Simplified Fantasy Surfer. No points. No tiers. No budgets.

It’s been a rocky start to the inaugural Surfival Season. 

We opened for trading on March 12, 2020.

The next day the rug was pulled on the opening event at Snapper Rocks, and the Surfival League sat dormant until December’s Pipeline Contest.

You remember the game?

Simplified Fantasy.

No points.
No tiers.
No budgets.

THE RULES:

1. Pick one surfer each event.
2. Surfer must advance past The Round of 32.
3. You can’t pick same surfer twice.
4. Winner takes $1,000 and a custom-shaped Panda Surfboard.

Real easy.

Pipeline was the first event of the Surfival Season. We lost 23% of the League due mostly to early exits by Seth Moniz, Julian Wilson, and Kolohe Andino.

Will The Surfival Gods play nice at Newcastle or are we in for another bloodbath!?

Here are the Top 5 Surfival Picks for Newcastle by Percentage.

Italo Ferreira – 21%
Ryan Callinan – 20%
Kanoa Igarashi – 15%
Julian Wilson – 11%
Filipe Toledo – 9%

Chas is riding with Caio, who has 1% of the picks. Who you got?

See you in the comment section.

PS: If you missed the signups for the 2021 Season (or lost at Pipeline) were opening up a Losers Pool for the back half of the season.  Stay tuned.

Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy one of the world's great beach houses… 

The eighty-year-old inventor of the sheepskin Ugg boot, Shane Stedman, has listed his iconic Mona Vale beach house with a sale price north of four-and-a-half mill.

Readers, I ain’t never been in a house with such a benevolent ambience, a lovingly rebuilt wooden house from the thirties, squatting at the end of a cul-de-sac with elevated views of the surf that will never disappear.

Five beds, three bathrooms, almost seven thousand square feet of dirt. 

His son, Luke, a former world number eleven whom we visited a few days ago, occupied a studio at the bottom of the house, a private dwelling where the lanky Lothario was able to exercise his formidable swordsmanship.

And all under an hour’s drive from the guts of Australia’s biggest city.

Examine the house here.

Stedman, whose real first name is Anthony but who changed it after watching the 1953 western Shane, plans to use the cash to build a multi-generational compound at Tintenbar, just behind Lennox Head and only a short drive to the thirty-million dollar home of Chris Hemsworth.

“Buying some land, throwing a couple of shacks on it and moving dad up the coast so he can watch the grandkids and we can keep an eye on the old grommet,” Luke told BeachGrit.

A house at Crescent Head, near Vaughan Blakey’s Medellín-style spread, which Shane has spent years and gallons of sweat building, will be available for holiday rentals.

Come and rejoin Ronnie Blakey and Joe Turpel and co… 

After all the drama, the tinsel dreams, the highest-rung of pro surfing returns today to Merewether, a pretty suburb of Newcastle and home to four-time world champion Mark Richards, as well as Craig Anderson, Ryan Callinan and Matt Hoy.

The waves?

Surfline’s interpretation of wave size is very different to mine, five-to-eight, to me, would be roiling lines of swell, but there’s a little something for the pro surfer’s great skills to be exercised upon.

John John, the world number one, appears in heat three.

Watch here 

And,

Discuss below the line, with Longtom’s analysis to follow at the close of play.