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BMT Rankings - 21 September 2009 |
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| Who blew up: |
1. Mick Fanning
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| The White Lightning finally struck this year! Mick was fit, focussed and on it all week. By the time the fat lady sang he was singing too. Who wouldn’t be with a US$ 105 000 winners pay check in their pocket? Mick is looking very strong at the moment. Prior to the event he was interviewed and expressed his deep desire to win this contest. Well win he did and in fine form too. |
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2. Sarah Baum
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| This 15 year old chick from Toti has been doing well in the contests, but there is a lot more to her surfing than that. She recently went on a trip to G-Land and charged it hard! How many guys do you know that would charge cranking G-Land, let alone 15 year old girls? Shew, respect. |
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3. Clayton Nienaber
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| Shaping an Alaia is not nearly as easy and groovy as it looks! In reality it is really hard physical labour and a lot of hours of sanding and polishing as shaping wood is much harder than shaping foam. That said Clayton didn’t flinch when we asked him to teach us (theBOMBsurf crew) the rudiments of Alaia shaping. He’s already shaped three Alaias and is working on his fourth, which makes him something of an expert by South African standards. Anyway he took valuable time out of his day to show complete shaping ignoramuses like ourselves the basics. He tried really hard not to flinch as we buried the blade into the wood time and time again, stuffing up the rails in the process. Thankfully he rescued the effort from being a complete disaster and we may get to ride this puppy yet! |
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| And who blew it? |
3. Dane Reynolds
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So close but so far. Do yourself a favour and go and watch the heats on demand final from the Hurley Pro. Take nothing away from Mick who was polished and focussed and on all the best waves, but ask yourself who you want to watch more and then ask yourself why? Watching this guy surf is so exciting. You never know what is going to happen next and you get the feeling neither does he. Rather than detracting from the experience it only adds to it. Watch one wave of Mick’s and its amazing, watch the second one and you can see the pattern, he’s surfing to a formula - which is closely aligned to the judging criteria. Watch the third and fourth wave and its starting to be boring. What, Mick Fanning boring? Yes, but only because he’s surfing firmly ‘inside the box’, despite doing it beautifully. Reynolds on the other hand doesn’t know where the box is, he’s never heard of it or that is how his surfing appears. Like Kelly he was riding an unconventional surfboard, unlike Kelly the board went for him like some kind of magic carpet ride. In the end it came down to wave count and wave choice. Fanning was all over the Park for the entire final, but Reynolds looked like his reserve battery had run out. There is a lesson in there somewhere for him, its called physical training and it cost him his maiden victory. Damn I wanted him to win!
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2. Kelly Slater
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Lewis Samuels once wrote about Kelly Slater surfing of a beautiful tropical island somewhere. Paddling back after a wave Kelly encountered a Mermaid. Startled the mermaid said to Kelly, ‘Gee I thought you were just a myth...’ Yes he is THAT good, but Kelly is using his myth up this year. His stubborn refusal to ride conventional boards is costing him dearly. If you go back through the Hurley contest and count the number of times Kelly fell it must be some kind of a record for him in an event. There is a part in the rail of that board near the nose that continually catches. At Snapper the board cost him dearly, at J-Bay it nearly cost him and at Trestles it definitely cost him. How much longer is he going to subject himself (and us in webland) to this kind of self destructive abuse? Can you imagine what guys like Al Merrick and Simon Anderson are thinking watching this? With their eyes closed they could deliver him a board that would change everything, yet like us they sit on the sidelines and watch the best surfer the world has ever seen continually sabotage himself. Eish!
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1.Kelly Cestari
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| Kelly C was the latest in a line of long suffering lensemen who have been co-opted into shooting ‘The Super Gnarly BOMBsurf Wetsuit Review’. The brief, simple. To test the suits in real waves of consequence and document the process. His predecessors in this task are the long suffering Craig Kolesky who eventually got seasick sitting on the boat while waiting for me to catch a wave at Dungeons and Garth Robinson who got sunstroke of all things, while waiting for me to catch a wave at Boneyards. After days of fooling around in the Dairy bowl during the third and final stage of the wetsuit test we finally saw a swell that looked like it might have the juice to turn Cave Rock on. This was great news as the other test locations included Dungeons, Bayview, The Outer Kom, Boneyards and Supers. Somehow the Dairy Bowl just doesn’t have the ring to it that Cave Rock does... So we meet on Sat morning (just before Kelly was scheduled to fly off to Europe) and Kelly is not into shooting from the water. He is far more interested in drinking coffee with a certain female he just met than working on silly wetsuit reviews. He procrastinates and procrastinates and all the time the tide is going out. Eventually I talk him into shooting. I’m shitting myself because it’s so shallow. It’s dead low on a spring low tide at Cave Rock. As I’m paddling out I watch a booger get exploded by a mutant double up and then get washed onto urchin infested dry rock, concust and minus his flippers. I get out a bit before Kelly and its a good thing too. The biggest set of the morning by far rears up and sucks what little water is left on the reef off it. I look back down and watch Kelly swimming frantically in the one armed water photographers crawl – back towards the beach! It’s too late. The lip lands on his back and smashes him onto the reef, leaving him with scratch marks on his back that no doubt he wishes were acquired in a more amorous manner. |
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This weeks Bombshell is the
tantalizing surfer chick, Donna. |
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