"Surfers whinge if it's not good for three days, let alone a couple of months. This year they had a legitimate reason to complain."

Who don’t go nuts when the strong, well-muscled waves of winter fail to show and surfers are left to fiddle and burn, often more fiddling than  burning? 

Surfers on NSW’s South Coast, a couple hundred mile strip that runs from Wollongong in the north to Eden in the south, are being driven crazy, literally, claims a prominent news source ‘cause there ain’t been no winter swells. 

According to coastal researcher Dr Mitch Harley from the University of NSW, the waves have been “exceedingly flat. Usually, winter waves are about 1.6 metres in height on average,” he told ABC. “They were about 25 per cent lower at 1.3 metres, and we haven’t seen any really large wave events over the entire winter.”

Australian surf champ Matt Hoar told the ABC he’d never seen it this bad. 

“Surfers tend to whinge if it’s not good for three days, let alone a couple of months. This year in particular they had a legitimate reason to complain.”

Bega Valley counsellor Prem Kranti said surfers were hit two-fold, the flat spell and memories of the Black Summer bushfires from a few years back after a few early season fires took hold.

“There are physical, mental, emotional and also spiritual benefits of being in the ocean and out in nature,” she told ABC. “For people on the south coast, the ocean also provides a strong counterpoint to what has been damaged by bushfire.”

Another surfer, Alice Mood, echoed Kranti. 

“You’re hearing on the radio about fires. When you’re in the water you’re forgetting about it, you’re just having a good time so it’s that time out. I was always cranky. I tried other avenues like running, the gym and even gardening, but none of it cuts it.” 

I  presume I’m an oddity when it comes to flat spells. I wake, examine the listless ocean, and am overjoyed I’ve  been gifted another day without the interference of surfing. Free from guilt, I can improve my sauna game (four hits of twenty minutes in a crowded hot box with quick dips in the ocean pool), wrestle without limit, wallow in medieval literature and extend midday naps til dark and so on. 

Where do you fall? A lover of flat spells or does your mind tend to the crazy?

"It is necessary for me to share a personal truth and publicly dissociate myself from someone I can no longer trust," writes Lupita Nyong’o.

At the turn of the new year, the surfing world was treated to news that beloved broadcaster Selema Masekela, the Los Angeles-born occasional surf commentator, had hitched his considerable caboose (protein bars!) to the film star Lupita Nyong’o.

Selema, who is fifty-two, is the sort of person who would put anyone under his spell. As I may’ve mentioned a couple months back, I met the extreme sports identity at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch in 2017.

Occupying one of the bench seats in the Surf Ranch’s heated jacuzzi aprés our allotted waves was Sal, he was Sal back then, and just as I was about to enter the swirling maelstrom, heated to a pleasing one hundred degrees and offering needed respite from the winter cold and a possible cure for a dreadful hangover, his telephone rang.

Sal asked me to rummage through his colourful outfit which was bundled on a barrel, enough clothes to suggest, or was I hoping, he was nude in the tank, and to pick it up.

It was Kelly Slater.

“Answer it,” he commanded, which I did.

Kelly Slater remained silent when he heard my voice, an early portent of the blood feud that would simmer for the following six years.

After a howl of laughter and some chortling Sal hung up. Despite an expanded adiposity, he gobbled protein bar after protein bar, informing me of the health-giving properties of the foil-wrapped chocolate chip treats.

Stories flowed like a river of honey and I left, like everyone who spun in his orbit that day, a fan for life.

I didn’t heard from Sal again and only knew in passing that he’d transitioned to Selema.

In January this year, Chas wrote that Selema and Lupita Nyong’o had not only made public their declaration of love but had spent four million dollars on a a sprawling $4 million Los Angeles home together.

Nine months later, the relationship is in ruins, with Lupita Nyong’o publishing an unflattering picture of their affair on Instagram.

“At this moment, it is necessary for me to share a personal truth and publicly dissociate myself from someone I can no longer trust,” writes Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her performance in 12 Years a Slave. “I find myself in a season of heartbreak because of a love suddenly and devastatingly extinguished by deception… I am reminded that the magnitude of the pain I am feeling is equal to the measure of my capacity for love. And so, I am choosing to face the pain, cultivating the courage to meet my life exactly as it is, and trusting that this too shall pass.”

The actual act of catastrophic deception is left for the reader to decode but is it possible Selema may’ve forgot to mention he is estranged from BeachGrit’s own Chas Smith, often described as the “voice of surfing”, or was it his savaging by Black Girls Surf’s Rhonda Harper whose online tirade included the unkind epithet “Uncle Tom.” 

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