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| 09/03/09 King Neptune pretty much delivered the goods for the Governor’s Cup contest. It wasn’t epic, unless you are a grommet, but certainly better than I expected. I’m usually pessimistic about contest conditions, because experience has taught me to expect the worst. So anything better than the Bonneville Salt Flats is a treat. I did feel sort of skunked by “Danny,” however. I really thought Friday was going to be one of those classic days. Quite often, we get better surf from tropical storms or depressions than we do from hurricanes – the latter being so out of control that you never know what you’ll get, and the local beach breaks can handle only so much. So a nice storm out to sea that barely qualifies for a name, like Danny, can be just the ticket. But it has to be teamed up with the right weather system (or lack of) over the land to give us those wispy winds that make it all so tasty. Not the case Friday morning. I was all set to make a quick run over to the island on my lunch break when I got a call from the CFO (chief frustration officer), Vinnie, telling me to stand down, that it was pretty much junk. He was in full-on rant, but the upshot was that it was typical S.C. We are braised for weeks on end with high humidity, no wind and no surf, and just when we get a nice system in our offshore swell window, the wind comes up from the NE and blows it all to pieces. This being a G-rated blog, I’ve scrubbed all Vinnie’s expletives, which is a shame because they were quite creative. When he gets going, his rants cross over into something akin to verbal, abstract impressionism, and he slings curses better than Jackson Pollock slung paint. So you’re not getting the full benefit of the delivery, but you get the picture. It’s just not a canvas you’d hang in the family room. So Ryan, Brian and I paddled out Friday after work expecting a dose of sloppy chaos. But to our amazement, the wind shifted offshore, and right before dark we had a brief taste of those primo conditions I was slobbering over in last week’s blog. And Friday night, I went to bed feeling somewhat less pessimistic about surf for the contest. I have to give a big hats-off to Nancy and everyone at the ESA for putting on another great contest. When it is the state championship, they really throw everything they have at it, and the event went down super smooth for anyone who was there. Behind the scenes, there’s always some mini crisis brewing, but it’s nothing anybody hasn’t seen before and it gets ironed out pretty quickly. It’s the surfer equivalent of frontier justice, and there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be solved by saying, “Dude, get over it.” The local surf shops really kicked in the swag, and it was stunning to see how much loot was donated for the raffles and prize giveaways. There are literally too many sponsors to name, so I’m not going to even start for fear of leaving somebody off. But the amount of food and drink served throughout the entire event was amazing. If you left hungry, you are one picky eater. I was privileged to be tapped to be one of the judges for the women’s and men’s open finals. These two divisions decide who holds the title of best surfer in the state for the coming year. Judging a contest is a pretty hairy thing to begin with, because there are always several things going on at once. The intensity gets kicked up to an exponential level when you have six of the best surfers in the state going at it. When the sets rolled in, just about all six would be hacking it to pieces at the same time. Completely manic. When it was over, I wanted to duct tape a Valium to my forehead until I calmed down. I don’t have the space to talk about all the finalists, so here’s a link to the full results and just a few highlights. First off, I’m having a hard time coming up with a descriptor for the way the first- and second-place winners in the women’s division, Keenan Lineback and Kristen Tanner, surfed. My first thoughts were, “Wow, they surf like guys.” But that is only partially right. Where they are like the guys is in their level of intensity. But what female surfers like Keenan and Kristen bring to the sport is an unmistakably feminine athleticism that is sort of like a mix of ballet and full-contact karate. (Basically, if I was in that heat, I’d have gotten the living crap kicked out of me – but it would have been done gracefully. Sort of like being assassinated by female ninjas.) As for the guys, one point of interest is that both divisions are “open,” which means there are no age groups like in the rest of the contest format. So imagine how young Jedi Addison Miles from the Myrtle Beach district must have felt when he was getting ready to paddle out in the final with the best surfers in the state. Oh, he’s only 10 years old. Usually, the shrimps make it through that far only when the surf is really small, but we had surf all weekend and it was at least head-high on him by the finals. Bet he’s still walking on clouds a week later. All six guys traded wave for wave, and the lead seesawed back in forth all heat. Finally, Todd Youngblood used his local knowledge to connect enough power moves together to pull ahead, and the deed was done. One last interesting note: Mikee Rawlings was hanging out in the admin area after his heat and told us how a four-foot shark tried repeatedly to chase him and another competitor out of the contest area. He said it charged them four or five times and swished its tail and did every aggressive thing it could do to scare them off. He said he wasn’t overly worried because he figured if it were going to bite one of them, it would have done so right away before they even knew it was there. Fair enough. As if there weren’t enough sharks in every heat without a real one showing up. I’ve got to travel some this week, so I’m writing this too early to give a decent forecast for this weekend. But this far out, it looks as though we will have a long-period groundswell during the weekend from tropical storm Erika. So eat well, rest up and stay loose. |
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