The Vulnerable Adult Learner Swimmer!

Hardened Dublin Bay sea-swimmers are taking a leaf out of the surfers’ book of beefs with as they attack the bona fides of swimmers using Dry Robes.

Dry Robe is brand name of “the world’s most versatile change robe” and costs 150 Euro or 180 American dollars.

The veteran Dublin swimmers’ issue is that the Dry Robe prevents the wearer from experiencing the invigorating post-swim, life-affirming “scrotum tightening” chill of the Irish sea.

“Year-round sea swimming used to be the preserve of a few people, known as “hardies”, deemed brave or mad. That changed several years ago when sea swimming became trendy,” reports The Guardian. “Some hardies associate the robes with arrivistes who snaffle parking spaces, hog benches with their fancy fleeces, call sea swimming ‘wild swimming’ and try to undo the Irish Sea’s effects on the human body.”

Arrivistes? Snaffling parking spaces?

So far, so familiar. Clueless weekender newbies coming into a “our” sacred space and clogging up the line-up – sorry, benches. Those Hardies sure are mysterious; immune to the frigid chill of the Irish sea but very much attached to public seating facilities.

And, they’ve got even more in common with us surf types, complaining about the “Dry Robe Wankers” penchant towards “using GoPros, selfie sticks and other devices to document fleeting swims.”

Anti-Dry Robe posters have already appeared, surely we’re only a couple of hogged-benches away from a slashed tire or two.

Naturally, BeachGrit will follow the story as it progresses.

Thirty-five mill plus if you got the cheese… 

Last year, it was revealed, here, that a passionate newcomer to surfing had bought the hottest piece of real estate in surfing and was gonna fill it with a landmark twelve-storey tower catering to the fabulously wealthy.

“I love everything about it and can’t believe I’ve been lucky enough to buy it,” said Brisbane-based VAL Paul Gedoun.

Now, and just a few hundred metres north, the old 151-room Greenmount Beach Resort, a faded jewel that was as glamorous as it gets when it was built in 1980, is gonna be offloaded and replaced, likely, with four or five twelve-storey towers.

Queensland developer Sunland Group bought the old site in 2016 for twenty-eight mill.

The following year they lodged plans for a $370 million build featuring two curvilinear towers filled with 247 apartments. It didn’t happen and in a recent review of undeveloped assets the company figured better to sell than linger.

The Greenmount Beach Resort holds many pleasant memories for your old pal DR including, although not limited to, being attacked with a glass bottle by a noted surfboard shaper enraged by my involvement in a bodyboarding magazine; meeting a pretty brunette with smoky eyes who would later become my wife; and presenting Kelly Slater with a twin-fin surfboard made by Mark Richards and painted in candy stripes and which would feature in a number of surf movies – a surfboard I’m pretty sure, helped convince MR to put the old board back into production, and to great commercial success.

Easy to play, limited numbers, a thousand bucks to the champ…

Editor’s note: Maybe you’ll remember the sad story of Shane Starling, the Berlin-based data analyst who won the WSL’s Fantasy Surfer League last year. Shane picked ten of the eleven winners and didn’t get a damn thing for his year’s work, the victory unremarked and unacknowledged by the owner of the game. Shane called the game, a “dead platform. You can’t communicate with other players, you can’t banter. And if they gave even a small prize it would make the competition more lively. You play the game and that’s it.”

So in swung Taylor Lobdell, from Costa Mesa but who works in the tech biz in San Francisco. He created Surfival League in March, and shortly before the tour was postponed. Twenty bucks to join. Thousand bucks to the winner.

Like the tour, it got iced. But now it’s back.  

Below, Lobdell explains how it works and how to join the gang.

Fantasy Surfer is back but “not sure if corporate will supply prizes”.

Also, WSL Fantasy is back and rules are as confusing as ever.

I believe Surfival League is the only running fantasy game that is supplying a cash prize.

Remember us?

We announced the winner-take-all “Survivor League” on March 12, and on March 13 ELO and the WSL pulled the plug and we’ve been hibernating ever since.

Thanks Erik.

If you don’t remember us, here’s a refresher.

Premise: Fantasy Surfing sucks and is complicated.

We’ve simplified it.

The Rules.

1. Pick one surfer each event.

2. Surfer must advance past Round of 32.

3. You can’t pick same surfer twice.

4. Winner takes $1000.

Want in? Buy in here.

We’re going to help you out here.

Here’s five surfers that should advance past Round of 32. Remember, you can only pick one per contest and you can’t pick the same surfer twice.

Kelly Slater

Yes there’s some “uncomfortability” with picking a forty-eight-year-old man with recent Instagram Drama, but it’s the GOAT and it’s Pipeline.

Gabriel Medina

Gabe is on a roll at Pipe with a runner-up finish in 2019 and a win in 2018. He’s going to get through the Round of 32. Only downside is you would be burning your Gabe pick early and having to watch that bow-legged cowboy march his way up to the grandstand to receive trophy after trophy for the rest of the year. But hey, at least you’ll be there to watch?

John John

Some kids grow up playing in their backyard swing set. John John played at Pipe. Stick him in there.

Jeremy Flores

Two-time Pipe Master. J-Flo did have a first-round exit last year, but lightning don’t strike twice, does it? Well, unless you’re my sweet old Uncle Staffy. Man’s been struck twice now out in the cornfields of Iowa. And once in Laguna. Call it luck, call it chance, but don’t call it a comeback. J-Flo advances.

Jack Robinson

Five years ago, little Jackie Robinson, then seventeen, won the Pipe Trials and in 2019 he won the Volcom Pipe Pro. Kid is comfortable out there. He’s a lock. But who has the key? The WA phenom has the skillset and the sweetpea personality to take it all… including our hearts. Is that enough?

Easy, right?

Who do you got?

And scientist predicts a spate of attacks by bull sharks caused by a rainy La Niña effect… 

Hitting a fish, even a twelve-foot, eight-hundred pound bull shark, at a hundred feet or so, ain’t easy as Western Australian police discovered three days ago after a fatal attack on a bodyboarder in Broome, a famous pearling town two thousand clicks north of Perth.

Charles Cernobori was a hundred feet offshore when the animal, likely a tiger or bull shark ‘cause Whites tend to do a u-turn when they hit Exmouth a thousand kilometres south, attacked.

After the man was pulled from the water by tourists, the cops used Glock 22 semi-automatic pistols to fire twenty-five shots at the animal, which missed, and the shark hung around for another half an hour.

In response to the attack, a scientist from Queensland’s Bond University has told Today that a rainy La Niña will, likely, lead to a spate of attacks by bull sharks this spring and summer

“Particularly if we get heavy rains,” said Bond University’s Associate Professor of Environmental Science Dr Daryl McPhee. “We know we have a higher risk of bull shark bites after flooding rains in the surf zone. That will be a risk.”

The man’s death marked the third fatal shark attack in Western Australia in 2020, following January’s Great White hit on diver Gary Johnson in January, and the disappearing of a local surfer by a Great White in October.