No surfing! How will Surfline Man survive this strange and uncertain new world.

When we last saw Surfline Man, he was bobbing around the lineup, explaining to his friends why their boards were all wrong.

You know, that board would work totally better with different fins.

Oh, you got Futures? I always get FCS2.

They just work, you know? You should try them sometime.

Surfline Man was busily tracking forecasts, following the multi-colored blobs as they headed straight toward his favorite break.

Two weeks from now! Two weeks from now, it’s gona be firing, brah!

That’s all over now.

Surfline Man is stuck at home in San Clemente. His shiny Sprinter Van sits idle in the driveway. His quiver stands untouched in the garage, dry and lonely. No surfing! How will Surfline Man survive this strange and uncertain new world.

Surfline Man still gets up every day and checks the cams. Look at those sets! It’s totally firing. Should he drive up to Huntington? He could go surf Huntington, but would it even be worth it? Probably not, really. He considers sneaking into Trestles, but how super embarrassing would it be if he got caught.

That’s bad vibes, brah, he texts his buddy.

Gotta respect the rules, you know?

Don’t want to be like those guys in the boat!

Surfline Man is many things, but he tries really hard not to be an asshole. It’s just that all that trying doesn’t always work out for him.

Even though there’s no surfing, Surfline Man is keeping busy. He would not want to waste time with, like, doing nothing or chilling on the couch. Surfline Man is not chill, generally.

So he bought some kettlebells and twice each day, he does a work-out he found online.

He’s also been trying yoga. So good for my back, brah, I feel like a totally new person! I’m going to surf so much better when this is all over.

Can’t wait to hit the water!

The new foam roller he ordered from Amazon is doing wonders. It hurts like a motherfucker, but all the pros use them, you know. And he’s fucking crushing his ab workouts. Surfline Man is gona be so ripped when all this is over.

You just gotta be consistent, you know? Every day, man, just don’t skip a workout ever. Surfline Man has a lot of advice.

Surfline Man gets text messages (Somehow he has friends): hey im playing halo this afternoon, come hang on twitch

Surfline Man: Sorry, brah, can’t. Baking bread. Got a new sourdough recipe!

Surfline Man is really into bread now. He got this killer sourdough starter from his ex-girlfriend’s best friend. You have to feed it all the time, you know. But fresh baked bread is so good.

I’ve been working on my technique, just checking out different recipes and all. I think I’ve got the perfect one now. You gotta try it! No more grocery stores, man, I’m going to make all my own food from now on.

Surfline Man made his own cotton mask, too. There’s instructions on the internet, you just sew it together. Super easy! Come on, man, it’s the right thing to do.

Surfline Man always does the right thing. You should wear one. Here, I made this for you. Sorry it’s pink! My ex left her t-shirt at my house, figured I might as well use it.

Eventually, Surfline Man gives up on surf forecasts, I mean, if I can’t surf, why check it, right?

Instead, Surfline Man is tracking Corona cases hour by hour.

Oh, shit, Truckee is looking hot.

Watch out Brooklyn, it’s coming for you. Check out Seattle, though, they’ve got it together there.

Nah, that’s not the right model to watch, you got to watch this one!

This one is totally accurate. Surfline Man believes the Corona models as devoutly as he ever believed the surf forecasts. We’re gonna get through this, man, we just have to wait 23 more days. That’s what the model says. Surfline Man believes in science, especially when it tells him what he wants to hear.

Why would it lie?

It’s going be firing, brah!

"I don’t know how long we can survive.”

Surfboards, the indispensable item.

Surfboard shapers, designers, glassers, sanders, our indispensable craftsmen.

World-wide they are being hit hard by the pandemic, or more accurately by the response to the pandemic.

Europe is the worst hit.

Zarautz based builder Johnny Cabianca who puts the steeds under Gabe Medina has been essentially shut down since Spain introduced almost total lockdown on March 23.

“My two employees can’t come to work, it’s not allowed” he said via Whats App. “ We’re a young company, only four years old and without cash flow I don’t know how long we can survive.”

The shaper to a dual world champ, for now, is fixing dings and finishing boards that have been sitting in corners of the factory.

“For us it all depends on how things evolve. When the beaches open again and when the shops open again, worldwide, as most of the boards we do are for export.”

Collapsing export markets have hit closer to my home, too.

Lennox-based Steve (Shuey) Shubonj of Glassing Division laminates for DHD and LSD. Glassing for DHD makes up eighty percent of turnover and has come to a complete halt.

“It’s put me in a precarious position,” he said. “I’ve already put two people off. As long as people can keep surfing around here, it’ll keep ticking over, as long as the landlord cuts me some slack, but I’m doing it all myself now.”

San Clemente-based builder Timmy Patterson was working around the clock to get boards ready for Italo Ferreira’s title defence.

A last-minute drive to LAX to meet Italo en route to the Gold Coast and handover boards was stopped at the eleventh hour as the tour opening was cancelled.

The undelivered quiver sits in a corner of the factory, “like a stash of gold.”

Patterson is still building boards at a reduced level behind locked doors with the shop shut, for now.

Marcio Zouvi of Sharp Eye surfboards is in a surer footed position than most.

“We own our own building, and our employees are on the payroll,” he said. “It’s the sub-contractors who are in trouble. Our business is diversified, we export a lot. We’re still servicing orders from Japan.”

Zouvi says the virus catastophe may precipitate a shake-down in the surfboard building game.

“We have very little receivables, we’re fine. Others have very high overheads. Rent, insurances. There’s an ageing workforce. There’s a question over how many factories will survive.”

The shake-down could extend to shops with “retail also struggling. There’ll be some impact, how deep we don’t know.”

Zouvi also worries with clothing companies struggling that payments with team riders are being suspended in an effort to bring surfers back to the negotiation table, presumably for far less shekels than currently offered.

His main concern is with the sport’s governing body.

“I hope the WSL can weather this out. We need an organisation such as WSL to standardize a format for competitive surfing which we can use as a reference. It’s very important for my business, with the type of boards that I make, to really gauge who is who, what they are riding and how they are riding.”

Ballina-based builder Gunter Rohn has been in the game for a long time.

He describes a board-cutting facility as being down from 400 a week to 100 a week.

Things are “patchy, but not dire” for him, with a loyal custom clientele still ordering boards as shop sales go through the floor. He sees surfing as important for “mental wellbeing” and hopes beaches stay open but admits lots of people will fuck it up.

Conspiracy theory pisses him off.

“I have to tell people to stop sending me shit,” he says.

Fellow Ballina shaper Wayne Webster is also surviving from custom orders, with his shopfront closed.

“I’ve had pneumonia twice, I can’t risk it. But the landlord wants full rent and I’m not eligible for the Government stimulus money, so I keep going.”

He describes success in these “absolutely nuts” times as “not going broke, having a house and food. This virus is polarizing and magnifying everything.”

For Webster, this is the start of a potentially long journey.

“A lot of people might feel like they are on holiday with no work, they’ve got more time to surf. That won’t be the case in a couple of months. Social distancing is here to stay. Who knows how long my showroom will be shut for.”

Not everyone is in crisis mode.

Maker of the hottest item since custom face masks, the mid-length channel bottom twin*, Simon Jones is in a good mood on this day that Jesus got nailed on the cross.

“Touch wood, and I feel I’m tempting fate,” he says, “the orders are still coming in.”

Where from? USA, Japan and Australia.

“Shipping is more expensive, I won’t be shipping until next month. It’s a time to catch up on domestic orders.”

For now, Jones has his eye on a local break.

“Gunna head down on a seven footer and try and dodge the crowd.”

The virus might be global, but the solutions will be local.

Happy Easter comrades.

*As ridden by Torryn Marten.

Better to die on your feet etc.

Gotta love a man who ain’t afraid to put his head above the parapet.

Don Abadie is a forty-eight-year-old surfer, and jiujitsu expert as it happens, who took his fourteen-foot Caribe out to four-to-six-foot Lowers this morning, along with a pal, to circumvent the no-surfing law shutting down beaches across California.

Didn’t turn out real well.

Abadie caught one wave, and missed another, before a set shook his little inflatable off its anchorage and sent it into the rocks.

While that was happening, rangers, guns drawn, were on the beach.

Abadie, who shreds by all accounts on his little five-four Timmy Patterson twinnies, says he and his pal James Brent Jnr’s plan to chase empty, pumping Lowers, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, was a “spur of the moment decision.”

In an interview with Johnathan Wayne Freeman on Instagram Live a few minutes ago, Abadie said he figured the law extended only to the high-tide line and that by boating in, and not touching the beach, everything was cool.

“They (the rangers) let us know the ground rules. Once a beach is shut down, everything is shut down,” he said. “Regardless if you’re in the lineup or on the beach. It’s all the same.”

His boat was dragged across the rocks and it was later towed back to the dock by BoatUS.

Abadie lost his only set of car keys (“My car’s still at the dock”), an iPad (“I figured I could check work from out there”), a new phone; his buddy lost his keys etc.

No tickets were issued nor arrests made.

“We were cool to them so they were cool to us,” he said.

When did it become a bad thing to give cops a little hell?

Last Sunday, a New Zealand news site ran a provocative photo of a surfer giving hell to cops brought in to police the country’s draconian no-surfing laws.

The caption read, “A surfer is not happy to be spoken to by police for flouting lockdown rules at a West Auckland beach.”

Now, the surfer, who says the upraised digit was aimed at a tabloid photographer and not the cops, says he’s been hammered with death threats against him and his family.

As reported by Newsroom, 

A west Auckland surfer says threats have been made against him and his family after the Stuff news site published a photo of him with a caption erroneously describing him as “not happy” to be spoken to by police.

In the photo, published on April 5, the man is seen holding his surfboard and giving the middle finger to the camera while being spoken to by a police officer. He says the photographer had been hounding the surfers for a while and he was unhappy with the photographer, not the police officers.

The full caption beneath the photograph reads: “A surfer is not happy to be spoken to by police for flouting lockdown rules at a West Auckland beach.”

On closer examination it is clear the surfer is not looking at the police officer standing nearby, but directly at the camera.

The man, who was photographed going for a final surf at his local beach on Sunday, says he has been threatened with being tasered, shot and hung in multiple Facebook groups and reddit threads.

“When I walked up the beach I did the fingers to the photographer skulking around the beach, thinking nothing of it. I went and spoke to the police. They were lovely and were clear with their instruction and delivered their message and I acknowledged their advice and agreed.

“We then continued to chat for about 10 minutes. That afternoon I became aware of an article on Stuff using a photo of me. The caption of the photo implied I did the fingers to the police and resisted their advice. This is not true.”

He says he has had hundreds if not thousands of “horrific” comments – many driven by one stranger online who continues to share the article in community Facebook groups throughout the country.

“Over the following hours I was made aware of the photo being shared and some pretty scary comments being made. This escalated to the point that hundreds of people were saying all sorts of nasty stuff believing I did the fingers to the police.”

More, here, although the disturbing point, I think, is, when did it become a bad thing to give cops a little hell?

Specifically, when did surfers put their own necks under the police jackboot?

Is this a form of Stockholm Syndrome?