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

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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Fun Police: Delaware beach restricts visitors to knee-deep wading after surfer gets “punctured” by shark!

Welcome to the Summer of Bummer.

Summer is here, in the northern hemisphere, with its coconut scented breezes, happy youth freed from the bondage of school and water-based activities. Oh, no one will be able to smell those coconut scented breezes, as masks are still mandatory around much of the industrialized world, the youth are not happy, having been restricted from learning, and water-based activities have been limited to knee-deep wading in Delaware where a shark hit on a young surfer has shocked and scared the already shocked and scared.

Delaware, not known for surfing, is also not known for shark bites, having seen its last nibble in 2014, but days ago and let us learn more immediately.

Officials have closed Herring Point to surfing and swimming until further notice due to a possible shark bite that happened. At this time, beachgoers are also restricted to knee-deep waters around the Cape Henlopen bathhouse.

We’re told that just before 1 p.m., a 12-year-old boy surfing off Herring Point sustained puncture wounds to one of his legs and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. Officials say it was initially reported as a shark bite, however the bite mark is being reviewed by state and fisheries experts to determine if it was from a shark or possible other creature.

Natural Resource Police Park Rangers and lifeguards are patrolling the beach area to warn visitors to stay in shallow water.

Can 2020 get any worse?

Wading is such a terrible, terrible bummer. I had a friend, once, with a paranoid mother who only let him wade. My heart broke for him like it does for all of Delaware’s children.

Well, at least they have Sleepy Joe.

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Real Estate: Least famous Backstreet Boy set to build $35m condominium complex called “The Surf” in Kelly Slater’s hometown!

"I think everyone’s going to be looking up going, ‘I want to be up there!'"

I am no economist, but if I had to make serious pronouncements about the landscape, post Covid-19, I would say that commercial real-estate is going to be a real bummer. People have decided they no longer have to be in an “office” to “work.” Every other business is officially out of and every other person is deathly afraid of human scum.

My feelings about residential real-estate are not so bearish, especially when it comes to unique projects called The Surf, backed by a Backstreet Boy, and set to soar over Kelly Slater’s hometown of Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Shall we learn more?

The Surf property is located on North Atlantic Avenue between Minutemen Causeway and North First Street, just north of Coconuts on the Beach and Beach Shack.

The 25-unit structure will rise from the long-vacant site of Ocean Dunes, a vacation rental complex that got battered by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004. Crews demolished the damaged Ocean Dunes complex in 2005.

Prices range from $800,000 for a 1,770-square-foot unit with three bedrooms to $2.2 million for a 4,080-square-foot, four-bedroom penthouse, listed by Alyssa Boyd, broker-owner of Sand Dollar Realty of Brevard.

The Surf features two-car garages for every condo, oceanfront balconies with glass railings, floor-to-ceiling windows, 11-foot ceilings and a two-story lobby.

“Anything that’s new and fresh around here, I get excited about. We’re bringing a slice of Miami-South Beach. Cocoa Beach is a hidden gem to me. That’s why I relocated my family here, instead of Orlando,” Howie D said.

“The fact that we decided to change the pool, from being on the beach side to the front side on A1A: I think that’s going to be a hot spot. I think everyone’s going to be looking up going, ‘I want to be up there,’ “ he said.

Which one is Howie D?
Which one is Howie D?

The Surf will also be a twelve minute walk away from the Kelly Slater statue.

Will you invest?

Will Kelly or has he repatriated to Australia?

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A happy interaction tween five year old and Great White in Mex. | Photo: @thebucketlistfamily

The fog of war: Major newspaper runs “exclusive” story based on flawed study claiming Great Whites have “little interest in mammals” two days after fatal hit on surfer

"Australian researchers found little evidence of marine mammals in the stomachs of the 40 mostly juvenile great whites they examined."

On Sunday morning just a little before eleven, Gold Coast surfer Rob Pedretti was hit by a Great White shark, a ten or twelve footer, according to an expert in these things. 

A pal, Frank, and another Gold Coast surfer, Mark, tried to fight the shark as it circled the trio, occasionally charging, leaving dings in Mark’s board, following ‘em to the beach where Pedretti died. 

No bite-and-release mistake here.

Two days later, The Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper that is to the left what The Australian is to the right, and therefore virulently anti-netting, culling etc, ran a chirpy sorta piece bannered “Shark Debate” and with “environment” and “conservation” built into the URL headlined, “Study shows surprising diet of sharks with little interest in mammals.”

Great white sharks are picky eaters, altering their diet to meet changing needs as they grow. Mammals are of little interest until the animals mature and bites on humans are likely to be mistakes.

Research published on Monday in the Frontiers in Marine Science journal by Australian researchers found little evidence of marine mammals in the stomachs of the 40 mostly juvenile great whites they examined.

Richard Grainger, a PhD researcher at the University of Sydney and lead author of the paper, told the Herald, “understanding what sharks were likely to eat and where could help the public minimise the small chance of an interaction with humans. People should also avoid dawn, dusk and other times when the water may be murky, such as after rain.”

Here’s the flaw in the study.

Studying “mostly” juvies ain’t gonna help anyone when it comes to minimising “the small chance of an interaction with humans.”

Dolphins and whales don’t get hit by juvies only by bigger, older sharks, although the paper concedes, “The hunting of bigger prey, including other sharks and marine mammals such as dolphin, is not likely to happen until the sharks reach about 2.2 meters in length.”

(No one told this juvie White. Last year, surfer Sam Edwardes was put in an induced coma after he had a “football sized” chunk taken out of his leg in Byron Bay twenty years after losing his pal to a Great White twenty years earlier in South Australia.)

As for that ol furphy about avoiding dawnies etc, as Longtom wrote yesterday, 

We’ve learnt the published guidelines on avoiding White shark attacks are straight up BS. They like clear water, sunshine, small surf. The mistaken identity theory was the first casualty. White sharks, we learnt, are curious to aggressive. What makes a looker, into a circler, into a bumper then a biter we don’t know.

In a 2012 TED x talk, Grainger’s co-author of the paper, Vic Peddemors, from the NSW Department of Primary Industries, joked that the recent fatalities of surfers in Western Australia had constituted a “bumper season”.

The central question remains, I think.

Are Great Whites endangered?

Yes?

Keep ’em protected.

No?

Throw out a net here and there.

 

 

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To kill or not to kill.

Longtom on the ethics of executing Great White involved in fatal attack on surfer: “We accept our place in the food chain, celebrate it even, but we don’t let the killer escape back into a highly populated surf zone”

If the cops had the kill order and they were so close they could reach out and touch its dorsal fin why was it not carried out? 

Sixty-year-old Rob Pedretti was just doing what is, was, a regular winter ritual for Queensland surfers yesterday: a little cross-border raid to try and pick up a little extra juice on the miles of undistinguished beachbreak that stretches south from the QLD border to Cape Byron.

We all know what happened next.

Poor bastard had his leg ripped off in the jaws off a fired up White. He did not survive the attack.

Soft, wintery day. You get a lot of them around here this time of year.

Warm sun, high cloud drifting in. Clean babyfood with little cats paws of wind ruffle on it. A fit wiry sixty year old would think of nothing but enjoying a little shred.

A hundred miles south I was feeling a little edgy.

Almost a year to the day since a juvey White buzzed me with a little too much intent. Out on the back bank with my boyo and gal.

I don’t like surfing out the back banks, with deep channels between me and the land. Too much opportunity for cruising Whites to get a bead on you. I rarely do it these days but my son wanted a piece of it and helicopter parenting ain’t my bag. If a kid wants a piece of it, my reaction is almost always: sure, go get it.

My boy was lollygagging in the water. “Get back on your board,” I ordered.

He must have sensed something in my voice.

“Why?” he replied. 

I didn’t respond. Just scanned the water. There was bait, birds and dolphins feeding. Nothing unusual there, thats typical. Especially for this time of year.  

A short timeline and context follows, for the record.

Twenty-three days ago, my pal the shark drum line contractor for the smart drum-line array off Ballina/Lennox  was complaining about the endless run of swell.

The surf was pumping but he was agitated; he’d dragged a fat twelve-foot White off the drum-line two days before and he wanted to get back work. The big swell  was preventing him from baiting and checking the gear.

He, like me, believes the drum-lines are keeping surfers safer in the area which has become a White shark attack hotspot. Ain’t too many whites can swim past a 22/0 circle hook with a stingray flap as bait.

They get dragged a mile out to sea and released with a tag inside them. 

So we all knew it was that time of year again.

But we forgot, in the midst of very fine run of late autumn swell. Crowds were high, there was safety in numbers. 

Day before the attack was a dreamy day. Head-high sets rifling down the bank. Moderate crowd. The water was stacked with bait. Slivers of cut glass in the morning sun. A yellowtail kingfish the size of a small pony swam straight past me. Crystal clear water.

There’s no safety in that. We’ve learnt the published guidelines on avoiding White shark attacks are straight up BS. They like clear water, sunshine, small surf. The mistaken identity theory was the first casualty. White sharks, we learnt, are curious to aggressive.

What makes a looker, into a circler, into a bumper then a biter we don’t know.

Neither will Rob Pedretti or his buddies that tried to drag him in after the attack. The attack happened around ten am. Paramedics were there by 10.40. The police cat scrambled from Tweed Heads, went out the bar, turned south, went past Fingal headland, then Kingscliff creek and the rocky reefy corner of the coast before it got to the open stretch of beach in front of a series of resorts and a new suburb called Casuarina.

That took just under an hour.

Rob was already gone by then.

Under a blue sheet on the beach, soul hopefully transporting to a more peaceful place.

The cops on the cat found a lifesaver on a ski engaged in a game of cat and mouse with a highly agitated predator. The shark had no intention of leaving the scene of the attack. Article 37 of the Fisheries Act was invoked which enabled the police to execute a kill order on the shark. 

The footage of the incident makes this kill order seem confounding. At one stage in the vision a cop on the bow of the vessel is leaning over, almost close enough to the shark to stroke its dorsal fin. He has what appears to be a camera in hand. 

I rang Inspector Kehoe from Byron-Ballina Area Command and asked him what the hell happened. If you had the kill order and you were so close why was it not carried out? 

“It wasn’t safe to do so,” he assured me.

The shark was too deep to safely put away with a firearm, which is the method used.

I didn’t ask him the deeper moral question of should it have?

In this instance, I think yes.

A defining characteristic of living things, from amoeba to blue whales, is the defence of itself from predation. To abnegate that fundamental natural law is to cloak existence in a sickly coat of misguided anthromorphism. We accept our place in the food chain, celebrate it even, but we don’t let the killer escape back into a highly populated surf zone.

It put the guy away, attacked his mates as they tried to rescue him total nightmare scenario, then hung around for four hours afterwards. 

A defining characteristic of living things, from amoeba to blue whales, is the defence of itself from predation. To abnegate that fundamental natural law is to cloak existence in a sickly coat of misguided anthromorphism. We accept our place in the food chain, celebrate it even, but we don’t let the killer escape back into a highly populated surf zone. At the least, not without a tag and a free trip out of the area.

Can anything be done now?

My pal George Greenough has had many encounters with Whites and written about them in detail.

Awareness is his primary tool. You got to turn on the primitive senses, the old lizard brain, that kept us safe on the savannah. If you feel something, check it out. Investigate movement.

It’s amazing how close that big animal can get to you without you knowing about it.

But if you can, if you can get your legs out of the road, even a micro-seconds notice can save your life.

As for his pals who dragged him across the gutter, whilst a ramped up White rammed them and circled them. That’s so gnarly. So, so heavy.

People say they hate their fellow surfers. I love my fellow sistren and brethren surfers and I love them even more when I think of what these guys did for their pal.

I hope they’re OK.

If you know them, keep an eye out.

They won’t be sleeping well for a long time.

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