Don't believe your eyes!

This morning if you were to take Surfline, the preeminent surf forecaster and official partner of the WSL, at their word you would’ve predicted the door on the Outerknown Tahiti Pro, which has been on standby for the last four days, would’ve have been flung open.

According to the official Surfline forecast, and as published by the WSL, today’s surf is “five-to-seven feet, offshore.” 

The #OuterknownTahitiPro is OFF for the day but there’s swell coming this week!
Next Call: 8:15 am TAHT@outerknown_live pic.twitter.com/zZriIqBAeX

— World Surf League (@wsl) August 14, 2022

If you’ve ever been to Teahupoo, you’l know that anything over four foot and the joint starts to light up, at least if the swell has a little west in it to kick the bowl into life. 

Five foot-plus polished by a light trade wind is the stuff of dreams, perfect, perhaps, to give the gals a taste of non-lethal Teahupoo

Yeah, wave size is a subjective thing, one man’s four foot is another man’s six, etc, but over the course of things we’re all roughly equal or within a twenty percent margin. 

Turn on Surfline’s cam at Teahupoo this morn and it’s two-foot, max.

Enough, barely, to propel an SUP or one of those fantastic pedalo devices that so thrilled spectators at Burleigh Heads last week. 

On Wednesday, Surfline  promises “ten-to-fifteen feet, offshore” which is, according to my accounting, one of those Code Reddish sorta swells, barely rideable monsters, wrangled by only a very few surfers such as Matahi Drollet and co.

Which raises the question, I think, what’s it gonna be when it hits?

Four foot? Six-foot?

Or something historic?

And, maybe most importantly, when are the gals gonna get a chance to shine?

“I’m not allowed to be in nature? In NATURE??”

Ain’t this a switcharoo. 

Surfers, long accustomed to being blackballed so swimmers can frolic unmolested and without fear of being decapitated during the hot summer months, watched, maybe a little confused, as a man was dragged off Rockaway Beach in cuffs for not surfing on Friday. 

Andres Velasquez, who is thirty-three, was having a little spritz in the warmish waters off the famous Queens neighbourhood when he heard a whistle and a phalanx of cops waiting for him on the sand. 

His crime?

Swimming in an area “designated solely for surfing and where swimming is always prohibited” and swimming after six pm.

A video posted by the New York Times finds the man shrieking, “I’m not allowed to be in nature? In NATURE??”

“Yessir,” chime the cops or New York City Parks Department patrol officers, if you wanna be precise. 

“Dude, I have friends that surf? It makes no sense,” says Velasquez. 

“Where’s your surfboard?” asks cop, wearing a fluoro snoot. 

“At the beach house!” 

“You should’ve brought your surfboard…” 

One of the chief lifeguards at the beach Janet Fash said the arrest was “kind of outrageous.” 

“I feel like what happened, it’s so wrong to do to someone,” Valasquez told the Times. “We’re just swimming at the beach, we’re swimming in a natural body of water.”

Watch here!

"The performance of masculinity in settler states like Australia and California is tightly linked with upholding colonizers’ whiteness."

A bombshell essay on the news blog Zócalo Public Square has revealed “whiteness” to be the poison that has made the seemingly innocent pastime of surfing “dependent on toxic chemicals, mass death, and uncheckable greed.” 

Author Maya Weeks self-describes as “a white settler transdisciplinary artist, writer, and geographer from California working on ocean justice with particular attention to climate, pollution, and gender.”

Her ethical surfing bona fides are beyond question.

“I sit on my log in the lineup, waiting, watching the horizon (no glasses, no contacts, just vibes) in between bits of conversation. I say hi to everybody; I’m from a small town. I call my board a log but it’s not, it’s a performance longboard for a man twice my size, a literal dad board for going fast and doing longboard cutbacks. I prefer riding hand-me-downs. It’s another way to be connected with the people I surf with and the water I surf in.”

The essay nails, point by dreadful point, the descent of surfing from joyous, shared pastime of Hawaiians to the vile broth of “white masculinity” it is today.

Important passages, though I recommend reading the essay in its entirety. 

“Surfing has a reputation for embodying all the most annoying and violent aspects of white masculinity, and for good reason. Contrary to its roots as a kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) cultural practice, modern surfing as widely distributed by white men has been a font of rugged masculinity, hyperindividualism, and conquering (especially when it comes to big waves). I’m thinking of white locals in my hometown telling visitors “we grew here, you flew here”; of white men stealing the waves of people they don’t know; of the way professional surf contests as late as the 2000s were set up to give women the worst conditions to surf in as well as far-from-equitable prize money; of white American men leasing private islands to capitalize on as surf resorts; of literal surf Nazis.”

“At the Chevron Estero Bay Marine Terminal, crude oil was loaded onto tankers from 1929 until 1999. In 1940, the U.S. Navy “established an amphibious training base” in Morro Bay due to its coastal location and harbor, town boosters Roger Castle and Gary Ream report in Images of America: Morro Bay… These industries offered high-paying jobs that afforded their employees—mainly white men—the ability to live on the coast. The white men who dominated these industries were, therefore, the same as those who dominated surf lineups. They brought the mentalities of the industries into the lineup with them. With this information, surfing begins to look less like a fun pastime and more an offshoot of a grim regime dependent on toxic chemicals, mass death, and uncheckable greed.”

“The performance of masculinity in settler states like Australia and California is tightly linked with upholding colonizers’ whiteness. Whether those who perform them realize it or not, the aggressive behaviors listed above are grasps to maintain a status quo that overwhelmingly favors a white patriarchy that manages how wealth, power, and free time for recreation flow.”

Too many good, if painful, points to mention. 

Read now.