By Phil Jarratt
MANY years ago, when we lived in an apartment in the charming village of Guethary on the Basque coast of France, Brian Kennelly, a surfing buddy from Kauai, phoned me to ask if we could look after his young daughter who was having a crack at the women’s pro surfing tour and would be competing in Biarritz.
This was how we met Keala Kennelly, a spikey-haired grommet with boundless energy and a wicked sense of humour. She was outrageous and we loved her immediately. She took over the spare bedroom but was rarely in it, surfing all day and painting the town red by night. I thought she was too much of a party animal to be a committed surfer, until I went surfing with her.
When Guethary was firing, there was no shortage of good surfers in the water, but Keala blew them all away. She was like Lisa Anderson, Layne Beachley and Pam Burridge wrapped up in one fiery little package. She ripped.
I was in awe of her that day, and I was in awe of her again last weekend when she and 11 other women made history competing in the World Surf League’s first ever women’s big wave tour event in monstrous surf at Jaws (Peahi) on the island of Maui. Of course Keala has been renowned as a fearless big wave rider for several years now – having picked up the mantle from Layne Beachley who pioneered women’s big wave riding on the North Shore of Oahu back in the ‘90s – and her cavernous barrel at Tea’hupoo won the XXL Big Wave award earlier this year, but it still stunned me to see her and the other girls – including Australia’s Laura Enever and Felicity Palmateer – paddling out into a wind-whipped line-up with sets as high and thick as city office blocks.
Social media chit-chat between misogynist male surfers contended that the girls should not have been out there, and indeed, three of the finalists, including Keala and Laura, were unable to compete after copping such a thrashing in the heats.
But hey, there were out there, and they were riding giants. I’m not sure how big the experts were calling it, although I did hear the WSL commentators talking about 40 foot faces.
In my world, where double overhead is bloody big and triple is ridiculous, I’d call it sextuple overhead.
Home girl Paige Alms from Maui took out the title, making it down the face of two absolute bombs in the final, while WA’s Felicity Palmateer was the highest-finishing Aussie, showing the grits she learnt riding Cow Bommie in the wild west.
Trumped!
I confess I didn’t get much work done on Wednesday. I channel-flicked between CNN and Fox News like a ghoul watching a train wreck.
As soon as the vote count started, I suspected that the forces of reason and sanity in America were in trouble, and so it proved as Hillary’s blue wall came tumbling down and the least qualified person to ever run for the office became the leader of the free world.
Of course now that the reality show of running for president is over, Donald Trump will begin the reality show of governing, running a mile from all the stupid election promises he made but never meant to keep.
There will be no Mexican wall, he won’t touch trade with China and nor will he force Muslim Americans underground.
I doubt whether he’ll even go topless horseback riding with Putin, but he might.
As night turned into the early morning in New York City, I was reminded of a presidential election long ago, when we sat in a hot tub in a forest in Marin County, California, and drank champagne as the numbers came in for a boofheaded actor turned politician called Ronald Reagan.
The Americans in the tub were actually crying that night, but in fact Reagan turned out to be nowhere near as bad a president as was feared.
Let’s hope that the boofheaded reality TV star turned politician turns out to be nowhere near as bad as he has promised to be.
It might seem strange, but Trump’s track record as a pathological liar might actually work in our favour.
Hallelujah Leonard!
Just when you thought the news from America couldn’t get any worse, it did. That brilliant song poet, Leonard Cohen, quietly slipped off this mortal coil, thereby thwarting one of the ticks on my bucket list, which was to hear the great man sing in a vineyard somewhere while sipping the best wine I could afford. Instead we opened a middling bottle of rose and toasted the great man’s enduring legacy.
It’s funny how, as you get older, you say, “Well, he had a good knock”, a lot less, and lament “too young” more often. Well, Leonard was 82 and he had a good knock, but he was too young to leave us.
