Australian rugby star retires at 31 declaring: “Unfortunately it’s no longer the 1960s where a warm-up was a cigarette and training was 10 beers in the pub. Now the time has come for surfing!”

Chas Smith

By Chas Smith

"Le temps est venu pour le surf."

When I lived in Australia for a year, in the late aughts, I fell very much in love with Australian Rules Football. Collingwood claimed my heart but I would happily while away the evening hours, Carlton Draught in hand, watching whichever team happened to be playing that evening.

Carlton was my second favorite team, thanks its namesake beer (the best in all of Australia), St. Kilda third.

I did not like Geelong because the town reminded me too much of my hometown Coos Bay and was on the way to Bells.

In any case, I could not understand how people would choose to watch rugby over Aussie Rules but rugby is more popular, no?

Certainly more popular worldwide where we find star Australian winger Blair Connor playing for Bordeaux-Begles in France and retiring at the ripe young age of 31.

Why?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBQPg8PA5u-/

Surfing of course as he announced, “Unfortunately for me, it’s no longer the 1960s where a warm-up was a cigarette and training was 10 beers in the pub. I decided I could give 100 percent this season but I’ll have nothing more to give next season…. Now the time has come for surfing.”

Bravo but do you think that Gabriel Medina, Michel Bourez, Kanoa Igarashi and all the super hard one-time professional surf trainers are re-thinking their plotted course?

They very much should be as I’ve always held that a cigarette and 10 beers in the perfect regimen.

And here’s to Blair Connor’s new surfing career.

Our next Chris Ward?

Fingers crossed.

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@secretshawaii
@secretshawaii

Trouble in Paradise: Hawaiian activists go after legality of Jaws event on Maui, others on Oahu; World Surf League brass rumored to be “deeply shaken!”

Chas Smith

By Chas Smith

"Land is Chief, Man is its Servant."

But right when the World Surf League finally began to see its way out of a complete Coronavirus shutdown, right when alleged plans to bring the Triple Crown, on Oahu’s North Shore, and the Peahi Big Wave Challenge, on Maui, began to form Santa Monica has run into a buzzsaw.

For it is on Maui where activists have mobilized and are demanding a reclamation of native lands, including the road to Jaws, with further actions planned on Oahu’s North Shore.

Per a direct to camera explanation on the Instagram account @secretshawaii, Mary Ann Pahukoa explains both the group’s mission and also the murky facts surrounding a recent arrest warrant:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CA68gkxDRRI/

“This is the TAKE-BACK of Pineapple & Sugar Cane lands, stolen from Hawaiian ʻOhana. This is the eviction of leaseeʻs & corporations who have mis-managed these lands for profit. We strive to work together with all persons who understand He Aliʻi Ka ʻĀina, He Kauwa ke Kanaka, Land is Chief, Man is its Servant.

We’re trying to end the continued displacement of Hawaiians. We’re trying to put Hawaiians back on their ancestral lands so they can be healthy, happy, sheltered. We reclaim lands for the rightful heirs and we have been challenging the real-estate fraud here.”

The World Surf League brass is rumored to be “deeply shaken” by this turn of events, especially in light of the “current climate.”

Land and usage issues have plagued the League before, most recently in 2018 where a wholesale tour re-imagination was scrapped and charges of “entitlement” and “arrogance” were leveled at then-CEO Sophie Goldschmidt.

Will current CEO Erik Logan have the dexterity, the temerity, to navigate?

Much to ponder.

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Black Girls Surf Founder launches extraordinary tirade at surf identity Sal Masekela: “I can’t believe your daddy is Hugh Masekela who was down there with apartheid and you act like this!”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

“I’m coming for you!” says Black Girls Surf's Rhonda Harper.

In a shock spray just uploaded to YouTube from Senegal, Black Girls Surf founder Rhonda Harper has quit her association with the WSL, called surf identity Sal Masekela an “Uncle Tom” and accused the popular commentator and musician of “bringing negativity and dividing black people.”

Last Wednesday, Masekela was the hit of a paddle-out at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas where he led the five-hundred strong crowd in eight minutes and forty-six seconds of silence as a reminder of the amount of time police held Floyd to the ground by his neck. 

“Sal delivered a speech so powerful that it reverberates deep in our core,” said Stab magazine.

 

Rhonda Harper, you’ll remember from a wonderful story two years ago where police were called, reports filed and news organisations notified, when a Brazilian surf instructor pulled the leash of a Black Girls Surf member at Venice Beach.

It was, perhaps, a glorious trifecta of localism, sexism and racism.

(Black Girls Surf was established in 2014 “for young girls/women surfers of the African diaspora. BGS is training and coaching the nextgen of surfers ages 5-17.”)

When I spoke to Harper and asked her to explain why it was necessary to bring the pigs into it, echoes of Goggans v Smith, she told that she’d seen Chas Smith’s earlier story on the incident and “As the owner of Black Girls Surf, I’m going to tell BeachGrit, I have no comment, no…fucking…comment.”

Fast forward to 2020 and in a piece live to telephone from Senegal and titled “Sal Masakela (sic) you on notice” Harper truly lights up.

“I’ve had so many complaints about that paddle out.”

“He hasn’t done nothing for black people in surfing!”

“I can’t believe your daddy is Hugh Masekela who was down there with apartheid and you act like this!”

“I’m coming for you!”

“Everyone’s on notice! WSL, I told ‘em I’m done ‘cause you put that Uncle Tom in the way of progress, that’s what you did. I told you I wasn’t going to work alongside him. He ain’t doing nothing for black people. He did it for himself.”

“You grew up in Malibu. You ain’t had to worry about getting a wetsuit, getting a board… you never had to do that!” 

Etc. 

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Breaching whale capsizes boat 30-yards from the sand launching two fishermen into the air!

Giancarlo Guardascione

By Giancarlo Guardascione

Fish gone wild…

As if there weren’t enough reasons to not surf New Jersey in the summer, you can now add being catapulted into the air by earth’s largest mammal to the list.

Local news sources have reported a breaching humpback whale capsizing a twenty-five foot fishing boat thirty yards off D-Street in Seaside Park.

Belted boat, beached at Seaside Park by feisty mammal. Photo: Friends of Seaside Park/Facebook

The two fisherman in the boat were unharmed as was the mean ol whale.

Breaching whales are not uncommon in the area at this time of year as the water warms.

However, to have them cameo with such proximity to the shoreline makes a paddle-out feel akin to a stroll in a Mozambique open field, playing lottery with the Portuguese version of planted, undetonated, war flowers.

When local fisherman with thirty years of experience casting in the same waters were asked if they ever remember whales coming this close to shore the answer was simple, ¨Never.¨

Scientists say it is the growing population of Atlantic menhaden, a North American species of fish in the herring family, that are bringing them closer to shore.

Either way, it somehow feels we should be prepared to become the next orphaned Ishmael without a Queequeg on the next paddel out at the Dirty Jerz.

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Rumor: The World Surf League “intent” on holding the Triple Crown and Jaws Big Wave Challenge in the barely foreseeable future!

Chas Smith

By Chas Smith

Bold moves!

But to float real forward thinking, progressive, non-chicken plans like holding a series of surf events on Oahu’s North Shore in, like, six months’ time and also holding a big wave event at the iconic Jaws when the winter swells start bashing, also like, six months’ time is where our World Surf League plants its flag today.

Theoretically.

For a very fine source from deep within the vacated belly of Santa Monica’s beast has declared that “the WSL is intent on holding the Triple Crown and also Peahi, if there is enough swell.”

Bold?

Audacious?

You tell me.

I was thinking, while ripping the early swells of the Coronavirus Apocalypse, that this moment here could be professional surfing’s moment.

Sport cancelled.

Life cancelled.

Fun cancelled.

Professional surfing could have, should have filled that void. A boat in the Mentawis, a gathering on Tavarua, Snapper, Bells, Western Australia, anywhere that could have had them, would have had them.

Cornwall, England.

ESPN was broadcasting baseball re-runs. It would have paid top dollar to broadcast live professional surfing in Cornwall, England.

It has been the only thing co-Waterperson of the Year Dirk Ziff wanted.

More eyeballs than football.

And it was completely botched by the weak-willed Santa Monica bastards who failed to realized their moment, going all in against the now accepted reality that Coronavirus is not an indiscriminate mass killer but rather flu-lite.

Oops.

Will heads roll?

They totally should.

But here’s to December and the Triple Crown.

Allegedly.

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