Sexy beach days under the canopy of June's marine layer.

Report from Santa Barbara post-COVID lockdown: “Determined tourists sit on the beach under a heavy, cold marine layer just because it’s Memorial Day Weekend!”

Calories don’t count on vacation, they say. Maybe the weather doesn’t either.

And then suddenly the doors swung open.

One day we couldn’t go inside a store or sit down at a restaurant.

The next day, just like that, we could.

A girl could get whiplash trying to keep up with things around here.

Memorial Day weekend showed up out of nowhere like a car swinging around a blind corner. A three-day weekend. What does that even mean?

For quite a few people it meant a weekend away in Santa Barbara. The hotels are still supposedly closed to tourists and “leisure travelers,” but there they were, leisuring all around us. The county added two-hour parking restrictions to some of the beaches, but it didn’t seem to matter.

The determination of tourists to sit on the beach under a heavy, cold marine layer, just because it’s Memorial Day weekend, will never fail to amaze me. Calories don’t count on vacation, they say. Maybe the weather doesn’t either.

A solid round of upwelling meant the water temperatures were far from tropical. Good luck, bikini-wearing tourist! Good luck with your Wavestorm! Good luck with that.

Every car has a board strapped to the roof, it seems, never mind the mostly flat surf and uninviting temperatures.

I slip down to the beach early ahead of the crowds, all totally socially distanced, of course, and ride some sloppy little runners. Summer soft top times, not worthy of an actual surfboard, not really. But I stand up and slide along, so I’ll call it surfing.

Certainly, the tourists with their bright boardshorts and fresh bikinis and the Wavestorms they bought on the way to the beach will call it surfing when they brag later about how they rode one all the way to the beach.

They stare at my 4’6” like I’m crazy. They’re probably right.

A pale grey ray, bright against the dark green seagrass, passes under my feet, fluttering in the currents. It looks nice down there, beneath the surface turbulence, just swimming.

They close one of the main streets of town to cars and I ride my rusted out town bike down the middle, giddy with the weird freedom of it. For weeks, we’ve sat around home, without much to do. Now, suddenly, we can ride down the middle of the street like there’s no rules at all.

I stop by the surf shop and slide under the caution tape intended to ensure against too many people entering at once. It’s a large warehouse-sized building with roll-up doors open at both ends. It’s as safe as anywhere else. To me, it feels safer than small-wave surfing with stingrays underfoot, but I don’t claim to be good at figuring out things like risk and probability.

“I’m looking for beach chairs,” a woman says loudly. A thing you learn living in a tourist town is that vacations are stressful. If I don’t find a beach chair, this whole thing is going to be a failure, the woman seems to be saying. I don’t linger to see if she finds one.

An old-school kind of place, the shop has beach toys for both tourists and surfers. Buy a towel, a pail and shovel, a beach chair, or a Hypto, and do it all under one roof. Bikinis cover an entire wall, boardshorts another.

The last of the winter clothing still hangs on the racks like a time capsule from two months ago. Sale: 30% off. I spy a Vissla x BeachGrit backwards fin shirt, laugh, and text Chas a photo.

Vintage boards hang from the ceiling, a treasure trove hidden in plain sight. Behind the wetsuit rack stands a 1950s-era Simmons. Several wetsuit racks stand empty, a reminder of how not that long ago, time stopped. There are few, if any 3/2mm men’s suits in stock. Maybe next week, maybe next month. No one really knows.

I wander the board racks, imagining. The tourists, busy with their beach chairs and their flip flops, haven’t made it here. The room’s quiet, boards lined up in the racks, so much fresh fiberglass. It would take a lifetime to ride them all.

A half-dozen Andreini’s showed up a few days ago fresh from the glasser, and already, two are marked sold. I look longingly at a Ghost, thinking less about the board itself than about the dream of waves good enough to make a board like that sing. There’s a bright pile of Trimcraft midlengths. High-shine, Gloss-coat Yater longboards march down the wall, almost too beautiful to ride.

There’s three bars of green wax left. Toilet paper, whatever. Green wax is precious stuff. I buy all three. Unlike the toilet paper, there’s more where those came from. Sex Wax is just down the road.

I walk out into the bright sunlight and pedal up the street.

The cars turn off the main street and I keep going. People sit outside the restaurants, drinking and laughing. A band set up outside one of the bars that’s still closed plays a Van Morrison cover. A couple slow-dances in the road, as though there’s nothing to worry about, not now, not ever again.

Maybe they’re right.

It’s a lovely fantasy, here under the trees, in this moment out of time.

The sun slides lower, and a flurry of swallows dart across the sky, flashing in the light.

I think I’ll stay a while here in our happy bubble.

All the real world’s worries will still be there when we wake up tomorrow.

But for now, they can wait, just like we did.


Watch: Chippa Wilson, Craig Anderson, Ryan Callinan, Stephanie Gilmore and mötley crüe mock the strictures of quarantine!

Barrels and airs.

I must say that some of the boldest, the best, surf art has come out during this Coronavirus quarantine. Two years ago, who could have imagined that Wade Goodall feat. Dane Reynolds would release a banging film that would smash so so hard?

Who would have imagined another full-length film with Chippa Wilson, Craig Anderson, Ryan Callinan and mötley crüe of bold new faces coming from the brilliant mind of Travis Ferré.

He writes on his new vehicle Inherent Bummer:

And here it is. A full-length pastiche surf vid made entirely from home with our friends. Some new faces. Some familiar ones. And hopefully a refreshing return to a surf video full of different styles and approaches all ripping together to get us hyped. So that’s it, hit play and enjoy. We recommend volume at full tilt. We can talk later.

The vaccine against boredom.

Watch here!


Man (pictured) gazing lovingly at local surf shop.
Man (pictured) gazing lovingly at local surf shop.

Unexpected Surprise: Surf Shops come blazing out of quarantine, smashing sales projections, defying all odds!

Welcome to Ron Jon's, I love you.

We are entering a new phase of the Coronavirus Dystopia, a sort of respite between the pandemic’s first wave and second wave where mass unemployment leads to mass homelessness leads to mass food shortages leads to solving that problem by watering the world’s crops with Brawndo™ because it has electrolytes.

The only retail that remains open, after we’re through, is Costco, St<a>rbucks exotic coffee for men and, quite unexpectedly, core surf shops.

Industry newsletter Shop-Eat-Surf revealed today that sales at many of the world’s surf shops are not only surviving but thriving, smashing forecasts and even outpacing last year’s numbers, which may say more about last year’s numbers.

Per the report:

Patrik Schmidle of ActionWatch has repeatedly said during this crisis that core stores could be better positioned than many traditional retailers when they are allowed to open. Many industry stores are not located in malls but in individual locations or strip centers, which can make customers feel safer. And more importantly, they sell a lot of activity based goods like skateboards, surfboards and body boards – all things people can do in this virus era.

Fantastic no?

Very surprising… or maybe not. We surfers, we proud descendants of Spicoli, seem primed to thrive in our new future.

Now go away.

‘Batin.


My favourite moment from the the Sunshine Coast Surf Ranch's promo film. Here, "Kelly Slater" with slick of rich Asian quality hair and holding a Mayhem-shaped surfboard.

Queensland wavepools ride COVID wave of taxpayer funding: “To save bushland and floodplain we need to bulldoze it, carve it up into a canal estate and stick a water and power hungry wavepool there that only a few will ever be able to access!”

Sunshine Coast Surf Ranch and Surf Lakes line up for free money…

Things are gurgling up, hard, in the post-Covid wavepool world in Queensland.

Like other tourism destinations, the state, famous for hosting the opening CT Tour event at Snapper Rocks, Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson, shit beer, a twenty-year quasi-dictatorship when developers ruled the roost etc etc, has been economically flayed by the restrictions put in place to control the spread of the virus.

Back the tape up to the November series on the proposed Coolum surf ranch proposal.

We noted a king hell public relations offensive was in the offing by WSL’s Australasian head kicker Andrew Stark and his property developer pal Don O’Rorke. Shots are now being fired and a government in thrall to shiny tourism baubles which could stimulate a morbid economy is being tickled pink by the prospect of a wavepool led recovery.

The Coolum proponents are luxuriating in the warm spa of a shiny new website (strangely, down the list on a Google Search, maybe SEO was not in the budget).

It paints a beautiful picture, an entire alternative universe even.

I appreciate an alternative Universe as much as the next absurdist and this one is a real doozy. It’s a place where to save bushland and floodplain we need to bulldoze it, truck in millions of tonnes of fill, carve it up into a canal estate and stick a water and power hungry wavepool there that only a few will ever be able to access.

No surprises there.

Of course we’ll have solar panels and an eco-lodge with high thread count organic cotton sheets.

Why would we believe in the 2+2=5 tenets of this wonderful universe?

Because the WSL is behind it, trumpeting itself as an Environmentally Conscious Organisation du jour.

How could they do wrong by MotherEarth, how could Kelly cash his cheque on a project that was not as green as the greenest grass?

This Golden Goose will shit pure green eggs, bank on it.

Don O’Rorke is a smart man.

He claims 75% community support, not something I found on the ground there randomly talking to as many people as I could, and has created a website where the only feedback mechanism possible is a “register your support” button.

Genius. So even if you want to kick it in the nuts it gets registered as “support”.

Anything can and could happen in this magic pudding world. The development itself grew from a hundred million when the first breathless presser was released on Sep 30 by a factor of 11 to 1.1 billion less than two weeks later when further pressers were leaked to the media.

Don’s holding big time; not just the wavepool, which is the carrot to get the housing development and other big ticket items over the line, but a huge fuck-off stick. That stick is a threat to turn the whole site into a sand mine. It’s a head I win, tails you lose scenario.

Pure gangster position, and I use the term euphemistically, obvs, because I don’t want to get in a screaming match with Don’s lawyers at midnight on a schoolnight explaining that even if I liquidate my quiver it ain’t gunna cover a days worth of their legal fees.

Coolum is not the only wavepool development hoping to find itself on the right side of Govt money used to stimulate an influx of pale legged southerners looking for easy tubes and vitamin D. And they are looking at it.

Word from my mole in the Queensland government is at least six or seven politicians are aware of the proposal and taking it very seriously.

The Yeppoon surf lakes site with it’s temperamental plunger, that according to the website: “full stroke of the plunger and therefore full wave height has yet to be achieved. Expect this to come in 2020!” is also on the sniff for a little hand-out to make the prototype tub into a full scale commercial operation.

I find this a far more exciting proposition because a: the wavepool is not a Trojan horse for a monstrous canal development and b: Central QLD with its dry tropical climate is a truly great place for a fly-in-fly-out surf trip.

Surf Lakes has been shy of good news lately, it’s website is looking a little moribund. It’s last licensee anouncement was with an unnamed group in California back in the innocent days of March at an unnamed location with the only clue offered that the licencee was “well positioned to contribute to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles”.

Fabulous.

But closer to home (and reality) Surf Lakes CEO Aaron Trevis came out publicly and claimed if the Queensland Govt “spent ten million they’d get around two billion in return.”

That’s a multiplier of 200!

With those numbers it only sounds like prudent business sense for the gubbermint to get behind the Yeppoon facility. They have my guaranteed patronage and I will tell all my Queensland relatives around the Christmas ham to vote for any politician who tips in.

But seriously now, with all the cheap money sloshing around, why not go big, very big.

Invest in a half-dozen Surf Lakes, really go all in (as ELO would say) on the concept of a wavepool-led economic recovery from the ravages of Covid.

It could be bigger than the New Deal and a global export we could be truly proud of.

Bamm, bam, bam, they are popping up all over the place like mushrooms in a cow paddock after rain.

Speaking of exciting developments, four sleeps until Elo’s next call on the Future of the Tour, this year and beyond. Yew.


Listen: Wade Goodall talks “schlock Australian new wave cinema” that influenced Pentacoastal and hears, for first time, about surf mag that incinerated twenty-thousand copies of his first film Passion Pop!

Secrets brazenly revealed, a few laughs, not so many tears.

In today’s episode of Dirty Water, Charlie Smith and I three-way with Australian child prodigy, and star of Vans’ supercharged new full-length feature film, Wade Goodall.

Goodall, if you know a little surf history, was an air queen whose signature move, a shuvit in the skies, became the fulcrum upon which Billabong’s big 2006 feature, Passion Pop, pivoted.

Fourteen years later, Goodall, as lead, and filmmaker Shane Fletcher behind camera, both editing, created Pentacoastal.

A few caveats about today’s convo.

I’m fucking awful, screeching and interrupting, recounting shit stories like the time I interviewed Nick Cave about his film The Proposition; Goodall’s net connection via telephone is even flimsier than is the norm in Australia although we’ve tried to edit out most of the glitches and Chas heads off for a dinner party three-quarter of the way through.

Still, it’s free.

The conversation hits high points, I think, when Goodall talks about how Australian New Wave cinema, specifically the films Wake In Fright and Walkabout, that influenced the colour treatment and vibe of Pentacoastal; when he recounts the three times he’s snapped a leg and his joy when he hears that Australian surf mags used to incinerate two-thirds of the surf film DVDs that were supplied as cover mounts.

In Passion Pop’s case, twenty thousand burned out thirty k supplied.

And, a bonus: anyone who leaves a review on iTunes, good, bad, don’t care as long as it’s entertaining, will get a BeachGrit tailpad. All you gotta do is write the review, email us the link ([email protected]) and you’ll get a tailpad in some random colour.

(Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, TuneIn + Alexa, iHeartRadio, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro, Castbox, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, Deezer and Listen Notes.)

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