A great mystery.

Kelly Slater’s bonafides as a professional surfer are beyond any sort of dispute. The 51-year-old Floridian is an 11x World Champion, holds multiple Pipeline Masters, one Pro Pipeline, Eddie king, current holder of an exclusive whole season wildcard etc. and many bravos to him. Best to ever do it et. al.

The GOAT’s out-of-water exploits, however, have not gone as wonderfully. Oh sure, he has dated Pamela Anderson, Cameron Diaz and Giselle Bündchen, but married none. Business-wise, it has been a very similar misfire.

Purps.

K-Grip.

Outerknown.

Slater Designs.

Yikes.

Never undeterred, though, the surf great continues throwing proverbial darts at the board. His latest offering? The cryptically dropped KLLY.

Well what on earth could it possibly be?

What in space, more to the point re. branding?

A rocket company to rival Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk?

Something that would be even more of a failure?

Excited to see.

Residents encouraged to flee before it's too late.

San Clemente, California is many things to many people. Richard Milhous Nixon’s favorite retreat. Site of World Surf League Final’s Day. Southernmost town in Orange County. Scene of three Andino generations. Most importantly, though, it is the global home of the surfboard industry. Yes, the “Spanish Village by the Sea,” as it is affectionately called, has long housed extremely important shapers, glassers, sprayers, finishers. Matt Biolos calls San Clemente home and so does Matt Parker. Timmy Patterson and Cole Simler too.

Our wave sliding experience would be vastly different, certainly, if not for the hotbed of progression that is San Clemente, but a terror has presented, in recent days, as the oceanfront Casa Romantica crumbled into the sea as its executive director looked on. Amy Behrens was was enjoying a spring stroll when she heard a low rumble then watched, helpless, as a chunk of the property collapsed into the mighty Pacific.

It was not a singular event. The bluffs fronting this wave-rich stretch of coast have been failing at a wildly increasing rate, knocking out railroad tracks, horrifying wealthy denizens with unobstructed ocean vistas as their million dollar homes teeter on the brink of major insurance claims.

The whole town under a very real threat of disappearing.

San Clemente, though, is not alone in its dire predicament. According to The Los Angeles Times.

In March, a Newport Beach home overlooking the water was demolished after a landslide. Later that month, a landslide in San Clemente prompted evacuation of four oceanfront apartment buildings. Laguna Niguel declared a local emergency last week after soil movement was detected beneath the hilly contours of La Paz Road, prompting officials to close two lanes indefinitely.

Yikes.

But what will a post-San Clemente surfboard industry look like? Where will Biolos et. al. go? Torquay, Australia? Whale Beach? Boca Raton, Florida?

More importantly, I suppose, is who will have them?

Most importantly, what is the cause of this sudden collapse? Global warming?

Discuss.

Chief of Sportwashing.

The Santa Monica-based World Surf League has worked extremely hard during these past few years to place itself squarely in the camp of social progressives. From patting itself on the back for making equal pay between and women, adopting the most liberal trans inclusion policy, robust environmental bush planting and ruthlessly muzzling those who disagree, many have celebrated the acronym WSL also standing for “Woke Surf League.”

A brave new world.

Except.

Hours ago, the “global home of surfing” came under heavy fire for being a super gross polluter. The average surfer with his one-board-per-year and one-trip-per-five was fingered as 50% more environmentally damaging than the normal citizen. The professional surfer with her six-boards-per-event and three-trips-per-month, then, at least 90% more more environmentally damaging.

Whilst breaking out the scrub brushes an attempting a nice green wash, the League was hit once more, this time for tacitly supporting far-right Central American strongman Nayib Bukele and his brutalist incarceration spree.

The Guardian recently profiled Jose Antonio Potes and his childhood pal Manuel Castrillon, both Colombian, who traveled to El Salvador looking for work. Once there, the two were locked up in a draconian anti-gang mass arrest and spent over three months in jail with no trial or explanation.

“It started really making sense then that they were just throwing innocent people in jail to show them off to the outside world,” Potes said as he met many behind bars who were there by mistake. “You no longer need to have any link with the gangs to be locked up in El Salvador. You simply need to be a young male,” lawyer Ruth Elonaro López added.

Young and male or wholly female as other reports suggest that “lesbian women” are being taken from their homes and tossed in the clink after being denounced by strange taxi cab drivers.

The World Surf League, as you know, is headed to El Salvador in a few short weeks, for the Championship Tour stop number seven, the Surf City El Salvador Pro.

Exciting.

But how do you think WSL CEO Erik Logan and self-described architect of the grand liberal reforms Chief of Sport Jessi Miley-Dyer will react to right-leaning shenanigans south of the border? Will Bukele’s name be banished from the booth, like the great conservative Bethany Hamilton, or will announcers be instructed to simply look the other way?

Will Wright take a knee for the nearly 70,000 people recently locked up, many without trial?

Currently more questions than answers.