Tears in Santa Monica.

Oh but certainly you’ve seen it, by now, and many multiple times. Jordan Anast’s stunning image of a longboarder mid-contest, at famed San Onofre, and that juvenile great white shark shooting skyward in the background. Snapped October 22, the photograph has taken on a life of its own, being featured in every major and minor media across the globe, most recently CNN.

Anast told the left-leaning service, “I didn’t know until I looked closely after, and saw the structures of the fins. Then I realized it was a great white shark.”

Wonderful and, officially, the most viral snap in surfing’s history.

The problem?

Well, the longboarding contest was not a sanctioned World Surf League event, rather a local San Onofre Surf Club shootout, thus leaving the “global home of surfing” far away from the glorious spotlight.

As you know, the World Surf League has been on a campaign to radically alter surfing’s past, present and future since its establishment in 2015 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California. Top officials quickly declared that it was actually founded 39 years earlier, in 1976, and dipped into various Wikipedias to burnish the narrative.

Kelly Slater’s first WSL championship, for example, came in 1992.

Sixteen years before the WSL came to be.

In any case, the most viral moment in non-Stalinist WSL history was when Mick Fanning became entangled with a great white shark during a contest in South Africa.

The moment was flashed on screens, globally, including CNN and World Surf League brass did their best to leverage into the stratospheric growth we are witnessing today.

Numbers to the moon.

Not, though, as high as this newest San Onofre sensation.

The question, I suppose, will the World Surf League absorb the San Onofre Longboard Club in order to lay claim or is Santa Monica’s hatred of longboarding more powerful?

Currently more questions than answers.

"I am on fire. I am dangerous, I am absolutely out of control.”

You’ll remember, of course, the death of surfing’s great gift to the world, the inventor Tom Morey, who died a couple of months after his eighty-sixth birthday, last October. 

Ol Tom exited blind and broke despite the outrageous success of the boogie board which had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. 

Morey invented the 4’6”, 23” wide foam boog in 1971; it was more than a toy for kids to hold onto in shorebreaks, he explained, this was a profound shift in waveriding. 

“For anybody to become a graduate of this planet,” Morey who would sell out of his Boogie biz four years later thereby missing the rivers of gold said, “it is essential that they learn to enjoy this activity.”

Now, an Australian surfboard shaper from the sweet little country town of Nambucca Heads, a few hours south of Byron, has put his tweak on the iconic lid and says miracles are afoot.

Keith Robinson, who is seventy-four, says he made his fibreglass“gut slider” so his sixty-seven-year-old buddy, Toni Jovancay, who was so tortured with hip pain he’d holstered his sticks, could get back into surfing. 

“As soon as I paddled out in North Valla, I immediately knew this was fantastic,” Jovancay told ABC. “If I didn’t have other things in life, I’d say it has changed my whole life.”

Two weeks on the GS and he says, “I am on fire. I am dangerous, I am absolutely out of control.” 

Robinson says he’s been making a couple of ‘em a week for surfers who’ve been hobbled by uncooperative ankles, knees, hips or for riding post-op.

Nambucca Heads photographer Chris Hewgill said, “I’ve seen a guy who hasn’t been able to [stand-up ride] for years. He got on one of these things and was like 15 again.”

I’m about three years away from one of these things, although better to be in the water than not at all, no?

Or better to quit and never return?

"Much like Blackberry, KSWC pioneered a new technology. And like Blackberry, KSWC is stubbornly hanging onto its original blueprint."

If you ever have the good fortune to grace the fabled Kelly Slater wavepool in Lemoore, California, you will be awed by its size, the shore where the right extinguishes itself after one minute of riding barely able to be seen, even with squinted eyes.

I rode the joint in 2017, nine waves lassoed, and have yet to sight or command a wave, even close to as good.

Therefore, a terrific surprise this morning when a wavepool expert slammed the Kelly Slater Wave Co pool as “obsolete the day it was unveiled.”

Skip Taylor, a Partner of Surf Park Management told wavepool mag, the reason there hadn’t been another Slater tank built since it’s unveiling in December 2015 was that,

“What happens time after time is once people start to dig into the financial feasibility and see the limited capacity, the large footprint of the venue, the scale of civil construction, and the awkwardness of the pool shape to build around, KSWC quickly gets dismissed in most cases.”

Meanwhile, Wavegarden, Perfect Surf and Endless Surf, smaller, modular tech, dominate the market.

When the developers of that wild housing estate built around a pool near São Paulo, Praia da Grama and Boa Vista Village, looked at the various techs, they dug the Kelly pool but came to the same conclusion as everyone else, it don’t have the commercial potential of its rivals.

And that wild little double shot air combo? No way the Slater pool touches that. Surfers are already calling it the most high-performance wave on earth.

Author of the comprehensive story, Evan Quarnstrom, posits,

I liken the position of Slater’s pool to the Blackberry cell phone circa 2010.

Blackberry was a pioneer in the cell phone space and even the preferred option of then US president Barack Obama. They had an industry-leading 43% of the market share in the US at their peak.

Then came the iPhone with its touchscreen technology.

Blackberry insisted on sticking with a keyboard. Their complacency spelled the beginning of the end. After an initial aversion to transition with the market trends and a far-too-late attempt to enter the smartphone market, the Blackberry cell phone finally sputtered to an inevitable death with its final model in 2018.

Much like Blackberry, KSWC pioneered a new technology – in this case a wave that could mimic the power of the ocean. And like Blackberry, KSWC is stubbornly hanging onto its original blueprint. As markets demand a smaller pool with a higher wave rate, KSWC is sticking to its guns.

Read more here!