New evidence suggests spate of Killer Whale-on-boat violence not tied to revenge but to fun: “They just play, play and play. And the game is getting worse and worse!”

Chas Smith

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They love it. And don't know why.

It was first reported, here, two months ago, that a pod of Killer Whales off the coasts of Spain and New Spain (i.e. Portugal) was exhibiting never-before-seen behavior in carrying out coordinated attacks on boats. Scientists and researchers puzzled and puzzled over what it could all mean and, a month later, many concluded they were revenge assaults over injuries sustained.

That the Killers “may have felt compelled to act when they saw a sailboat in order to slow it down by going after its rudder.”

Well, another month on and the situation has grown much worse with attacks increasing in both ferocity and damage. Some last for hours with terrified passengers and sailors praying for a merciful end.

Scientists and researchers reconvened to get to the bottom of this wild business, identified the three culprits and named them Gladis Black, Gladis White and Gladis Grey and have now abandoned the revenge theory, settling on an assumption that the big boys are just having some good ol’ fashioned fun.

Renaud de Stephanis, a biologist who is part of the team investigating, told the BBC, “I’ve seen them hunting. When they hunt, you don’t hear or see them. They are stealthy, they sneak up on their prey. I’ve seen them attacking sperm whales. That’s aggressive. But these guys, they are playing. It’s mainly two of those guys…that are just going crazy. They just play, play and play. And the game is getting worse and worse. They love it. And don’t know why. It just seems to be something they really like and that’s it.”

Well now I like them and like everything they are doing.

I get it and am going to swim out to the lineup at Cardiff Reef and start ramming the fins of every SUP I see with my head for fun.

By the way, did you know that Elvis Presley’s beloved mother was named Gladis but she spelled it Gladys?

Very cool.

Listen: Surfing superhero Mark Occhilupo on quitting the booze, being a daddy to nine kids and his beginnings as a “little cross-dressing Italian Scotsman from Kurnell!”

Derek Rielly

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And being slapped by Hawaiian lifeguard and having rail bitten by famous big-wave surfer… 

God bless the great Mark Occhilupo, and I mean that sincerely. Surfers come and go, light up an epoch and then disappear, usually without glory. 

Occhilupo, however, turns sixty in five years time (“Sixty in five years time? Don’t say that!”) and still lives a surfer’s dream.

He has a “little nook” at Rainbow Bay and is up at three-thirty every morning, and never with a hangover for he quit drinking three years ago (“It was my nemesis”), chasing the four am Gold Coast sunrise and those precious few uncrowded runners.

Warshaw’s EOS describes Occ as being “built like a duck” and surfing “like a big cat.”

He has been largely ignored by the ravages of ageing and is a finely balanced combination of enthusiasm and confidence. 

He is a world champion and a runner-up to the world title, is still regarded by most as the best surfer ever at Bells, and possibly Jeffreys Bay, and has a spirit that bristles with a scorching flame. 

In a wonderful profile by Sean Doherty five years ago, Occ self-described as a “little cross-dressing Italian Scotsman from Kurnell.”

Many stories today.

Logan (pictured foreground) appropriately bullish.
Logan (pictured foreground) appropriately bullish.

World Surf League CEO Erik Logan pledges to “help restart economic engine” severely damaged by Covid-19 by “bringing world’s best surfers to the North Shore!”

Chas Smith

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Powerful.

But oh drat, here we go again. The world ready to go back under lock and key as dreaded Covid-19 cases rage across the United States of America, Europe, Australia. The global economy losing the oxygen it so desperately needs to fire. Last lockdown, everyone except face mask makers lost their job and many business were forced to shutter.

People only fed, clothed, kept warm thanks to largess of government.

This coming lockdown, though, there is surprising new player ready to provide much needed stimulus.

Our World Surf League.

As you well know, the 2020/21 World Championship Tour sparks to life on Maui (on the women’s side) and Oahu’s North Shore (for the men). According to Hawaii News Now, spectators will not be allowed on the beach and the WSL will be broadcasting from private homes in order to have “no active presence at Pipeline and Sunset.”

Even still, World Surf League CEO Erik Logan is bullish about professional surfing’s impact, telling the CBS affiliate, “We feel really, really confident of leaning and help restart the economic engine by bringing the world’s best surfers to the North Shore.”

I don’t know what the leaning business is about but am very proud of our favorite pastime’s power.

Do you think that the world’s best surfers going to the North Shore will help restart Hawaii’s economy or the global economy?

I think maybe global since, again, the WSL will have “no active presence at Pipeline and Sunset” but also because I’m generally anti-depressive.

In any case, very exciting and inspirational. I hope that CEO Logan gets many calls from world leaders thanking him, and us by proxy, for our service.

Extremely cool.

Bills, fading skills that never were, overcrowded lineup of bobbing kooks… even the sand is coarser in my toes.

Quit-lit: “What does it mean when your life is a steady downward trajectory from the peak euphoria of your first wave? Even the sand is coarser between my toes”

Derek Hynd's Missing Fins

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"Barbarian fucking days indeed."

It’s like a View-Master toy from the 1970s. Maybe you remember ’em.

You insert stereoscopic 3-D pictures and advance with the lever. Your own little fantasy world that only you can see. Never mind that it’s mass produced and everyone else is looking at the same pictures, just from their point of view.

The initial joy of the contraption is captivating, but after the third cycle through you realize it’s the same shit, and it’s not getting better.

Has BG become a View-Master in this COVID-shark-quit-lit Elo-and-Slater-stalking-MAGA idiocy in the comments takeover year of 2020?

Is BG a microcosm of the macrocosm of surfing-while-aging? An ouroboros, where to progress we need to eat our own tail, wallow in our own repetitive shit?

Have we reached the point where we realize it’s not getting better, despite efforts of LongTom and Chazz and Surfads to nudge us to hit the browser refresh lever for another peek we hope will be more entertaining than the last time?

Or is this allegorical musing a reflection on my own surfing, or more accurately, recent lack of?

Maybe it was the excess testosterone or the naïve belief of youth that all your dreams will come true and everything you talk about until midnight actually means something.

Is Searching for Tom Curren better than Kelly Slater in Black and White?

What’s the best surf spot on the East Coast?

Will you ever longboard as an old man so you can at least stay in the water?

How much money do we need for an endless around the world surf trip before we get real jobs, and where will we go?

Etc. etc. etc.

Those questions and dreams lost in the dustbin of the past, ground to find granules on the floor of my life where they join with those long-lost feelings from when I used to walk into a surf shop to smell the wax and get the latest copy of Surfer magazine.

Shit, those boardroom kooks even took that nominal pleasure from us this year.

Repetition… the story of this, my so-called surfing life. Barbarian fucking days indeed.

The same shit waves.

This, despite the collective local delusion that they are worth surfing, as seen in the locally produced “I (heart) small waves” bumper sticker. Fucking idiots. They’re small shit waves. Wishful thinking via bumper sticker doesn’t make them worth more, or you a better surfer by grovelling on them.

The same grovelling for thirty years.

What does an overhead wall even look like? I’ve been trying to find out for years via surf porn. Now with GoPro we losers can see even more clearly what we’ll never experience. Koa Rothman has perfect abs, a perfect mole, perfect eyebrows, all the free açai he wants, and in one day surfing Rockies will get more ocean juice and tube time than I’ve gotten combined in thirty years of ocean time.

Who wants to see a vlog of my surf life?

The same piddly dribbles…  same pulling on the wetsuit for the fifty-degree winter plunge…  same shredder who somehow is pulling all the modern tricks on these shit waves as he’s aged, when I’ve regressed to barely being able to stand up on time before the dribble passes me by.

Except now I have a wife who begrudges me even the one hour every two months I do get in this same sloppy shit.

And while some deal with mid-life crises by buying the convertible Corvette or doing the dream trip to the Mentawis or dropping $1,200 for a new custom shape from their dream shaper, my mid-life crisis is trying not to step on Lego pieces in the middle of the night as I sneak out of bed to rub one out.

I haven’t bought a new board in twenty years or been on a dream trip in as long.

Bills, fading skills that never were, overcrowded lineup of bobbing kooks… even the sand is coarser in my toes.

What does it mean when our whole surf life is a steady downward trajectory from the peak euphoria of our first ever wave, through bills, jobs, aging, more people in the lineup, stagnant skill level, down the slope to the putrid chasm of lost regrets for what could have been: if only… if only the waves were four-feet bigger. If only the wind were offshore.

If only I had a job in Hawaii.

If only I could have more money to travel.

If only there weren’t so many Germans in the lineup when I finally travel.

The worst thing about it all is that I see where this nihilism all ends and it terrifies me.

Or would, if I weren’t a budding nihilist. The not caring, the endless snark, the being ok with missing a chest high two-hour swell when back in the day I’d have been pissed for three weeks and would have rewaxed my board as a promise to myself to not miss the next one.

I see where it ends, on this path of nihilism.

And it’s this end game, this telos, the realization of who I’ll become if I don’t snap out of it that is the mantra I have to repeat, to somehow escape the quit lit era of our times:

“Whatever else I do and no matter how bad it gets, don’t become Ben Marcus.”

Gimme some o dat secret sauce.
Gimme some o dat secret sauce.

Researchers declare: “More Great White Sharks in California waters than anytime in history and people may be on secret menu!”

Chas Smith

By

Animal style.

And oh bother. Sharks. Am I right? But this is the time of year, usually, when Californians wipe their brows and bid adieu to our Great White population as they head for warmer Mexican waters to winter properly. 2020 though, and there have never been more apex predators sticking around California.

Chris Lowe, the director of the shark lab at California State University, Long Beach, has tagged a record 38 sharks which already triples the number that were tagged last year.

He says, “Normally they’d be leaving by now, but instead we are seeing more sharks than ever.”

David Ebert, who directs the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, agrees with Lowe’s assessment.

He says, “There are so many people in the water: you have paddleboards, kayaks, wetsuits, but the number of attacks hasn’t really changed. That tells you that people are not on the menu, they’re not out here hunting people.”

Which makes me very scared for everyone knows that the epicureanly most adventurous rarely order off the menu but force kitchen staff to innovate, to experiment, to push the very bar.

Like, when I go to In-n-Out hamburgers, for example, I never order a hamburger, cheeseburger or double-double, which are the only items on the menu.

No.

One time I ordered a five-by-five, five meats on top of five cheeses.

I often order “animal style,” grilled onions, secret sauce.

Stretching the chefs. Pushing them near their breaking point all for the sake of culinary excellence.

Are people “animal style” for Great Whites?

Many worries.

Photo: Jack English
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