"The surf is for everyone" lie and other grievous felonies…

As a rule, I’m anti-death penalty. The thought of being framed and then convicted of a crime in a country where capital punishment is doled out blithely, Bali, Singapore, America*, gives me occasional night terrors, as it has since I was a child.

How would I face death? With a brave face and a clever one-liner? Panic and buckled legs?

Crimes in the surf are a different kettle of fish, as they used to say, and it’s important, especially with the rise of “WSL ” and “VAL”, to remind surfers, experienced and new, of what constitutes a capital offence.

Following is a list of surfing’s gravest crimes. Please help fill gaps.

1. The surf is for everyone argument: Just as a skate park revolves around a hierarchy of best first, worst, last, and where the child scooter rider languishes at a perpetual end of line, so does the surf. To operate this argument in the complaint of a drop-in by better surfer is among the most heinous of man’s crimes. You can imagine Jeffrey Epstein, may he rest in perpetual madness and torture, a follower of this line of thinking.
2. Slick extortionists who paddle out, sit next to you and assume priority: You know ’em, but only in the context of the beach. A smiling face paddles out, sits on your inside, strikes up a conversation, then spins for the first set, yelling.
3. Paddling for the shoulder on a set: One man’s wave ruined, the other avoids a duckdive.
4. Refusal to split a peak: Two surfers in position for an A-frame. Instead of a civilised sharing of the spoils, one decides to  backdoor the peak.
5. Pulling back on a set you’ve warned anyone else from touching: From a yell to reverse-arm paddle.
6. Presuming local status at remote, and foreign, reef: American ex-pats in Tahiti, Australians in the Mentawais, Brazilians in Bali.
7. IG-ing a once-secret wave and then weeping at its reveal. 
8. Surfboard thrown away, in panic at spectre of set, in crowded lineup.
9. The presumption of priority because of longboard, SUP.
10. Refusal to attach leash to longboard for aesthetic reasons.

(*Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story described North America as a “country”. Matt Warshaw has pointed out to me via email that North America is the continent and America or United States is the country. This error has now been corrected.)

Out of towners and Tahitian locals ride the Teahupoo subway…

A drove of the world’s most persistent big-tube chasers, including Koa Rothman, Jackie Robinson, Nathan Florence and Anthony Walsh, joined their Tahitian brothers for a day of waves so big it forced the cancellation of the Tahiti Pro trials.

Mr Walsh, a thirty-five-year-old Australian who has spent twenty winters on the North Shore, flew in to Papeete two days ago, hoping the expected swell would be so big the trials couldn’t run.

It came close. The first heat was readied, jerseys handed out then…hold.

Wait and hour.

Hold.

Wait an hour.

Cancelled.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1TS9yQDTbH/

Walsh describes the wave size at Teahupoo today thus, “Eight-to-twelve-to-fifteen with twenty-foot sets’ and laughs at the absurdity of what a long period swell delivers.

Moments of relative calm, and relative perfection if you like that sorta thing, before unruly things came through, wiping the water off the reef and, in one instance, giving Surf Ranch mayor Raimana Van Bastolaer the appearance of being mauled by an alligator.

Walsh entered the water at six am, had a couple of hours off at lunch and was there til dark. He estimates he caught forty waves.

Any hall o’ famers?

“I had some amazing wipeouts in the morning,” he says.

The two best waves of the day went to local surfers, Matahi Drollet and Ariihoe Tefaafana, fifteen-foot tow bombs.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1S4QG1jY4C/

The trials event will run tomoz, the swell halving in size before the main event kicks off later in the week in, likely, three-foot waves.

"You're always going to get pieces of shit wherever you are…"

A twenty-three-year-old New Zealand man has been arrested in the carpark shooting of an Australian surfer a dozen or so clicks out of Raglan, the country’s most celebrated wave.

The surfer, Sean McKinnon, who was thirty-three and from Port Campbell in Victoria, home to one of Australia’s best big waves, was in a camper-van with his girl, Bianca Buckley, early on Friday morning when a man demanded the keys to the van.

Sean got shot.

Bianca escaped.

Gunman drove off with the mortally wounded Mckinnon still in the back.

From Australia’s national broadcaster, 

His partner, described as being “very shocked and distressed”, managed to escape the gunman and alerted the police.

“At approximately 3:20am, police were notified that an offender had approached a van and shots were fired,” Detective Inspector Graham Pitkethley said.

At approximately 8:00am this morning, police located the van with the man’s body inside.”

Police said they found the van with the body inside some 80 kilometres away.

“Inquiries indicate that this was a random attack,” Detective Inspector Pitkethley said.

The suspected gunman was arrested after police raided a property at Tauhei on the outskirts of Hamilton late on Friday night.

He appeared in Hamilton District Court this morning charged with murder, aggravated robbery, threatening to kill and driving disqualified.

His identity was suppressed and he was remanded in custody to face another hearing in the country’s High Court on August 27.

I did a little ring-around pals in Raglan, population five thousand or so, and as, one said, “The police said it’s a local guy to the region so it’ll be interesting to see who it is. You wouldn’t imagine this happening here but then, you’re always going to get pieces of shit wherever you are. And there’s shitloads of people in campers around here. Pretty spooky for ’em.”

On Facebook, the Victorian surfer Glen Casey, another man noted for his love of big cold-water waves, wrote, “Seany you showed us how to live life to the fullest and charge as hard as anyone on the big days.! You touched us all with your kind heart and beautiful mind. See you on the other side dear friend.”