Blood Feud: Gold Coast photographer squares up to local surfing legend after Kirra imbroglio!

"KARMA got you and you totally deserved it…"

Kirra Point, once the greatest wave in the world but now languishing in the lower teens after losing its sand to Snapper Rocks a couple of decades back, turned on its best waves since 1994 yesterday.

Lucky Gold Coast surfers, of which there are many, thrilled to four-to-six feet of east swell, Kirra organising the lines into these wonderful green funnels.

And Mitch Parkinson, cuz to Joel, son of hotshot eighties shredder Darryl, star of BeachGrit’s surfboard test series, rode the wave of the day, a tube filmmaker Justin Gane said had the potential to be one of the greatest rides ever ridden at Kirra – at least twenty-five seconds in the hole.

Of course, as vision shows, Mitch’s adventure was abbreviated when a man fell out of the air and into Mitch’s trajectory. Opinion was unanimous online, the drop-in a piece of cutthroat savagery etc.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNW7fChjq-l/

Now, photographer Aaron Pierce has squared up to Mitch by claiming the act was karmic rebuttal.

Mitch getting drooped in on is KARMA as he himself dropped in on a guy about to get barrelled at the start of the wave before all the videos show! Even worse is a few frames before the shot above I zoomed in and Mitch is looking straight at the poor guy so he did see him, that’s poor sportsmanship and feckn selfish. Sure Mitch’s barrel was impressive and the other guy shouldn’t have dropped in on him as there was probably another 5 seconds at least left in that barrel but it wasn’t Mitch’s wave to have. I have a policy no matter who it is if someone drops in their photos of them getting barrelled will never see the light of day and most likely get deleted, it’s unfortunate as there’s some cracking shots especially a few frames after the shot above is such a heavy line up shot with Mitch pulling in. Too much of this is going on and surfers need to sort this out somehow but how can it be sorted when surfers like Mitch that kids look up to keep doing it and getting away with it, this time though KARMA got you and you totally deserved it, it’s not as though there’s no waves after this one!
.
And the way that guy was surfing he would’ve had a good chance making those barrels too, Mitch stole possibly the best wave of his life off him!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNYDwGenSY5/

When I call Mitch, who is twenty-five, he is watching Kirra from his car alongside girlfriend Bonnie-Lou Coffey, the youngest sister in the four-pack of girls and one boy.

Mitch says he has no idea who the photographer is and dismisses Pierce as “another keyboard warrior.”

Did you look at man inside tube, destined for greatness, perhaps, and take-off regardless?

“Did I see him? Yeah, he was way too deep. He was on a seven-foot board and old mate didn’t have buckleys of making it. He didn’t make it around the first section and he straightened out.”

Mitch says the wave was the best wave he’s ever had at Kirra, “one of those proper long, crazy lines. I’ll probably have to wait another ten years for one of those.”

To the drop-in that ended his ride, Mitch says he was screaming at the interloper while in the tube and that “it was such a fucking good wave. It was heartbreaking for me to watch the clip after.”

The man, he says, was apologetic, knew he’d fucked up.

“He was back-pedalling as soon as he came up, saying, ‘I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!’ I was still stoked to make it as far as I did, I wasn’t all that angry. I was kinda just shocked that I made it out next to him. I told him to fuck off and that was it. I almost felt bad for being angry at him, he was so rattled.”

Did he hunt man down, beat hell out of?

“It’s all good, fuck, life goes on,” he says.