“I’ve been on this wave for thirty five seconds and the surfer decides to drop in!”
The steppes of Instagram are alive this morning after vision appeared of a foil-boarder delivering the Strike of Wrath to a surfer, although surfer is putting it generously, a stubbornly intermediate long boarder if we’re to be precise, at Queensland’s famous Snapper Rocks.
In the clip, we see a man of late middle-age, possible harvest years, on an electric foilboard, and holding a GoPro 360 on a long stick as he fades the aforementioned long boarder into the shallow Rainbow Bay sand bank.
As the Gold Coast surf influencer Nick35 correctly puts it, “Men are from mars and this foil king is from Venus!” referencing the hugely popular 1992 self-help book that uses interplanetary metaphor to explain why couples often misunderstand each other due to fundamental diffs in psychology, communication, emotional needs etc.
Subsequent footage from the little camera on the end of the stick and voiceover from the e-foiler revealed his side of the story.
“Now, as you can see on this wave, I’ve been on this wave, now for well over thirty seconds. There’s no one anywhere near me, there’s no surfers, there’s a foiler on the inside, nobody.
“At this point here, very shortly, a surfer decides to drop in on inside.
“I’ve been on this wave now for thirty-five seconds and he decides to come in. So instead of respecting that I’m already on the wave, that I’ve been on the wave for fricken forever and I’m trying to get in to the inside.
“So I’m looking for a hole, then there it is, my passage to home, in between those two surfers so I’m coming home.
“I haven’t seen him yet but instead of turning off, he keeps going.
“Now the point is, I stacked because he was too close to me. The point is, the bit that got posted online, shows me not respecting the fact that he was… it looks like I’ve dropped in. I didn’t drop in on anyone. I’ve been on it a minute before him.
“So let’s put it into perspective. We need to figure out who dropped in on whom. It wasn’t me. I didn’t drop on anybody. We need to respect each other. I always get out of the way for surfers.
“I was simply trying to come home. Why didn’t he drop off? Shouldn’t we all do it for each other?”
Two brief questions: how do you see it and, two, is this, along with the horrors of the recent Bells Beach surf contest, the death of surfing?