Booze, food, fuel, running low.

Ramifications from the world’s response to coronavirus are far reaching. Yet to be fully understood.

Border closures. Enforced quarantines. Essential social services in many countries suspended. Macro decisions that hit on a micro level.

The biggest social upheaval since World War II plays out in myriad ways.

As I write, twelve surfers from Newcastle, Australia, are in limbo off the coast of Sumba, east of Bali. Stranded by a political decision that sees them unable to disembark from their boat nor allowed to return home.

While they were out chasing waves in a mobile reception dead zone, local government authorities decreed no foreigners could set foot on land in any of their ports for fear of spreading the mildly lethal virus further.

Upon their return, they found the world had shut up shop.

No back to life, no back to reality.

At one stage, the dozen were down to the final meal and running dangerously low on basic supplies. The skipper they’d use the last of their fuel to travel to nearby Flores, but there was no guarantee they could land there either.

Many have already missed connecting flights home (and will now face a two-week quarantine for their troubles when they do finally make it).

“We’ve had one boat come out to speak to us to basically tell us we can’t come to land,” one of the surfers, Brydon Roper, told 9News.“This is a ten-day surf charter so the guys that run this boat stocked it for ten days only of food and water.”

Dire times east of the Wallace line.

Yet surf travel companies in my Facebook feed are still advertising business as usual in the Ments, up the other end of the archipelago. Freedom of passage assured, lack of crowds guaranteed. Social distancing to be enforced on the trip, allegedly. But any person that’s ever stepped foot on one of those testosterone-soaked love boats knows how that will play out

Cheap deals for you, mister.

Special price for today only. Shred the apocalypse.

But the situation is evolving as quickly as the virus spreads.

The only knowns are the unknowns and a real-world, geopolitical unravelling that would rival any right-wing-left-wing conspiracy fantasy.

So what would you do for love in the time of coronavirus?

Risk a dirt-cheap trip and uncrowded perfection for the chance of quarantine, forced berthing, or worse?

It’s a yeah, nah, for me.

Obvious question: who did it better?

In 2010, the filmmaker Kai Neville was shooting for what would become his, and the epoch’s, defining masterwork, Lost Atlas. 

That golden period. All collaborative artists have ’em.

It’s only years later, upon reflection, that we can trawl through their work and call it.

Kai Neville, the now thirty-seven-year-old filmmaker and sunglass company co-owner had grabbed the performance surf film space after his debut Modern Collective.

But for Kai, it was his second film, Lost Atlas, that built his reputation into a profitable exercise.

A decade later it’s still his masterwork. It came at a time when he had John John Florence, Jordy Smith, Dusty Payne and Dane Reynolds in his pocket.

And, in the middle of 2010, Kai joined your ol pal DR and the Stab gang to shoot Oakley teamriders Julian Wilson, Kolohe Andino, Adam Melling and Evan Geiselman in a Canary Islands wavepool, with lighting and stills by master technician Richard Freeman. 

The clip, which starts twenty-eight minutes into Lost Atlas, is most surreal, an ethereal interlude in a most prosaic film.

Recently, the German motorcar company Audi, employed the surfers Stephanie Gilmore, Coco Ho and Leah Dawson to, and one must suppose here, recreate the Lost Atlas sequence, and which you can watch below.

The obvious question is who did it better?

Do bear in mind that Kai shot and edited his sequence solo, and using a seven-hundred dollar Canon 7D camera, while the Audi team hired the noted Australian filmmaker and artist Daniel Askill (Chanel, with Kristen Stewart, Dior, with Jude Law, BMW, Air France) and a cast of many.

(Watch the behind-the-scenes clip of Audi film here.)

Elo looks solid, on the right side of cancel culture and a ballsy decision that, even within the space of a twelve-hour day, looks to have shown the wisdom of Solomon.

May have been no surprise but it’s still one of the ballsiest moves in World Sport to cancel the opening event of the 2020 CT season.

A very, very bold move from Elo, considering the backing at the highest levels of the Australian Government, which is a major under-writer of the Pro Tour in Australia. The chief reason Australia can sustain three coastal CT events and the USA cannot sustain a single oceanic event.

Crazy, crazy day.

This article has had to be rewritten three times to keep up with this horrendous black swan which carried away Snapper and possibly the entire year.

As of last night Australian time, our Prime Minister was still urging Aussie (surf) fans to whip out and attend major sporting events.

Nothing to see, go about your business as usual.

At approx 9.45 AEST WSL dropped the statement on its website cancelling the March events, an event which according to John Shimooka commentating the Sydney Pro immediately went “global and viral.”

According to Shmoo, “Every stakeholder would have known about it”.

A phone call to the QLD Tourism Minister’s office, one of the main stakeholders of the Gold Coast event at 10.42am revealed that they had no knowledge the WSL had pulled the pin on one of the Gold Coast’s premier sporting events.

Fatal comms fail?

Of course, the dominoes have fallen and are falling quickly.

Formula One cancelled as fans were lining up to enter.

Like the WSL, the taxpayer is a major under-writer of the event, to the tune of around 60 million. Unlike the WSL, sports like Formula One also have serious revenue streams from gate receipts (over a hundred thousand people expected to attend), huge broadcast deals, food and bev, merch etc etc. They are legitimate global sports, not “enablement platforms”.

Wozzle is much more dependent on government underwriting, as we learned from the Fijian event, which was deemed unviable by then CEO Sophie Goldschmidt due to a lack of support from Fiji’s Government, despite a three-year deal with Kelly Slater’s OuterKnown clothing company.

Those deals, deemed valuable by Australian tourism promotion authorities in three states are now shredded, at least for this year.

At three pm AEST Australia’s nominal head of state, Scott Morrison, or ScoMo, effectively killed the Australian leg by banning all public gatherings over five hundred people.

Chances of events running minus spectators defeat all principles of government tourism funding and will result in contract terms being reneged on all over the shop.

A twenty-million dollar deal with Facebook does not keep the deep fryers going at Rainbow Bay. Who pays for dishonoured contract terms in an act of God is yet to be determined.

Calls to Tourism and Events QLD, who administer the funding for the Gold Coast event, were not answered.

Money has gone down the drain big-time and the whole year may yet be written off.

It’s not all bad news of course.

The WSL is likely to keep its pledge to be Carbon Neutral by 2019 now, a year later, and in a canter, if the 2020 calendar is voided.

Organisers of the Tokyo Olympics are putting on a brave face and staring down the virus.

The country’s Olympics minister, Seiko Hashimoto, said Tokyo 2020 organisers would continue to plan for a “safe and secure” Games, due to open on 24 July.

That was an hour ago.

If a truncated tour does go ahead comparisons will be made with CJ Hopgood’s 2001 Title, cut short by the Sep 11 attacks in NYC, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

It’s a very different world now and those comparisons will be largely meaningless.

Webcasts were in their infancy; we largely consumed surf contests via heavily curated surf media content. A savvy, web-educated fan base, as minuscule as it is (1200 people watching the Sydney Surf Pro live on Facebook) will not tolerate an uncredible champ if the Tour haemmorhages contests due to pandemic.

Biggest losers?

Well, me of course.

And other hacks.

Can’t write about a comp that don’t run.

Plus, I’m down a face mask invested in in case I rubbed shoulders with virus carriers in the steamy Snapper cauldron.

Dirk Ziff will take a massive bath, billions of paper money wiped off due to the market crash.

Owen Wright and his wife, pop singer, Kita Alexander both lose big. Owen a minimum of ten grand, which is the purse for a last place finish at a CT event. Kita, who was booked to play the Drop Festival, run concurrently with the Aussie leg, also loses gigs as they get cancelled.

Owen’s extensive real estate book, focussed on Air BnB and boutique hotel development will take a haircut, at best. At worst, assets will need to be liquidated.

The days of windfall gains from real estate speculation are probably over, at least for now.

Elo looks solid, on the right side of cancel culture and a ballsy decision that, even within the space of a twelve-hour day, looks to have shown the wisdom of Solomon.

Pro surfing itself?

That depends on the largesse of its two greatest benefactors, Dirk Ziff and the taxpayer. Both show no signs of blinking, as yet, in this highly fluid scenario.

Me, I’m prepped to the eyeballs.

How’s about you?