Kandui Left, last week. | Photo: Kandui Resort

Loophole of the century: Buy $1700, sixty-day Indonesian visa, surf empty Mentawais!

Derek Rielly

By

A pot of gold awaits…

Ain’t no finer joint to spread your eagle wings than the Mentawais.

And, for the past six months, all those skippers and resort owners working in that dazzling chain of seventy islands who didn’t swing back to their home countries in a COVID panic, have been raking their teeth across the archipelago’s erected cherry nipple. 

Want a slice of the Mentawais, as it was before the great boat rush?

Kandui Resort in the northern Ments, real close to Kandui Lefts and Rifles, a left and right pair that will make you gasp or maybe death rattle depending on the swell, has offered tubesteak aficionados a way into the Ments. 

You, a few pals, surf of a lifetime, yes? Kandui, last week.

In a WhatsApp message, the resort outlined how it could getcha into Indo and to their resort. 

Here’s what you gotta do:

Book a ten-day trip to Kandui Resort. 

Get a PCR swab test (the nose one) to prove you ain’t got the bug. 

Pay $US1700 for a sixty-day Indonesian visa. The resort has lowered its daily rate from $US295 to $US195 to help offset the cost. 

During a recent swell, a group from Bali came to the resort and, well, here are the photos. 

Got time, a little money, can find flight and don’t mind quarantining when you swing home? 

Will you ever go home? 

Norwegian standing in front of early surfboard.
Norwegian standing in front of early surfboard.

Progressive: “The Bible of the Sport” Surfer magazine gets historically woke in new series highlighting the actual genesis of surfing!

Chas Smith

By

I told you it was the Peruvians.

Fraught times. Angry times etc. but you already know that and I am looking forward to re-reading each of 2020’s BeachGrit posts, in ten years, to chuckle at the generally dim worldview encapsulated in the first lines because in ten years we will all be ruled by rogue AI and pandemic/economic collapse/Rumble at the Ranch will seem paradisiacal in comparison.

Andy Irons.

What a bastard.

In any case, Surfer magazine i.e. The Bible of the Sport has recently awakened and is doing a fabulous series on the pre-white history of America’s most famous surf spots. The latest highlights The Pump House Gang’s La Jolla (brought to you by Tom Wolfe). Shall we read its opening together?

In surfing, we obsess over people’s history and connection to our favorite surf spots. We even go so far as to build hierarchies in the lineup based on who’s been there longest. First time paddling out somewhere? Cool, no set waves for you. Moved into the area for college a few years back and been surfing it on the regular ever since? OK, go help yourself to some scraps on the inside. Are you a third-generation local surfer who knows every cobblestone like a family member? You probably more or less run the place.

The funny thing is, while surfers place immense importance on our history and connection to a given surf break, outside of Hawaii, most surfers don’t actually have that much history at any particular spot. Not in the grand scheme of things, at least.

On the US mainland, few families can claim more than three generations of surfers. And, sure, some surfers have family history along their local coastline going further back through things like fishing, but none of that compares to the history of those who have the deepest roots along the coast—the original locals indigenous to the region.

In the case of San Diego, the original locals belong to the Kumeyaay Nation, a Native American tribe whose ancestral land spans from North County down to Northern Baja, from Swami’s to Sunset Cliffs and beyond.

You can, plus should, read the rest here and learn something but also Peruvians and their Thor Heyerdahl, cocaine and inventing our Pastime of Kings. You can, though probably shouldn’t, read the rest here.

Rogue AI is gonna be super lame, theoretically, but I have a solid belief that I can confound it with a barrage of me.

Have you ever listened to Dirty Water?

Told you.

Watch: Poet and activist enters tequila brand Jose Cuervo’s “Spirit of Surfing” challenge; crushes all-comers with impassioned speech!

Chas Smith

By

Fine art.

I, myself, am not typically a contest enterer. The odds certainly never feel in my favor and that sort of defeatist attitude doesn’t lead to wonderful manifestations of victory but this new “Spirit of Surfing” challenge seems very much up my alley.

The contest, in association with pandemic profiteering website Surfline, has very simple rules:

Here’s how to enter: in a small homemade video show us or describe to us your ideal day of surfing and share with us your go-to post session, share with friends-at-sunset-hour, cocktail recipe using one of the following bottles of Jose Cuervo ® Tradicional ® tequila: Plata, Reposado or Añejo.

And the prize sublime:

Each of the top six “home mixologist” winners will take a friend to the Surf Ranch this September for a once-in-a-lifetime day filled with special guests (including Mr. Pipeline Gerry Lopez) and spectacular waves. So, what are you waiting for?

If you have listened to any Dirty Waters, you’ll know that I, myself, enjoy sunset hour cocktails with my friends Derek and Longtom and also idealize surfing days but alas, right when I was preparing to submit my entry I watched poet and activist John Wayne Freeman’s and my spirit is crushed.

Crushed but also buoyed that a man, an artist, can capture the zeitgeist so well.

Your contest makes no sense. I see that you took all the money from the billion dollar tequila company Jose Cuervo and that you came up with an “idea” about “the spirit of surfing.” “The spirit of surfing.” You are holding a contest with Mr. Health, Gerry Lopez, who, I’m pretty sure doesn’t drink, he’s the reason I got into hot yoga, Mr. Holistic you get to surf with, right? In a fake wave lake? It’s not even in the ocean? In a lake? And we’re surfing with a guy whose entire life has been about health? And its put on by Jose Cuervo? Do you know what I’ve done because of Jose Cuervo?

Truly and undeniably the spirit of surfing.

As always, blame Surfline.

Listen: Shane Beschen on new orgasms-and-cocktails-tittys-and-honeybuns Arizona wavepool, “Shock waves of pleasure!”

Derek Rielly

By

Entire "human ecosystems" built around blue-water wedges…

In this episode of Dirty Water, number twenty-five, you’ll note the terrible absence of verbal histrionics and the laughing outright into people’s faces.

Charlie Smith, who just celebrated a birthday, disappeared for two days on a sailing adventure and, therefore, the forty-five minutes is constrained by my introversion and inability to carry a conversation without volumes of paper notes.

Today’s guest on Dirty Water, Shane Beschen, has been described as a “loner and a malcontent” and with a face that has the pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child. 

Although a recent guest on Dirty Water, the forty-eight-year-old former world number two returns with important news concerning his tank in Mesa, Arizona, using engineering and tech made in Minnesota; the rapidly evolving world of wavepools; we later veer into the possibility that the sled-driven pool, as fabulous as it is, may already be obsolete.

Beschen also pokes a timely fork into the eye of Surfrider Europe.

Leave a review on Apple podcasts, forward your address to us, and we’ll send you something shiny in return.

"The modern exasperated sigh of surfing" Martin Potter (right) points his love gun at Joe Turpel.
"The modern exasperated sigh of surfing" Martin Potter (right) points his love gun at Joe Turpel.

“Modern voice of surfing” Joe Turpel gives beautiful interview to local news station, not a dry eye left in the house!

Chas Smith

By

"It’s still honestly surreal."

The Rumble at the Ranch, now one week in the rearview, reintroduced professional surfing to an entertainment starved public and… to be honest I have not read or heard one good thing about it. Mocking Kelly Slater’s Green Kingdom, its monotony, its “unnecessary irresponsibility,” has become too easy and so I’m always on the lookout for a voice to force me to see it in a different light.

Always on the lookout even to this very day, but while we are discussing voices, the “modern voice of surfing” Joe Turpel gave such a warm interview to his local Hawaiian television station khon2.

Do you forget that Turpel is Hawaiian? I certainly do and/or never realized in the first place but there he was discussing his personal history…

I was taking a summer school class at Punahou and the teacher was Pal Eldredge and he made us do a sports report of our favorite team. I was playing baseball at the time and I did a full Dodgers breakdown of their last game and Mr. Eldredge said ‘hey, you might wanna take this VHS tape back to your parents and show them what you did today,’ and I was like ‘what do you mean?’ He’s like ‘maybe you should do this in your life.’ That was the first time I was like ‘oh my gosh, maybe I want to be a broadcaster.’

His feelings at the dawn of Covid…

We had like a heat to go and we realized this might be maybe the last heat of the year (Carissa’s victory). At the time it seemed surreal. It just felt like ‘wait, is this going to be a couple of weeks or is Snapper (Rocks) gonna be back on?’ Then eventually it led to further down, the full cancelation of 2020.

But most importantly, his being called “The Modern Voice of Surfing…”

It’s still honestly surreal. I have a hard time saying that myself because it feels too big,” he said. “For me, I’m still this kid that loves to surf so to be able to even think that is incredible. I almost don’t spend too much time thinking about it because it feels too big. I’m just enjoying it all. It’s definitely an honor to hear something like that.

If your eyes aren’t moist then you are not human.

Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by @theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
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