Open Thread: Comment Live as the Maui Pro
presented by Roxy gets underway at beautiful Honolua Bay!
By Chas Smith
We're back!
I apologize for the slack in getting our Open
Thread up and running this morning. Hawaii time etc. But here we
are and with all the boys (Chris Cote etc.) and all the girls
(surfers, Rosie etc.) and it feels like everything is right, again,
in the world.
The waves look glassy and classy.
Who you got?
Tyler Wright apparently shone already but Steph coming up and
will likely shine more brightly.
Everything right including Tyler’s fabulous new singlet.
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Davy Jones's Locker hanging in the National Maritime
Museum.
Indian newspaper poetically describes
tragic episode: “Man meets watery grave while trying to rescue
drowning surfer daughter.”
By Chas Smith
Shakespearean.
The Indian subcontinent has so many joys,
almost too many joys, and is well worth a visit. The various
regional cuisines entice, architecture inspires, trains, hill
stations, hotels, drinking tea and shattering the cups on the
tracks so as not to inadvertently touch lips with an untouchable
all set the heart racing but one of the greatest pleasures is the
Indian use of English
The language is as much theirs as it is ours, as the English
first spread the tongue across the land in 1608, but they have done
better things with it.
Can we, as an example, read a passage from the New Indian
Express that details a tragic event of father drowning while
trying to save his surfer-daughter?
CHENNAI: A 51-year-old software engineer drowned in the sea
off Thiruvanmiyur while he was rescuing his daughter who was pulled
by a giant wave while practising surfing on Monday
morning.
The deceased was identified as Balaji, an employee of a
private software firm in Tidel Park and a resident of Vannandurai
in Besant Nagar.
According to police, the incident happened around 7 am at
Thiruvanmiyur beach.
Police said that Balaji accompanied his daughter Revathi,
11, a Class 6 student, to surf in the sea.
Quoting on the onlookers, police said that Revathi, who was
training with the surfboard, was suddenly sucked in by a giant
wave. A shocked Balaji entered into the sea to save his daughter.
He drowned as he was unable to swim in the rough sea.
Police said surfers usually do not practise in a rough sea,
but the duo reached Thiruvanmiyur claiming that the sea was
relatively calm there compared to Besant Nagar.
Extremely tragic but written better than anything in
Austro-American surf, save Longtom, in years and years. We other
continentals have dispensed with “watery graves” and “Davy Jones’s
Locker” and other pirate-adjacent words and have stumbled into pure
bore. Drowning, asphyxiated, etc. But we should reclaim the swagger
as we are closer to pirate heritage than any, save right-of-center
politicians.
Poetic.
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Seal-fattened shark bites Oregon surfer’s
leg in rare attack: “The incident serves as a valuable reminder to
never recreate alone, in or out of the water.”
By Chas Smith
Kafkaesque.
As you well know, I grew up surfing
central-southern Oregon’s icy cold water. The Pacific there teems
with life from crab to seal to the mighty Great White Shark
herself. Shark sightings were common in and around my hometown and
I swear I saw a massive silhouette, once, when I as out for a
paddle near the long rock jetty jutting out from Bastendorff
Beach.
Scary, though I always thought about my own spindly arms and
legs then looked at the many seals swimming by, luscious and fat,
and thought the shark would know better.
Well, apparently the beasts have developed a taste for spindle
for last evening a surfer was tasted in Seaside, there in the very
north.
The man, who was riding a fine Super Brand board, sustained
non-life threatening injuries to his leg and was helped by fellow
surfers and an off-duty lifeguard who fashioned a field tourniquet
to stop the bleeding. The man was then transported to a local
hospital for further evaluation.
The fire department said, “The incident serves as a valuable
reminder to never recreate alone, in or out of the water. The fast
response of fellow surfers was instrumental in providing aid to the
victim.”
Very confusing advice in our Covid days when, I thought, we were
supposed to recreate alone. Kafkaesque, I suppose.
In any case, I wonder if this expanded palate, amongst sharks,
will hold or if human leg will simply be a trend. Like cronuts.
Did you ever have a cronut? I did and an original one too from
the bakery that invented in New York City.
I was underwhelmed.
Updated: Super Brand has offered to give the Oregon hero a free
board. If one of you know him, please pass along this turn of good
luck.
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A still from Great White, a horror thriller released
2021.
Survival of Surfer attacked by Great White
shark off Kangaroo Island “remarkable” says first-responder;
injuries “catastrophic”; surfer describes feeling as like “being
hit by a truck!”
By Derek Rielly
"It's amazing what people can do."
The twenty-nine-year-old man hit by a Great White off
Kangaroo Island yesterday yesterday has written an account of
the attack from his hospital bed.
In a handwritten statement dictated to his partner the
still-unnamed man wrote,
It was a normal day’s surfing at
D’Estrees Bay.
I was sitting on my board when I
felt a hit on my left side – it was like being hit by a
truck.
It bit me around my back, buttock
and elbow & took a chunk out of my board. I got a glimpse of the
shark as it leg to & disappeared. I still had hold of my board and
paddled into the beach.
I walked up to the car park and yelled out to another surfer
who was about to go in. He drove me to Kingscote & we were met
halfway by the ambulance.
I want to thank all those involved in getting me to hospital
the awesome emergency services & medical staff & my family &
friends for all their love & support.
I’m feeling incredibly lucky & grateful & I’m optimistic
I’ll make a full recovery.
King Island paramedic Michael Rushby, who treated the man
and who described the injuries as “catastrophic”, said the surfer
was lucky to be alive.
‘With the extent of his injuries, this was quite remarkable and
very lucky that he was able to do that. It’s amazing what people
can do,” Rushby told the Murdoch press, adding these sorts of
events are “once-in-a-career jobs… it hasn’t fully sunk in what we
experienced yesterday.”
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Give the gift of radical Islamic terrorism
this beautiful Covid-19 holiday season: “On the way home from
Somalia, just post 9/11, I rode an airplane with four 7-foot-tall
Taliban!”
By Chas Smith
Merry everything!
California will be shut down, entirely, by
midnight tonight. No more pumping iron in the gym. No more getting
super fit in the gym. But do you remember a simpler time, when the
only terror that haunted our dreams was radical Islamic terrorism?
A utopian bliss, in comparison and, as it happens, I wrote a book
about that joy which you should gift
friends and family.
Of course, when a book is being written much ends up on the
floor. Like this passage right here.
On the way home from Somalia, a handful of years ago, I rode
a weird transport airplane with four with 7-foot-tall Taliban. I
can’t imagine they were up to any good in Somalia and their faces
were etched into furious scowls beneath their black turbans, in the
middle of their wildly bushy beards. I decided to sit next to them
so at least I’d be the first to know when the hijacking was
occurring. I mumbled something in the little Pashtu I knew and the
7-footer sitting next to me broke into a smile. We chatted in
Arabic for the duration of the flight to Dubai. He leaned in
heavily on me, insisting God was one and that I must recognize. I
told him I agreed, and that Jesus was God was the Holy Spirit.
Three in one. Weird but true. Absolute blasphemy to any Muslim and
his frown returned. We went back and forth, he tried to trick me
into saying the Hadith and converting to Islam, I told him I
couldn’t. I was a believer too. At the end he capitulated and
patted me on the shoulder with a giant, muscled paw and said, “You
and I, we are people of the book.”
But you are a person of the book too, even if that book is the
World Surf League Rule Book.
Pipeline is tomorrow-adjacent. Join the Surfvival League
here before it’s too late. You can win $1000 and a
Panda surfboard.