"Very unfortunate news."

World number two Caroline Marks has told fans she ain’t gonna be on the bird to Sydney tonight after testing positive for COVID-19, a gritty lil disease that has otherwise shut down international travel and torn hell out of ol peoples’ withered air bags.

Taking to Instagram, Marks, who is nineteen and was 2018’s rookie of the year, told her 179,000 fans,

“Some very unfortunate news, I tested positive for Covid-19. I will not be making the charter flight to Austrailia tonight. I am following all the Covid protocols and do expect to be competing when I’m cleared. I want to wish all the WSL competitors and staff a safe flight. I’ll Keep everyone posted.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CMGE6ROg1VC/

It ain’t a tour without the best of the title contenders and Marks, at forefront of an advancing army of wild talents that’ll clean out the existing roster, is still a favourite to win the crown, the addition of events at Teahupoo and Pipeline considered to her advantage.

As Longtom wrote eight months ago when the tour changes were announced, “The gals are back in Teahupoo. A brave, bold move. Which will likely deliver copious laydays, zero-point heat totals and a Caroline Marks dynasty into the forseeable future.”

Various world champions, including Stephanie Gilmore, Mick Fanning, Lisa Andersen  and Italo Ferriera all posted kind words in the comment pane.

“That sucks. Chin up. Get healthy and get over here!” wrote three-timer Mick.

"Affirming that I declared that surfing happened in China ‘Thousands of years before Polynesia’ is blatantly false and casts a bad light on my professionalism."

Three days ago, it was reported, here, that an Italian historian had made the stunning discovery that surfing began in China “thousands of years before Polynesia.”

Wrote Chas Smith,

Nicolla “Nik” Zanella stumbled on his discovery in 2006 while visiting a Buddhist temple in Kunming in the southern Yunnan province. There he saw a 19th century bas-relief depicting a group of arhats, or those who have reached Nirvana, out amongst the waves.

One, in particular, stood out.

“The guy was standing up, his pose was exactly what we teach – back foot flat, front foot at a 45-degree angle, looking 5m in front of the board. And his face – he looked stoked,” Zanella told the South China Morning Post.

It was so captivating that he climbed down 5000 years of Chinese literature, finding Song Dynasty poet Zhou Mi’s work on the way. Zanella translates, “Hundreds of brave watermen … with unfastened hair and tattoos, holding coloured flags, race to the water … they paddle towards the oncoming waves … then they leap up and perform a hundred manoeuvres without getting the tail of their flags even slightly wet. This is how they show off their skill. Hence the nobles reward them with silver prizes.”

In a lengthy email to BeachGrit, received today, Zanella has eviscerated Chas Smith, the celebrated and much loved author of best-selling books Welcome to Paradise Now Go To Hell, Cocaine and Surfing, a Sordid History of Surfing’s Greatest Love Affair and Reports From Hell.

Zanella writes,

“I felt sick, because sharks have been around for 400 million years and it’s only in the past 50 years that humans have been doing such a great job of getting rid of them."

Four days ago, a group of sports fishermen from the Port Hacking Game Fishing Club, competing in a contest off Cronulla in Sydney’s south, hooked an almost half-ton Tiger shark as big as their boat.

The men wrestled the fish for almost an hour before killing it and bringing it to shore for the obligatory victory photos. 

Tigers aren’t protected in NSW waters so a fisherman can do pretty much what he wants. 

Catch ‘em, drag ‘em board, belt ‘em over the head. Take selfies.

Death ain’t pretty, of course. 

And, ocean and wildlife lovers lit up, as you can imagine. 

“I had two reactions,” University of WA Professor Jessica Meeuwig, who is the director of the uni’s Centre for Marine Futures, told The West Live. “I felt sick, because sharks have been around for 400 million years and it’s only in the past 50 years that humans have been doing such a great job of getting rid of them. And the other thing is, I felt sad, because a lot of recreational fishers truly love the ocean and they love the wildlife that’s in the ocean, and they’re probably not aware that killing animals like that is basically ocean vandalism.”

Two years earlier, a ninety-pound eight year old boy from the same club spent an entire day reeling in a nine-hundred pound Tiger twenty miles off Bondi.

He that is without sin, of course, throw your rocks. 

Know, 

All those pretty little lambs, mewing like the babies they are, throats hacked open, roasted in ovens, presented as happy family meal; the calves torn from mammy at birth for veal, described as “the pale and tender meat of a very sick baby cow who was tortured to death.”

All the happy salmon and tuna we mow through, gasping on the decks of fishing boats or living miserable lives in filthy pens before getting the knife through the head.

The male chicks thrown into slicing machines, useless, mostly for any commercial purpose. 

And on and on.