunder, a PR cock-up of epic proportions.

Still, the drip feed marketing continued unabated.

Mainstream interest was high.

Sophie took a full head of steam into the big unveiling: the Founders’ Cup.

As a concept the logic was byzantine: paying homage to the Founders of Pro Surfing by trotting them out pool-side in a muddy pond a hundred miles from the ocean. Everything went about as perfect as it could get, right down to a manufactured high stakes, high drama finish from Kelly, whose busted hoof magically came good for the event.

The people? The ones that Paul Speaker in 2016 predicted “will be super energized by the advent of Championship Tour-level competition with man-made waves.” They gave it a slow clap.

Which made the full scale CT event held there in September an even harder sell. Ticket sales were weak. Blink 182 cancelled. Fans blew raspberries at competition surfing in the – I struggle to remember the official term – basin. Pulitzer prize winning writer for The New Yorker and author of the best book on surfing ever written, Barbarian Days, Bill Finnegan rode a long-form piece on the event and pronounced it “unexciting…..the pool made surfing feel tame, domesticated.” Final judgement had been cast.

Waco looked nuggets then the amoeba showed up.

High hopes were put on Yeppoon’s steam punk piston to deliver. It did not. Baby food slabs and a breakdown. The more we found out about the physics the harder it was to maintain the froth.

Florida was going to be the jewel in the crown for the WSL/KSWC with a big shiny joint at Palm Beach, right in Dirk Ziff’s backyard. It turned into a shit-show. Stick a shovel in the ground and water comes up. You’d think a perfect problem to have for a wavepool, but no, too much water is worse than too little. I think business students might call the more than seven million spent a sunk cost.

What now?

The historical wind has shifted. It’s blowing back in the face of the wavepool dream, hard onshore.

Surfing, big surfing, suddenly found itself on the wrong side of history. Even by its own hand.

The WSL has gone all in for the ocean. Going carbon neutral, eliminating plastics, international paddle-outs, restoring the Ocean.

But in doing so it looks like they have killed their mechanical baby.

Maybe they had no choice.

E-Lo is a smart guy. He knows the kids are more into Extinction Rebellion than Blink 182 playing by ditches that need huge amounts of water and electricity to power ’em up. It’s a bad look and an unsellable story if you’re pitching pro surfing as being a force for the environment.

Kelly boldly claimed wavepools would democratize surfing.

After four years that call looks staler than the August air at Lemoore. The wavepool looks deader than the Dodo. The way out for the WSL?

Remove Surf Ranch from the 2020 schedule, and reinvest in Trestles and Cloudbreak.

The experiment has failed. Wavepools are a novelty.* time to move on.

*High point: Joe G with the super models and Dion Agius in the desert. What’s your high point?