pro surfing without danger is like golf
The Quiksilver’s comp is on Fuel today. Everybody is there. Heats on all day one after the other and everyone’s mixed up for the showcase.
Every heat is a feature act, and today they run out of the tent like bullfighters in a cow paddock, do the pros – anointed as such – for now.
Banting, Buchan, de Sousa, Lopez, Payne, Otten, Fanning, Slater, Smith, Wright, Parkinson. Burrow.
All these supreme individualists iconised down into red green and yellow, or blue – whatever.
Snapper is asleep.
Small wave after small wave, glassy small wave after glassy small wave. One guy goes whickety whack whickety whack and another guy goes zoom and slash, zoom and slash.
Cutbacks!
Thousands of perfect cutbacks, hundreds of tail pops, tail slides, tail reverses, skate-back-around-reverse-skeg-re entries, foam glides, foam slides .. tick tock tick tock goes the clock and this is like watching two sixty year-olds in a nose riding competition. Every step a score.
They talk and talk and whoop and exclaim do these lads on the commentary, as excited as girls, unbelievably so as Green in heat 6 does a perpendicular stabbing upthrust on a gently collapsing old washup wave that was lucky to get past the Ballina bar.
All the rides are imperfect, hands touch water, rails grab too deep, arms wave about like flags.
Score logic is
– do something.
{click}
{click} Cricket
{click} Darts
{click} Soccer
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snapper pic lifted from surfwonderland.com
petebowes.com 
You are missing the point.
Ask what about the boardshorts?
Sometimes the crowd is more value than the show…
I feel your frustration
A subject so Fucked Its hard to ignore
Soon though it’s cloak will be withdrawn
And its irrelevance laid bare
And those clinging to it’s bruised breast will be cast down
Their distress will warm my heart as does a cold beer on a warm day…