Listen: Chas Smith and Steve “Longtom” Shearer on why the slow death of the WSL doesn’t mean the end of the great game, “Pro surfing is both an unflushable turd and a dream too beautiful to die!”

"It will always float to the top of the bowl."

In this episode of Dirty Water, number forty, we find Steve “Longtom” Shearer in terrific form.

Shearer, who wears out his brain thinking, takes the listener back onto the WSL tour, remembers an “epic” Pipe contest and the absurdity of a world title contender, suddenly fat, who didn’t want to be there.

As Shearer wrote at the time,

“It was hard to watch Filipe Toledo in the first heat of the round of 32, for example, without feeling a real sense of pity.

“Seven waves ridden in 40 minutes, nothing close to clean make. Pip got boofed in the head by the lip, Pip out ran the toob– once, twice, three times, Pip went straight to the beach. There was talk in the booth all day about spiritual connections and the mental health benefits of the ocean and here was a guy, clearly unprepared on every level, melting down in front of our eyes. It was actually a relief when it was done.

“Where too for Pip? Isn’t there some sort of God who can help him?”

Today, Shearer describes Pip’s surfing as “performative non-makes… he isn’t even making progress. He’s going backwards.”

Chas Smith, who shares with Shearer his guts and flexibility of thought, calls in briefly from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and casts a wicked eye over Mikey Wright’s front-page heroics during a recent Hawaiian rescue.

The episode concludes with a vivid account of goat castration and Shearer’s subsequent epiphany regarding testosterone.

Listen, or not.