Italians will recover. Sport surfing may not.
Italy is playing England today for the Euro Cup soccer finals and I only really know this because I am in Rome headed to Naples via train.
A sailboat is waiting for me there but more on that later.
Soccer.
The Italians don’t seem as excited as they should be. A few roving bands of youths in blue shirts half-heartedly talking with their hands but not much more. No flags flying from balconies. No morning drinking and cheering, crowding around television sets dialed to the very latest analysis.
Maybe global warming’s fault?
It is sweltering, already, at 10:00 am and set to hit triple digits later. Much cooler than Salem, Oregon but hot nonetheless.
Maybe Covid’s?
People forgetting how to celebrate together?
Forgetting how to maraud?
I was in France then Germany at the very beginning of the pandemic, surfing the apocalypse with my young daughter. There was a wild sizzle in the spring air then. No one knew what was going to happen. Empty palaces and restaurants and zoos. Closures and lockdowns and sweeping governmental decrees felt new.
Now, it all feels normal but still. No wild soccer scenes on the streets of a soccer wild country.
Is sport dead?
Right ahead of surfing’s grand Olympic coming out?
What a disaster for our beloved pastime, if true, to have pivoted hard sport at the dawn of the World Surf League era what with NFL Paul Speakers and tennis Soph Goldchmidts and Oprah Erik Logans pushing pushing pushing for respect, sporting respect, when the greatest thing going is…. soul.
Not soul, sorry that’s the jet lag typing, but whatever is not sport or, rather, not serious sport.
I love competitive surfing, don’t get me wrong, but serious sport surfing is sadder than Italians not knowing how to celebrate soccer superiority and that’s pretty sad.
Or maybe not.
Italians will recover. Sport surfing may not.
How does that make you feel?
I’m going to ruminate more once I’m on boat.
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By the way, why is no one reporting on what’s happening in South Africa right now?
They’re trashing the place, big time, but it’s really not in the news.
Not front and center, anyway.
I wasn’t entering this boat, though it sails really cleanly in strong conditions and was made for strong South Pacific weather.
I had applied to crew on an 85 footer in the Sydney to Hobart but someone else got the position.
Then some people died that year from some other yachts, gnarly as fuck…
Great to see photos of her though, makes me wanna get another similar but bigger haha
Yeah that’s her
Solid as all heck
Guessing you learned the n word in Italian after the pks
And its all happening at the same time as BG’s Aichmophobic quack down under, Derek ‘toothy/goofy smile’ Rielly, takes us down his rabbit hole of redneck ignorance to expose the lowbrow trajectory BG is taking to keep us clicking on the bait. Sad times indeed.
You’ve made a passing comment while passing on a train. I can assure you that in most of Italy folk were going mental last night, and quite right too.
Thankyou Italy.
Get fucked England.
Ok, so Mads plays Chas in this telenovela…. Who plays us!? We (The People ™️) are definitely NOT the minions in sailor hats!!
I’ll be played by Brian Baumgartner thanks.
Kinda
So in trying to find a shot of something more similar I found a shot on google I thought looked like her.
On following the link I found it actually IS her.
So, google “Waitemata woodies”, then click their search panel and put in Leisure Hour and voila, scroll down and there’s a whole heap of different shots from different angles and ages of her.
Haha awesome, I wouldn’t have seen it myself if ya hadn’t asked, classic.
None are my shots.
Looks like the Oregon has gone back to oiled, put a wheel on instead of the original tiller, added a duck board, painted the pop top white and was last sold for my original cost (a third of what it cost me to buy and refurb).
Proof those old girls just suck the cash out of ya haha
If ya keep clicking any of the blue names of Leisure Hour it takes ya to about a dozen or so more shots.
Great stuff.
Some of the information and names, years etc since 1980 is crap though.
I’ll have to get onto the site and set them right…
“on the boat.”
A bit like being “on the wagon” but with friends
What kind of boat did your wife buy you @Chas ?
No I mean, we were up to our necks in Frascati wine.
It was a novelty jacuzzi experience.
Soccer fans got to drink it afterwards to celebrate a win.
It’s not coming home.
Donnarumma was a beast !
Meanwhile the pommies can suck it and suffer as the tabloids will skewer all of them.
They’re good at suffering.
England shat their own bed. No offensive flow. Sterling played like a petulant child. Their D and keeper made it respectable or would have been 3 to 1. Best team won. Italy could have a good world cup run.
No offense, but your football analysis is very American.
Good football knows no nationality. England did not play good football and Italy did.
Suffer in the jacuzzi with their page 3 muff
Page 3 is the best page in the paper. The rest is rubbish.
Yeah, got a box with some old shots somewhere.
After moving a few times since then all my photos from my whole life are temporarily lost. Could be under a family house or in a shed on my farm. Not sure. Not a quick find though.
Anyway, I stripped her back to bare timbers and have shots of the whole process. As an example, the Oregon pine masts and bowsprit had been black from a lifetime of sunburnt oil coats and ended up gleaming like gold in the sun after I’d finished with them, for instance. A thing of real beauty. I really wanted to keep her but was just a continuous job and cost a fortune too. Meanwhile I had surfing to do, land to develop, a daughter to invest for and an income to make to pay for the whole shebang.
I ended up without a wife, put it that way.
One day though I’ll get another like her, such a smooth sailing solid heavy old girl who enjoyed a strong wind. The yacht, not the wife, that is, haar haar…
True, but when you’re young and foolish it’s a lot of fun. It was to me anyway, haar haar..
I actually haven’t been sailing since I sold Leisure Hour about 12 years ago.
I actually like a bit of rough weather sailing, having been brought up in a boating family, and had my own 32′ solid Carvell planked ketch called ‘Leisure Hour’ that’d been built in 1934 and that I spent 2 yrs (almost full-time) restoring in the late ’90’s.
A boat which incidentally was one of the first private small yachts built (is featured in a couple of books about such historical things) to sail from NZ to the Chatham Islands, Pacific Islands and Australia in the olden days. And was actually embroiled in a smuggling debacle years before I had her.
Nothing quite like a high speed broadreach to get the blood pumping.
It’s when ya doing that through a shipping channel at night with the gunwhale awash that I start getting a bit nervous.
Sailing slowly with a level deck bores me to tears and drives me to drink more, than usual, haar haar…
You probably would have liked that Sydney to Hobart race where half the boats got disabled and broke their masts that one year.
Funny you mention that.
I’d actually put my name forward as crew the year (the boat I would’ve been on made it safely to port) that 7 people perished, bless their souls.
I got passed over for someone else, but I never applied again…
I’ll Take getting caught inside at Mavericks any day of the week over being hundreds of miles away from any land like that.
Yeah dying on a lonely unforgiving sea ain’t my idea of fun either, gives me the shivers now just thinking about it.
As the old saying goes when someone’s having a rough time of things in life, “worse things happen at sea y’know”…
BBBQ. Father manning the grill.
3 things that are shit:
– soccer
– yachts
– this “article”
I’d bet all the limoncello in Sorrento that Argentina or Brazil, last night’s Copa America finals’ teams, enjoyed cocaine last night
Before drinking age for me.
No such thing when you’re at sea (or a pirate) haar haar
That looks to be a modern day take on the Flaming Rooster.
First witnessed by myself in nz 1976.
I’m unsure of it’s origin, I’d never seen anything like it. A naked man sprinting through a party with his arse on fire. It was fantastic !
Yes, many surfers were at that do. The sprinter was not a surfer tho …. But wildly cheered on.
Not dissimilar to the ‘Dance of the Flaming Arseholes’, which may have been done by an Australian surfer called Rooster (or one of his friends), that was laughed about during many an afternoon booze up in a certain notorious NZ surfboard factory in the days of old.
I shall check the sauce, with my secret source and get back later.
Watch this space (or whatever the term Chas uses is)…