Celebrate! Mavericks is back!

Winning: Young, non-surfing co-ed on verge of reviving Mavericks contest, shaming “incompetent, billionaire-owned WSL!”

5 years ago

From the mouth of babes!

And what has Greta Thunberg taught us all this past year? Yes. That adults are uninspired, selfish, greedy, destructive, uncaring, bloated, hideous, wastes of air. That we can’t get anything done, can’t even save ourselves from catastrophic climate change much less hold a surf contest not even thirty minutes from metropolis San Francisco at California’s premier big wave spot not even if a co-Waterperson of the Year, who happens to be a billionaire, owns all of professional surfing.

But…

…out of the mouth of babes etc.

The children are our future and a child-adjacent co-ed who attends Georgetown University is on the verge of reviving Mavericks but we must not waste anymore time self-loathing. We must head to The Mercury News directly for more.

The World Surf League, surfing’s version of the NBA or NFL, failed to bring a big-wave contest to Mavericks, the renowned break near Half Moon Bay.

But a Georgetown University senior and San Mateo coast native — who doesn’t even surf — is inching closer to resurrecting it in time for an event this winter.

“I’m not very athletic,” said Elizabeth Cresson, the 21-year-old who is spearheading the effort. “We’re connected to the ocean, and it’s something I care a lot about from a conservation and athletic standpoint. Mavericks has always been top of mind.”

Top of mind for the potential invited surfers: proof that this isn’t just another narwhal-like proposal they’ve become so accustomed to since the contest began as the Men Who Ride Mountains in 1999 and has only been contested 10 times in the two decades since.

“I’m not holding my breath for anything until things become a little more solidified where athletes see invites and we see who the title sponsor is,” said Tyler Fox, a Santa Cruz surfer who finished fourth in 2016, the last year the contest was held.

Potential competitors do not know much about the plan that is being spearheaded by Cresson, a Half Moon Bay native who grew up in Hillsborough.

Cresson stepped in to try to fill a void after World Surf League officials announced in August the end of the Big Wave Tour that was supposed to include Mavericks this season.

“We are planning on doing this full-throttle, making it exciting and as impactful as it can be,” Cresson said.

The piece goes on, inspiring, detailing how our brave heroine has secured the permits, $50,000 and the dreams of weary professional surf fans exhausted by an unscalable Positive Wall of Noise.

Bravo, Elizabeth Cresson. Come be CEO of BeachGrit next.

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A Great White is captured, tagged, released. | Photo: Department of Primary Industries

Man killed by suspected Great White in Esperance, Western Australia; two years since town’s last fatal attack by White on 17-year-old surfer

By Derek Rielly

5 years ago

"They are still searching the ocean for the victim."

A recreational diver has died after being hit by a suspected Great White shark near Cull Island around 1:00pm, WST, on Sunday.

Early reports suggest the man, named as Gary Johnson, lost his arm fending off a Great White.

From the police presser:

“Esperance Police and Marine Rescue WA volunteers deployed to the area on board marine rescue vessels. They are still searching the ocean for the victim. A woman who was on board the boat at the time of the incident has been returned to shore, and has been taken by St John Ambulance to hospital. She is suffering from shock.”

Two years ago, seventeen-year-old surfer Laeticia Brouwer died after being hit by a White at a popular wave in Esperance called Kelpies.

By coincidence, the surfer and doctor Jon Cohen, whom we interviewed a month ago about how to save someone who has been bitten by a shark and who sells tourniquets for surfers on his website, is currently working in the emergency department at Esperance Hospital where he is believed to be comforting the diver’s wife.

In that early interview, Jon spoke of the effect Laeticia’s death had on hospital personnel.

“I know some guys who were in the ED that day and it was a traumatic experience to manage. Cases like the are preventable deaths. People can act on the beach if they’re there when it happens. It might be scary to talk about but it’s reassuring to know that there is something you can do and it’s not complicated.”

Still, you gotta get ’em to the beach or a boat.

According to a report from the ABC, local man Glenn Quinlivan heard a mayday call his wife and raced to the scene in his boat.

“There was nothing to see,” he said.

All beaches in the area will be closed until Monday.

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Kelly Slater adopts provocative pro-science stance in Australian bushfire debate: “One of my biggest fears as a kid was fires.”

By Derek Rielly

5 years ago

"Mismanagement of forest underbrush back-burning in the winter months and overall water resources have helped create a perfect storm in the face of this drought," says 11-timer.

A recap.

Australia, if you’ve missed the blanket reporting, has been ablaze across its eastern and southern coasts since September.

Sixteen-million acres scorched, thirteen hundred houses gone, twenty-five dead.

Like most matters that require sound and rational thinking, fingers are instead being pointed this way and that way depending on which way you swing politically.

If you call yourself a progressive, it’s proof of the world’s imminent climate change apocalypse.

Yesterday, The New York Times ran an op-ed by the Australian author Richard Flanagan titled “Australia is Committing Climate Suicide.”

Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.

The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.

From The Sydney Morning Herald,

“It needn’t be happening. We’re breathing woodsmoke, flavoured with burnt echidna, but it’s (prime minister) Scott Morrison’s coal-fuelled fire that’s turning our lovely world to ash.”

Those on the right point to arson and a lack of preventative back-burning for the catastrophe and cite a prominent bushfire scientist’s warning of disaster back in 2015, and published, ironically, yes, in the left-wing journal The Age.

Forest fuel levels have worsened over the past 30 years because of “misguided green ideology”, vested interests, political failure and mismanagement, creating a massive bushfire threat, a former CSIRO bushfire scientist has warned.

Victoria’s “failed fire management policy” is an increasing threat to human life, water supplies, property and the forest environment, David Packham said in a submission to the state’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management.

And he argued that unless the annual fuel reduction burning target, currently at a minimum of 5 per cent of public land, “is doubled or preferably tripled, a massive bushfire disaster will occur. The forest and alpine environment will decay and be damaged possibly beyond repair and homes and people [will be] incinerated.”

He said forest fuel levels had climbed to their most dangerous level in thousands of years.

And, now, Kelly Slater, 11-timer, lover of conspiracy theories and so on, has, surprisingly, gone for the latter and not, as one might expect, the former.

“I’m not sure a picture could better sum up the fear and devastation more succinctly,” Kelly wrote to his 2.6 million followers. “I’m no expert but from the messages and reading I’ve done on the subject, mismanagement of forest underbrush back-burning in the winter months and overall water resources have helped create a perfect storm in the face of this drought. I hope there is a silver lining and important lessons learned from the ongoing catastrophes once the dust settles. One of my biggest fears as a kid was fires and ironically enough, my mom was a firefighter. Maybe one created the other.”

To which you reply?

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Female Great White shark (pictured) being sad.

Official investigation launched into “big fat guy” and friends who dragged female Great White shark to New Zealand beach and mocked her as she died!

By Chas Smith

5 years ago

The plot thickens...

Was it yesterday, or two days ago, that we first learned about the heart-wrenching tale of a near-10-foot long female Great White shark that was allegedly netted and dragged to a New Zealand beach to die?

Time and events related to the “man-eating” apex predators, their various escapades, their man-eating etc. are starting to blur but we must not be deterred, we cannot be deterred because then the terrorists win.

But who are the terrorists in this particular New Zealand case? The Great White, who likely man-eats or would man-eat if given the opportunity, or the men, who allegedly netted, dragged, kicked and mocked as she lay there on the sand?

New Zealand’s proud government has just launched an official investigation into the matter and let us go straight to RNZ for first hand accounts.

The juvenile shark was caught in a fishing net off Orewa Beach in northern Auckland yesterday and died despite bystanders’ attempts to help.

Men who were fishing in the surf caught the 2.75m great white in a net and hauled it to shore.

A woman who was at the beach told RNZ that the group seemed intent on keeping the shark and acted in an intimidating way towards those who wanted to return it to the water.

She asked not to be identified.

“They were touching it, rolling it [and] the big fat guy did kick it,” she said.

“It was just disrespectful, and it was probably, like, intimidation as well. And that was the same guy that asked for someone to go get a knife.”

But the woman’s husband and surf lifeguards managed to pull the shark into water deep enough for it to float.

“When my husband and the lifeguards pulled it out, they were just taunting them and kicking water at them and just basically trying to get them not to take it out.”

When the shark didn’t swim off, she says the men who caught it dragged it back to shore after a minute or two.

She said she wished they’d given it more time to recuperate – even though it was probably too late to save it.

The sharks body lies in state in a university freezer.

And like the current perilous ratcheting up of tension between shark and man very much mirrors the situation between The United States of America and Iran. Retaliation expected etc. but will it be symmetrical or will the prehistoric beasts eat 20 of the world’s top 24 professional surfers before the start of their 2020 Championship Tour?

Let’s not speculate wildly. Let’s follow the evidence where it leads and hope for peace in our time.

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Listen: “Is our World Surf League a sort of Pinocchio Pleasure Island where fun-lovin’ men and women are lured, turned into donkeys then sold?”

By Chas Smith

5 years ago

Very scary.

And I’m starting to become worried, to become, at the very least, concerned. The World Surf League’s President of Content, Media, Studio, Etc. Erik “ELo” Logan announced his departure from the Oprah Winfrey network, embrace of “a new journey” through the exciting universe of professional surfing almost exactly one year ago from today.

Big dreams.

A bigger smile.

Oh we mocked, chuckled, cajoled because that’s what we do. His Instagram profile featured picture after picture of bigger smiles, SUP-life, Manhattan Beach shred fun, ripping, a thorough, joyful expression of surfing’s uplifting qualities. Its unique ability to inspire and heal. Its transformative properties, as it were.

Two months ago, President Logan went missing. One month ago I became worried, sarcastically, and wrote a story.

Today I am genuinely concerned for last night I had a terrible nightmare. That the Ziffs, Co-Waterpeople of the Year Dirk and Natasha, were actually very bad slave traders who lured simple, kind folk struck blind by the glories of surfing to Santa Monica. There they met Kelly Slater, “worked” on professional surfing, told their friends, “Can you believe I get to do this for a living?” Threw shakas, drank hazelnut/kona blend coffees.

Then, when they reached peak “stoke” the Ziffs would turn them into donkeys and sell them to the highest bidder for lives of toil in the salt mines. Very much like the whole Pleasure Island, originally called “Boobyland,” scenario in the Walt Disney classic Pinocchio.

A horrible, terrible nightmare but could it actually be true?

David Lee Scales and I discussed the possibility yesterday and also many other things tangentially related to this grand surfing salt mine life. Worth a listen?

Yes, but only if you yourself would not like to be turned from wooden boy into beast of burden.

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