'On the BeachGrit Instagram feed, Kelly Slater wrote, “Funny. Cheap. Character Revealing.” '
urf Fans Reeling:
It was BeachGrit’s belle epoch, 2017 through 2019: Elo Logan was the new frontman of the freshly named World Surf League and its new COO was the wildly overqualified Beth Greve, listed on Adweek’s Top 50 for 2014 for her success as “purveyor of cool” in the teen space.
Ms Greve, you’ll remember, soon earned the epithet Backward Fins Beth, photographed and filmed in Bali carrying and preparing to surf a beginner’s longboard-style surfboard with its fins installed completely backwards.
As BeachGrit readers swiftly pointed out at the time, putting fins in backwards is a classic beginner or “kook” mistake — the fins are designed to point toward the tail for proper tracking and maneuverability, so reversed ones make the board handle strangely or not at all effectively.
We ate and regurgitated that morsel here, here, here, here, here and here and bookended the saga with a billboard near Kelly Slater’s wave pool in Lemoore, and installed just before The Surf Ranch Pro.
Backward Fins Beth and The New Yorker
The moment was covered in a long feature in The New Yorker by Pulitzer winner William Finnegan, where it was cited as an example of perceived “kook” culture at the WSL.
As if to confirm everyone’s suspicions, Beth Greve, the W.S.L.’s chief commercial officer, was photographed in Bali lugging a beginner’s board across the beach with the fins put in backward. Backward Fins Beth became famous in surf world—more than half a million views on @kook_of_the_day. And then BeachGrit, an Australian Web site that delights in trolling the W.S.L., blew up the image to billboard size and installed it on a freeway in Lemoore, just in time for the Surf Ranch Pro. The billboard shot zoomed around the surfing Internet.
Slater saw it. He is a tireless online poster, with a rare degree of patience. On his Instagram feed, a magnet for cranks of all kinds, he has spent years debating flat-Earthers, laying out innumerable scientific proofs that the planet is round. He’s a well-informed environmentalist; right-wing flamethrowers rain hellfire on him for that, and he often takes the trouble to reply to them individually. When the Backward Fins Beth billboard went viral, Slater showed a tiny bit of pique. On the BeachGrit Instagram feed, he wrote, “Funny. Cheap. Character Revealing.” The BeachGrit crew was ecstatic. They had successfully trolled the king.
Lovely Nick Carroll called BeachGrit “horribly clever.”
Sadly, and with our faces as red as turkey cocks, it was subsequently revealed that putting your fins in backward ain’t such a bad thing.
It works.
Well, now, seven years later, Backward Fins Beth and BeachGrit are united again, this time via a mutual love of the relatively obscure post-punk outfit Nancy and the Jam Fancys, a band from the surf town of Moruya on the NSW South Coast.
The album Swan Songs was my top album of 2025 according to Spotify Wrapped, time listened etc, 466 minutes, posted it on the BeachGrit account as a story to which the band replied, “Apparently Backward Fins Beth listens to us too.”
Wild and a slightly late Christmas present, yes?
Do you remember those days and all that fun we had?