Who blew up?
1. Quentin Shabalala
Shaba is one of those guys that lives to surf. Being a Lifeguard at Bay Beach he is constantly on it and this past week was no exception. There haven't been decent waves in Durbs lately with the East-West-East-West thing happening, but there were 2 days this week when there were waves in Town and Shabba was on it both times. Shabba is always happy, always in the thick of the banter and always charging. He took off on a deep one right in from of the New Pier on Friday arvo, pulled in and got completely shacked. He came out of the first barrel, stalled, went into the second barrel and was lost in there for a good few seconds before the wave opened up again letting Shaba sneak his nose out, before it pinched on him. Nice one Shaba!
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2. Robin from Digicape
We met Robin at the 2Oceansvibe.com Goldfish Party in CT on our last visit. He is a BOMBsurf subscriber and clearly a passionate waverider. When John's Mac was stolen this week, we called Robin up with our tale of woe. Despite the fact that he was at home in bed laid up with a mysto virus within hours he had organised us a loan Mac. His words to us were “I love theBOMBsurf man, I wouldn’t want anything to slow down the production of the next mag I’m sending you a machine now!” These Macs are our lives and there is no way we could do our jobs without them, so a really big thank you to Robin for hooking us up.
3. The Border Masters Team
These guys outsurfed, outdrank and outfoxed the other provincial ballies teams to end up top of the log in the recent Masters SA Champs held in Mossel Bay. Special mentions to all the individual title winners. Senior men's Llewellyn Whittaker, Masters Andrew Banks, Grand Masters Dave Malherbe, Kahuna Nike Pike, Grand Kahunas, Chris Knutsen and Vets Glen Bowles. Apparently the surf cooked and the beer flowed as the quiet town of Mossels bent under the strain of hosting a bunch of fully grown men behaving like groms. Here is proof that surfers never grow up.
And who blew it?
3. Joel Parkinson
One month ago Parko had both hands on the World Title. A few short weeks and three disastrous events later and Parko has slipped behind Mick Fanning effectively relinquishing his domination of the rankings on tour this year. Parko’s 17th this week was a huge blow to his World Title aspirations. Instead of shutting the door he folded. When your competition is as good and as focused as the top tier on the ‘CT then surfing defensively will get you nowhere. Joel needs to attack again and maybe coming from behind will allow him to do that this week in the Rip Curl Pro Portugal
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2. John McCarthy
John left his laptop in the Xtrail while we quickly dashed into Clayton's shop last week. Surprise, surprise, but when we returned my car was sans a back window and John was minus one apple mac. This would have been just a mere irritation if A) My esteemed business partner had recently backed up his work like I'm always telling him to and B) we weren't fast approaching a print deadline! It took 4 days to get another machine, re-install everything, import the data that had last been backed up back and buy a new modem. There are a lot of morals to this story, I'm going to go with the "if you do something dumb, you have to give all the good waves to your colleague for a month" one.
1. Patrick Rostance
Pat is one of those guys who is super chilled. Usually I see him wetting his elbows while watching live music around Durban's pubs, clubs and any other place live music is being played. We always chat about the waves we've been getting or missions we want to do, you know the usual surf talk. So it was with some surprise that I saw Pat at a quiet little point break far far away from the city, with his chommie, Mark Campbell and another dude. It was just the 5 of us in the line up and the waves were just turning on. Pat happened to be in the right place at the right time, when this absolute nugget rolled through and peaked a few feet away from Pat. He paddled hard, dropped in and was lining up what was undoubtedly wave of the day (and possibly wave of the month) when he just simply....fell off. Straight over backwards. Like he overbalanced or something. I was just on his inside and couldn't believe he'd blow in, so I tried to turn and paddle into it, but the wave had already picked up speed over the middle section and morphed into a freigh-train barrel. I could only watch as it funnelled past me at warp speed, perfect and unridden, all the way down the point, over the sandbar at the bottom, spitting and barrelling until it disappeared out of sight a good 200 meters away. Ah Pat...looks like it's back to wet elbows for a while. |
