I love you, surfing. You are the best, surfing.

There is still time but barely. Tomorrow (or today for our southern hemisphere brothers and sisters) is International Surfing Day. The occasion when surfers everywhere shower surfing with the praise and attention, love and care it deserves during the rest of the calendar year but sometimes doesn’t get.

Like Mother’s Day, it is best to let surfing sleep in on International Surfing Day and present it with a nice rose and cup of tea when it leisurely awakes which it can enjoy quietly without being bothered. Later, when surfing has had a chance to collect itself, it is wise to take it to a champagne brunch, letting it get a little silly and chatty. Afterwards, it’s time to head home to let surfing nap before serving it a nice home cooked dinner and allowing it retire early to watch its favorite television program (The Young and the Restless) without doing any of the cleanup.

If you have children, have them write letters to surfing. Encourage them to dig deep for more meaning and greater feeling than simple tropes like “I love you, surfing” and “you are the best, surfing.”

Surfing is fine with simple, thoughtful gifts but won’t turn its nose up at a bauble from Van Cleef & Arpels or handbag from Hermes.

Please don’t give in to the cynical trend of calling International Surfing Day a holiday made up by the greeting card industry.

That’s mostly it, now hurry and sort your plan.

Heart emojis overflowing.

Surf fans near and far found themselves morphed into giddy school children, yesterday evening, after Sawyer Lindblad and Ethan Ewing released an Instagram Story featuring the latter gazing off into the distance and a heart emoji. The aforementioned surf fans screen captured the image as quickly as they could, sending it back and forth with dizzying speed.

Lindblad, 19, is, of course a professional surfer on the rise with a powerful modern style. Currently world number 11, the San Clemente-bred screwfoot won last year’s Rookie of the Year.

Ewing, 26 and hailing from Australia’s North Stradbroke Island, is considered one of the smoothest surfers on the Championship Tour where he is currently number 6.

Surfing has not had a power couple so fantastic since Jack Freestone and Alana Blanchard began dating over a decade ago.

Or maybe Jesse Mendes and Tatiana Weston-Webb.

Do you remember when Laura Enever and Granger Larson were together?

Me either.

How do you think Kelly Slater might try to steal Lindblad and Ewing’s spotlight?

Happy days.

"Heavy rainfall will lead to life-threatening flooding and mudslides..."

Hours ago, Hurricane Erick made landfall 100, or so, clicks north of Puerto Escondido, Mexico. Upgraded to a category 3 with maximum sustained winds of 205 kilometers per hour (127 mph) and gusts reaching 250 kilometers per (155 mph), it is the first to hit Mexico this hurricane season. Forecasters are predicting above-average activity from May to November, guessing that eight to eleven swirling storms will form.

The National Hurricane Center warned, “Heavy rainfall will lead to life-threatening flooding and mudslides, especially in areas of steep terrain.” Images coming out of the region show swamped streets and bendy trees.

Surfers, of course, best know Puerto Escondido as home of the “Mexican Pipeline.” A ferocious sand-bottomed tube.

Those wanting to visit, once Erick has left town, are advised to purchase a copy of Lonely Planet’s Epic Surf Breaks of the World.

The Puerto Escondido offering begins thusly:

There is likely no better feeling than sitting on a sweltering beachfront patio in Mexico, languid fan spinning overhead, sipping a still cold margarita, salt, rocks, nibbling shrimp tacos garnished with fresh pico de gallo while gallons of saltwater pour all over them from a sunburned nose. So why are my knees pulled to my chest like a frightened little kitty cat right now? Why is my heart pounding so hard that I swear it might leap right out of my throat on that next margarita sip?

The chair underneath me quakes and my senses return. Because this sweltering patio fronts Puerto Escondido and Mexico’s most notorious, dangerous, biggest, famous, superlative wave is just 500 yards away, thundering on the sand. Snapping boards in half, eating grown surfers whole.

I’d come to the Mexican Pipeline, as it’s called, to test myself. To push beyond what had become my comfort zone, namely soft southern California reef breaks, groomed Australian point breaks and warm, shoulder high tropical barrels. Becoming a surf journalist had opened up a world of ease and, as I looked myself square in the mirror one day, was disappointed with the softened visage looking back…

Enjoy the rest of this captivating tale here.

"I do not, nor never will, support SUPs, Wavestorms, Ben Gravy-branded soft-tops or foils around people."

Polarized times, these are, but I don’t have to tell you. It’s hard to keep up what with America-first anti-forever war United States President Donald J. Trump considering bombing Iran under pretenses that makes George W. Bush’s Iraq escapades seem downright considered, hard liberal Columbia University instantly capitulating on what it claimed to be rock solid values when barely pressed and Kraft Heinz declaring it will remove all artificial dye from ketchup and Jell-O.

Polarized, yes, but polarization jumping all over the dang place quicker than brave coward Filipe Toledo can sit out the back while scary waves pump over scarier reef.

Former Instagram surf comedian John Wayne Freeman, in any case, took to his new trad-wife vacuum in recent days to excoriate the failed shoe brand Vans for releasing a collaboration classic with Queer Surf.

The message that “nobody cares” might have been more “punk” had he delivered it in the height of those wild cancellation years when every company on earth was actively engaged in performative allyship, those with any sort of discomfort branded as dangerously retrograde and deserving of guillotine.

Something quite different, today, when the LGBTQIA+ community is back in the crosshairs, bullied, marginalized, etc.

And so I bought a pair of the Vans Queer Surf shoe in hopes of wearing it on the recently wrapped North Florida/South Carolina podcast tour to show support. Paying much extra for quick shipping.

 

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A post shared by Jonathan Freeman (@jonathanwaynefreeman)

Vans, being failed, did not get they/them to me in time.

Package was waiting when I arrived back home, though, and I opened the box to a horror realization. They were pink, as promised and a color I love, with a fine triangle motif, but on the whitewalls two statements were scrawled.

All bodies.

All boards.

All bodies is why I bought them, any and everyone should be comfortable in the lineup and especially these ultra-bully days, but the all boards business sent me reeling.

I do not, nor never will, support SUPs, Wavestorms, Ben Gravy-branded soft-tops or foils around people. I also loathe longboards outside specifically designated longboard waves, Surftechs, rentals, gliders, eggs and… I guess all longboards anywhere.

What then to do?

I crossed out the “all boards” junk in hopes of a brave new future where only high-performance shortboards, mid-lengths on the right day, and mini-simmons are the only boards in the water.

Join me.

Buy here.