For those of you still paying attention to surf news from outside our happy bubble, the 2021 World Surf League championship tour kicks off today as the waiting period begins for the Women’s Maui Pro, followed on December 8 by the men’s Billabong Pipe Masters.
A week or so out, swell predictions looked pretty good for a day one start for both events, but beyond that, the WSL season is in chaos. The first four stops of the tour are in the United States where Covid-19 case numbers are currently at the highest level since the pandemic began. Joe Biden will take office just before the tour moves from Hawaii to Santa Cruz, California, at which time, unless there has been a radical drop in case numbers, we could expect to see immediate tightening of restrictions on travel and events as the new president faces the realities the previous could and would not.
As you would expect from a closed island population, Hawaii’s Covid numbers have been relatively good, but the timing of the season openers is not great for Australian tour surfers, who will face Christmas in quarantine should they choose to return for family reasons. Veteran Ace Buchan has already pulled out of Pipeline to spend Christmas with his young kids, and with the schedule likely to be riddled with event cancellations along the way, this early no-show might spell the end of a great career.
Most, however, will opt to remain in Hawaii for January’s men’s and women’s Sunset Open, which signals the return of women’s surfing to the big arena of the North Shore after a decade away.
The Hawaiian leg will also include a “surf-off” for the second injury wildcard for the 2021 season between Italy’s Leo Fioravanti and our own Mikey Wright, who will apparently surf three man-on-man heats at Pipeline before the start of the Pipe Pro, which is sure to get a hostile reaction from the locals if the surf is pumping, illustrating yet again that strategic thinking is not what the Wozzle does best.
The US leg is meant to conclude at Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz in early February, but that’s just two months away, and right now most of California is going through its most severe lockdown of the pandemic in response to spiralling case numbers. I had a Zoom call this week with the World Surfing Reserves executive in Santa Cruz, and while they remained positive, there was an overwhelming sense of disappointment and concern about the cold winter ahead.
After Santa Cruz, the fourth stop on tour is meant to be the Meo Pro in Peniche, Portugal, but this has already been “postponed” because of the second wave across the Iberian peninsula. Next, the tour moves to Australia for Bells Beach at Easter, followed by Margaret River and lastly the Gold Coast Pro at the Superbank in the first half of May, almost too late for the best swell window. Assuming that all state borders remain open, and that the international surfers allow time for quarantining, this leg seems the most likely to proceed as planned, although the WSL has yet to confirm anything beyond Santa Cruz.
The long-awaited return to G-Land is slotted next, but G-Land is in Java, where we don’t even know the true state of the pandemic as yet, and all feasible international entry points, like Denpasar, Surabaya and Jakarta, are problematic now, but maybe won’t be in six months.
After that, it’s too far out to predict what will happen as the tour hopes to roll on to Brazil and South Africa in June, then back to California for the Surf Ranch Pro in August, then back to Tahiti, then back to California for a finals series at Trestles in September. And just a thought about all of that – couldn’t the WSL consider emissions, not to mention costs, as surfers flit around the globe unnecessarily? Would it be unthinkable to move Surf Ranch back one stop to save a Pacific round-trip?
Finally, when it comes to the longboard tour, we know nothing, except Noosa won’t be on it. Most likely it will be a US-based tour in the latter part of the year. Meanwhile, the Noosa Festival of Surfing will be a scaled-down domestic event which has been pushed back to the very edge of the swell window in mid-May, for reasons unknown.
Boys will be boys
After all that nonsense about schoolies behaving badly, let’s reflect on some really naughty surf-related behaviour. I remember seeing these shots years ago, but big thanks to surf collector and photographer Gary Clist for refreshing my memory during a conversation on his porch last week.
The year is 1968, late May, end of the surf season, and, there being no surf, the boys are leaning on the back of the $50 Ford Prefect woodie shooting the breeze and maybe drinking a tinnie or two in the Nasho’s car park. Whoops, did some one leave it in neutral?
What do you do with a woodie that’s had its best years and isn’t worth the price of a tow off the rocks? Well, you remove the Plastic Machines and the racks and you torch it, don’t you! No social media in those halcyon days, but word got around, judging by the crew seen through the smoke enjoying the show.
Gary says its remains had disappeared in a matter of weeks, so totally sustainable, more or less.
