The developer "used the ‘Surf Ranch’ as the ‘hook’ when it is in fact a Trojan Horse for intensive urban sprawl onto the critically important Maroochy River floodplain."

The developer behind the WSL’s billion-dollar pool and residential play on 1200 acres near the Queensland beach town of Coolum, featuring a Surf Ranch, a six-star “eco resort”, a 20,000 person stadium and 1500 homes, says the Woz will move the project to the Gold Coast unless state government red tape is slashed.

“The World Surf League that owns the Kelly Slater Wave Co system is understandably pretty frustrated by the process,” developer Don O’Rorke, chairman of Consolidated Properties which owns the land, told the Courier Mail. “It’s a significant tourist attraction, it’d be a shame if it went to the Gold Coast and that is an imminent possibility… There’s a dire shortage of residential options on the Sunshine Coast, a big need for hotel rooms and big need for employment land.”

The pool and real estate play has been kicking around the halls of power for three years, and has met with some pretty stiff push-back from local residents and environmental groups.

Spokesperson for the non-profit Sunshine Coast Environment Council (SCEC), Narelle McCarthy, whose group’s protest signs were mysteriously stolen says “Both O’Rorke and (the WSL’s Andrew) Stark have unashamedly used the ‘Surf Ranch’ as the ‘hook’ when it is in fact a Trojan Horse for intensive urban sprawl onto the critically important Maroochy River floodplain and conflicts with numerous and long-standing statutory planning instruments and intent.”

O’Rorke will meet with six reps from different community groups, including the SCEC on May 31, see if maybe they’ll ease back a little and let ‘em get the development through.

Might be tough going for O’Rorke, who “donated the land and a half-a-million dollars for the Hurley HPC and was subsequently made a life member of Surfing Australia.”

“Our position has not changed,” said Melva Hobson, from OSCAR, the Organisation Sunshine Coast Association of Residents.

“We are still opposed to the proposal. The area involved is part of the Maroochy River flood plain and does what a flood plain should do.”

In a series of stories that followed the project, the dearly missed Steve “Longtom” Shearer walked the site.

The developer’s eye eludes me. I see trees and bush. Birds, insects, frogs. I feel sad that surfers will be the ones behind the bull-dozers, erasing this wildlife, this bush from history.

From what I can see though, although there is ambivalence, distrust and even hostility to the Coolum wave pool development, that is unlikely to stop the bulldozers.

The greenwashing on the project will be immense. Next level.

But I wonder, when Kelly thinks about what is being done in his name and looks in the mirror, does he still see an environmentalist looking back at him?

Zen.

Days ago it was revealed, here, that a new record for the “biggest wave ever ridden” had become official. Sebastian Steudtner had surfed the Nazare beast eighteen-months earlier but it took a crack scientific team to discover a new way of measuring, one that could never be fooled. In a rare moment of genius, they stumbled upon a tool hiding in plain sight, the German male’s lower leg, et voila.

History will never be the same.

Well, as luck would have it, one of surf history’s most stylish creatures, Gerry Lopez, just happened to serve up a delightful interview to Forbes magazine on the heels of this accomplishment. Jim Clash was, ostensibly, speaking to Lopez about the upcoming film The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez, which will be released later this summer, when talk turned to monster waves.

Clash: I’ve seen amazing photos of guys surfing behemoths off of Nazare, Portugal. Sebastian Steudtner surfed one there that was 86-feet tall in 2020, a supposed world record.

Lopez: Nazare certainly has the look of the biggest wave faces in the world. Every year, you see new pictures of guys in the waves, and it looks like they are shrinking because the waves are so enormous. I often wonder, “Has this been photoshopped?” But they’re getting so much better at it, developing the equipment and skills, so that they just keep going. A wave comes along, and sometimes it’s a big one. If the guy is right there in line, he’s going to go for it. If he doesn’t, everybody will tease him, and he’s probably going to regret it.

Clash: Is it possible to surf a 100-foot wave?

Lopez: Certainly. You just have to have big balls [laughs]. It probably already has been done. It’s just that nobody has acknowledged it yet.

Such beautiful shade. More delicious than anything backhanded compliment master Kelly Slater could dish. But do you think it has been done? The 100-foot ride? When it is, finally, done will everyone think it was done a long time ago and be all “that’s sooooo 2019.”?

Hopefully not.

Hopefully everyone will be more self aware and praise appropriately.

"Filipe Toledo’s all-black Sharp Eye quad looked like a panther sprinting through a gallery of Diebenkorn landscapes while listening to Charli XCX’s Pink Diamond."

I cut way back on the screentime after posting that Make or Break rave last month, and not until yesterday did I get around to the season finale, which of course takes place at Lowers and ends with Carissa Moore and Gabriel Medina crowned as 2021 WCT world champs. 

I remain a Make or Break fan.

But the show did not, for me anyway, build or improve on the first two episodes—in fact it seemed less sure of itself as it went. 

The clichés started creeping in. The WSL’s Wall of Positive Noise was, if not resurrected, no longer under siege. Filipe Toledo’s title-snatching aversion to heavy waves is mentioned but not examined. 

The Surf Ranch Pro—despised by WCT fans and pros alike, but a golden invitation to a talk about the promise and existential dread of wavepools—is offered as just another tour stop.

None of the surfers in episodes two through seven, which the exception of Medina, are anywhere near as interesting as Tyler Wright was in episode one. Ditto for the contests themselves—as you’d expect, since the CT now begins at Pipeline, which is a dumb move by the WSL, but that’s a topic for another day.

I think the Make or Break creatives will fall back and make improvements, and I’m very much looking forward to Season Two. But I’ve adjusted my Season One score from a low 9 to a high 7.

All that said, two things in the Make or Break season finale stood out. 

First, the waves at Lowers looked so much better than I recall from watching the live stream. Bigger and smoother and 100% fair, in that everybody got a fair shot, nobody was screwed by the conditions. I still believe Finals Day deserves a better venue than Trestles—but Trestles, last year, did its part.

Second, Filipe Toledo’s all-black Sharp Eye quad, even while just resting in the sand, looked like a panther sprinting through a gallery of Diebenkorn landscapes while listening to Charli XCX’s “Pink Diamond.”

Stylish, fast, and bold. Five pounds of bespoke flat-black confidence.

Black is, of course, an aggressively impractical color for a surfboard. Or it was, anyway. Two minutes in the summer sun and you’ve got melted wax all over the car upholstery, towel, boardbag. Another hour, if it’s hot enough, and the glass will bubble off the foam like cheese on a skillet, and if somebody out there tells me an overheated PU board will eventually spontaneously combust and leave nothing but a crater I will not be surprised.

Carbon-wrapped EPS-core surfboards not only solved the bubble problem, but the boards are light, strong, and whip-fast. Plus they look like a million bucks compressed into a flying dagger. 

Most black boards are made at Dark Arts in San Diego, which I was expecting to be huge and high tech, but looks instead like the same three guys from every hardcore board factory between here and Dale Velzy’s garage. Owner Justin Ternes admits that the company can “add colors to the boards, to reduce sun exposure,” but then states the obvious: “I recommend staying black; black is best.”

Red used to be the best. 

Board-fashion-wise, what Filipe is doing today with black—and not just Filipe, but John Florence, Tatiana Weston-Webb, and Kanoa Igarashi, among others—is what other great statement-making surfers have traditionally done with red. 

Barry Kanaiaupuni and Tiger Espere on the North Shore in 1969. Dewey Weber at Hermosa. And maybe reddest of all—Laura Blears and her 1975 Playboy Lightning Bolt.

(Editor’s caution, link contains nudity and bush.)

My new favorite red-board surfer is Joseph “Scooter Boy” Kaopuiki, who lit up Waikiki in the 1940s and ’50s on an 11-foot-long fire-engine red hollow board, which he rode like a Benzedrine-huffing finalist in the Savoy Ballroom lindy hop dance-off. Grady Timmons, in his essential book Waikiki Beachboy, said this about Kaopuiki:

Most beachboys were not big-wave riders. They were exhibitionists, their giant surfboards their stage. It was far more common to see a beachboy on a small wave, riding in while standing on his head, or carrying a woman in his arms, much as he might carry her across a threshold. The old-style surfboards were well suited for such antics. They were as big as beds—at least ten feet in length—[and] a surfer could improvise endlessly. Few were better than Scooter Boy Kaopuiki.

When beachboys talk about Scooter Boy, they have trouble finding words to describe him adequately. Coming up short in mid-sentence, they will suddenly jump on a picnic table or begin running up and down their living-room floor, demonstrating how Scooter Boy rode a hollow board. “Scooter Boy had that board flying all over the wave,” said Buffalo Keaulana. “He would run to the front, jump up in the air, and land on the nose, kicking the water from the nose so that the board would spin right around.”

Scooter Boy, a fireman by trade in addition to working as a beachboy, was small and ripped—he boxed as a welterweight and was said to be the best broken-field runner in Hawaii’s wildly popular Barefoot Football League. 

He was also stubborn. In the mid-’50s, years after board styles had moved on, Kaopuiki was the only person in the Makaha International Surfing Championships riding a hollow board; the same one he’d had for years.

Incredibly, given his foot speed and gyroscopic balance, Kaopuiki—who just three months earlier had taken up hang gliding with his wife—died in 1985 after slipping from a bridge during a hike. He was 74. 

A flotilla of canoes took Kaopuiki’s ashes through the Waikiki surf where he’d kicked up his heels years earlier, red trunks matching his red board, and put him to rest just beyond the lineup.

(You like this? Matt Warshaw delivers a surf essay every Sunday, PST. All of ’em a pleasure to read. Maybe time to subscribe to Warshaw’s Encyclopedia of Surfing, yeah? Three bucks a month.)

Plus Karl Von Fanningstadt.

There are times, in all our lives, when important questions must fall. Like what then should happen to professional longboarding? And wherefore art thou Jonah Hill? And Kelly Slater? We must take them and roll them around our mouths while sucking, seriously, in order to find true meaning, subtle nuance n shit.

With this in mind, and heart, which surf journalist has undertaken the tried and true format of “Power Rankings” and soared above contemporaries?

Oh we’ve, each of us, have feasted upon Power Rankings for a decade plus. We’ve laughed, winced, nodded while thinking “too true.”

Have you watched Ricky Gervais’ latest comedy special on Netflix?

Or read Karl Von Fanningstadt’s most recent breakdown of our heroes and heroines?

But who has done it best?

Moststest?

Off the top of my head, I can recall our Derek Rielly, Matt Warshaw, Sean Doherty, Lewis Samuels, the aforementioned KVF and many I’m forgetting taking pen to ego but which has soared above the field?

Who should be considered the best Power Ranker of all-time?

It’s your turn.

In order, please.