"There are no major changes on swell timing and size from our previous update."

The World Surf League finals day is but hours away and, according to Surfline, set to run on the opening day of the waiting period. “There are no major changes on swell timing and size from our previous update. This continues to look like the largest swell of the event window. The storm behaved very close to model guidance and subsequent satellite passes through the swell as it propagated away from the storm have also been close to expectations,” lead forecaster Kevin Wallis has declared though, likely, not confidentally.

The “official forecasting partner” of the “global home of surfing” came under much fire in Fiji as the wave calculation was badly muffed. One day deemed “the best” devolved into windy slop while the following day, not noted at all, delivered gems. JP Currie wrote at the time, “Jonathan Warren gazed into the middle distance, wondering why everyone kept asking him about weather and when he could get back to playing Pokemon Go in peace.”

Jonathan Warren being Surfline’s South Pacific’s swell finding expert.

And, so, Italo Ferreira, Ethan Ewing, Jack Robinson, Griffin Colapinto and John John Florence will gingerly step across Lower Trestles cobbled stone into “the peak of the SSW swell with surf in the shoulder-head high range at Lowers. The largest sets of the day should run slightly overhead.”

Tatiana Weston-Webb, Molly Picklum, Brisa Hennessy, Caroline Marks and Caitlin Simmers will gingerly step the same for the women.

Do you believe in the “shoulder-head high range” call or does that feel… optimistic?

If the Cloudbreak Blooper holds, though, we may see pumping surf on Sept. 7th.

Exciting.

RIP James Darren.

Rebels, everywhere, are in mourning today after it was announced that actor James Darren died in his sleep at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 88. Darren played many unforgettable roles in film and television, starring alongside William Shatner in the 1980s classic TJ Hooker and the unforgettable Spyros Pappadimos in The Guns of Navarone.

His most iconic turn, though, the fiercely anarchistic Moondoggie in the profoundly counter-culture 1959 cinematic adaptation of Gidget.

While a bubblegum teen romp on the surface, the film actually finds its root in questioning authority. Francine “Gidget” Lawrence, who has just turned 17-years-old, is under intense pressure from friends and family to find a man and become a trad wife. Flipping the bird to custom, she heads to the beach instead and falls for Moondoggie, played by Darren. A man who has rejected norms, Moondoggie is instead hell bent on following an older war veteran, The Big Kahuna, to Peru in order to surf instead of going to lame-o college.

The two eventually get in a raging fight over Gidget and all appears lost with Gidget agreeing to accept her parents’ invitation to the trad life, though it turns out their pick of mans is Moondoggie himself, who had gone undercover as a square.

The august New York Times praised the film as, “enough to make anybody leave one of the neighborhood theatres, where it opened yesterday, and light out for Long Island Sound. Pictorially, this mild little Columbia frolic, about a teen-age girl with boy trouble, seems an ideal way to usher in the beach season.”

Darren reprised the Moodoggie role in two subsequent films Gidget Goes Hawaiian and Gidget Goes to Rome.

The proto-punk stylings made the Philadelphia native a massive hit with disaffected girls, as he recalled in a 2015 sit down with Los Angeles Magazine, “The defining moment was when I was at a studio in San Francisco and word got out that I was there. Thousands of girls were screaming out front. When I had to leave the building, they tackled me to the ground and pulled pieces of my hair out. The police had to rescue me and took me to the roof until things settled down.”

Bad to the bone.

"People were just screaming, ''You hit somebody! Somebody's under your truck! Stop''!'"

The New Jersey police are having one heck of a time as summer turns to autumn and Starbucks aficionados smack their gums in anticipation of pumpkin spice flavored fatty beverages. First, a surfer was violently thrown to the sand and arrested for failing to immediately produce his pedigree. Then, a second surfer peacefully protesting on the high tide line was also arrested for being a hippie. The twin actions so odious that surf great Kelly Slater and former The Inertia darling Tulsi Gabbard swung into the fray.

The 11x world champion asking, “What do you guys think about having to pay to go on the beach NJ? This should be criminal. I expected this to have been struck down years ago I saw a guy getting arrested on Instagram the other day for not having his pass.” Freshly-minted Trump surrogate Gabbard adding, “The thing about New Jersey that I couldn’t swallow is, I think it’s principally wrong to charge people to go to the beach. The ocean belongs to everyone. I couldn’t stomach paying money to go and jump in the ocean.”

Well, things just got a lot worse for New Jersey law enforcement overnight after an officer ran over a woman sunbathing on the sand, maybe even daring watch some surfers catch a little dribble.

A witness at Wildwood Beach told local news that a police Ford F-150 was cruising past when “People were just screaming, ”You hit somebody! Somebody’s under your truck! Stop”!'”

Thankfully, the officer did stop and bystanders jumped into action, lifting the front of the truck off the woman who was then rushed to the hospital where she was diagnosed with broken ribs and vertebrae plus lung issues but is expected to survive.

I was at the beach the other day and saw a lifeguard almost get her truck stuck in a sand hole dug by sneering four year olds. Not exactly the same but what I got.

You?

Anything to add?