Surfing Loves You... It takes a long time to get to the other side of the word. You could put a time on it I suppose. Like, you could say it took me 20 hours to get from Sydney to Lisbon. But it felt a lot longer than that. It felt a lot longer because I spent the whole time thinking about a girl. A girl I love but who doesn’t love me. A girl who’d left Australia a week ago bound for Switzerland. I stopped in Abu Dhabi and I thought about emailing her an email. My next stopover would be in Milan. She was somewhere in Switzerland. “Hey, how are you? I’m in Italy!” But what would be the point of that? I had to keep going. I had to go to Portugal. I had to go and watch a surf contest. I had to see if Parko or Mick or Kelly or John John would make a move on this damned world title. In Milan while walking from one side of the airport to the other I looked out the window and I could see the snow covered peaks of the Italian/Swiss Alps. She was up there somewhere. She was close. So close it hurt my chest and brain. “I should walk out of here,” I thought. “I should ditch everything and go to her. But man… she doesn’t love you. And you know what does love you? Surfing loves you, man. It has always loved you. You should go to the surf contest. Go to your people. Forget about the girl. Go and get barrelled and eat sardines and cheer for the guys who will rule that Atlantic. And when she gets to Paris next week go visit her then and there!” Yes that was a good plan. So that’s what I did. And this morning the contest was called off and I jumped in the sea and I washed the muck off my heart with surfing. And I felt good.
(BARNWELL/RIP CURL)
(BARNWELL/RIP CURL)
The contest was called off. Fair enough. Supertubos wasn’t super or very tubos. But plenty of the top dudes surfed. John John surfed. He did full roter after full roter into the flats. Nobody in the scaffold could believe he was warming up for this event by trying to break his ankles. Owen Wright surfed. He made a giant backside full rote and then came in. He stood on the beach with his blue board and people in the scaffold wondered out loud if blue surfboards looked water logged and old. But they didn’t wonder out loud once Owen walked within earshot. Mick Fanning surfed and he looked fast and nimble and hungry. Joel Parkinson surfed and he surfed like he has all year – like World Titles are for some other time and some other place. He surfed like he was having fun. Matt Wilkinson surfed. And so did Kolohe and so did Alejo and so did Taj and Bede and Melling and so did last year’s Rip Curl Pro winner Adriano De Souza. But really everyone watched Mick and John and Parko. And in the car park where the surfers park in their own designated space, one spot was empty. It belonged to Kelly Slater – who did not surf today.
AWKWARD PARKING FACT
DID YOU KNOW‌ that at the Rip Curl Pro in Peniche there is a really long driveway that leads from the contest site all the way down to public parking? And along this driveway the best surfers in the world can park their cars? And the order with which their spots are allocated is relative to the ASP World Tour ratings meaning Joel Parkinson, Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning and John Florence all park right next to one another at the entrance to the event site, while Dillon Perillo, Pat Gudauskas, Jadson Andre and Willian Cardoso basically have to park at the Spanish border. Cool huh?
(BARNWELL/RIP CURL)
(BARNWELL/RIP CURL)
(BARNWELL/RIP CURL)
The with
days golden
shimmer promise.
Somewhere in this town a stray cat is eating a sardine.
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