“I can still go straight, you know.”

The quinquagenarian surf champ Kelly Slater has stunned fans at Tahiti’s infamous Teahupoo by slicing through the defending champion, Australian Jack Robinson, and Morocco’s Ramzi Boukhiam, with a brutal ease in perfect four-to-six-foot waves.

You’ll remember shortly after his twenty-seventh retirement announcement following an early loss at Margaret River a couple of months back, Kelly Slater admitted he would be accepting wildcards at the tour majors in Fiji and Tahiti, which his company co-sponsors, as well as a cameo slot at the Championship Series Gold Coast Pro. 

And on a day that was as picture perfect as they come, not exactly Code Red, Code Pink, maybe, Kelly Slater picked at the waves, playing with the long, dazzling tubes like a pretty girl twirling her corn-silk hair around her fingers.,

In his post-heat interview, BeachGrit’s own Toxic Positivist Chris Cote lures Kelly Slater into a joke when he says, 

“Well, Kelly Slater, wildcard. Not used to hearing that. But Kelly Slater, heat win. We are used to hearing that. So congrats on the first win of the year here in Tahiti.”

Slater, of course, has only won one other heat all year and he doesn’t miss Cote’s irony.

“Yeah, well, we’re not used to hearing Kelly Slater heat win, are we? It’s been a while. I saw Jeremy (Flores) in the water and I said, ‘Well, I can still go straight, you know.’ But there’s a lot of technical aspect to the waves right now. There’s some south in it.

“You can actually take off a little bit deeper than I think a lot of people have been today. It kind of gives you one pump earlier than if you take off and stall. So there’s a little bit of technical stuff, but also whoever has the good waves, he’s going to win. No one’s getting third and fourth scores.”

Asked if it’s total muscle memory when it comes to a joint like Teahupoo Slater, who rode his first wave of the trip in his heat, likened it to catching a baseball.

“You see a wave and I guess it’s like a guy in an outfield trying to catch a ball. You’re kind of registering where do I need to be and how deep, how far out, wide or deep or whatever. And then you’re trying to look down the line to see how much cupping it has on the reef. Does it have a lot of west in it? Today’s like a touch of west, but it’s really more south and open. So what you don’t want to do is get one that doesn’t have any end on it because those get almondy. And, the ones that are super west that are way down the end, you tend to not be able to get as deep or very long in the barrel. You can only do with what comes to you. And, you know, I only had three good waves that came to me in that heat.”

Kelly Slater that he intended to “send it” if the expected swell arrives next week.

“Any political posts that are posted in the Surfer forums will be deleted and accounts will be removed.”

With only 164 days left until Don and Joe fight for the right to jerk the American steering wheel either left or right, Surfer magazine has reacted by banning all readers from expressing any personal political opinion on their forums. 

Surfer magazine, which most recently featured on BeachGrit when they advertised for a human to monitor its AI-driven content, had over one thousand pages on its politics forum covering everything from the Ukraine-Russian war, a political assassination in Slovakia, Peru’s decision to classify trannies as mentally ill, Biden’s “inflation explosion” and Trump’s “Hush Money”.

Written in what you might imagine as a creepy sing-song voice, Surfer magazine told its readers.

“IN AN EFFORT TO KEEP THE CONVERSATIONS SURF-RELATED, THE POLITICAL FORUM HERE HAS BEEN REMOVED. Let’s talk surf trips, surfboards, and the latest happenings from around this beautiful, blue planet. Thanks!”

And, as a sticky in the main forum, 

“Effective immediately, the politics forum here on Surfer.com has been shut down. Any political posts that are posted in the Surfer forums will be deleted and accounts will be removed. We want to continue to offer this forum as a surf-related area, and we know that bleeds into everyday life. With that being said, we will not have this forum devolve into a political area that is disrespectful of others and intentionally marginalizes or disrespects other groups/individuals.”

The fall and rise of Surfer magazine, heritage title driven into the ground before being rebirthed as a dystopian zombie site complete with AI-generated writers, was best documented, I think, in this story by Santa Barbara’s Jen See.

As humans, story-telling is one of our most ancient traditions. We drew on cave walls, wrote on papyrus rolls, and scribbled illegibly on parchments and yellow legal pads. Now we tap out our Instagram captions and text messages. The medium doesn’t matter that much.

It feels like the deepest cut to replace this profoundly human process with a machine trained on the work of so many human writers. Who are we, if not our stories? And who do we become in their absence? What’s lost in this dystopian world of trained robots and hyper-efficient editors? Certainly what’s left starts to feel a lot like Roth’s “claustrophobic and airless culture.”

Surfing is nothing without its stories.

At times, it can feel like the stories are as important as the thing itself. Sitting around campfires and hanging out in parking lots, we talk of that one perfect day, that probably wasn’t all that perfect at all. But we were there, we experienced it, and we’ve come here to tell of it.

There is then, something beautifully, magically, and fundamentally human about telling stories. Dumb stories, true stories, completely fake and made-up stories — what matters is that they belong to us. In the telling, we spin another thread and add to the ties that connect us to one another.

And isn’t that elusive connection what we’re all here to find?