Fiji Pro Cloudbreak 2017

[brendo]

long wave trough has strong nodes in SW Indian and New Zealand longitudes = Indo and Tahiti bombing and a bad pattern for Tasman sea swell window.
They'll get some very incon surf from long period sources right back under Oz and zonal polar fetches but I can't see a proper Cloudbreak swell happening. Luckily it's such a swell magnet.

nz is getting some really good snow from that atm. next nodes for us are end of the month/early next. gunna be lean pickings for qld school hols
heading to nsw resort late june.

[steve shearer]

wow, Surfline has massively overcalled these forecasts.

[Gumby]

That heat was painful viewing

[julioadler]

Melancholic defeat from Kelly once more.
There's some history behind Louie Egan and Slater in that particular heat,
1996, Egan had some really close calls against KS, and from other Momentum dudes - J. Bay, France 2Xs - semis against KS.
So it might have some sweet revenge here, with Stuart Bedford Brown, oops, O'Leary Chase.
Thing is, being old and bald, it hurts to see the carnage.
The Mojo went away.
Now it's time to watch Adriano smells the blood and feast with the carcasses...
Gonna dream with Strider gettin' eaten by a white whale, microphone and all, narrating from the innards the encounter with Pinocchio and Geppetto and asking them about how thrilling must be to participate to an another amazing WSL event...

[alakaboo]

I like the way you think Julio

[Nick Carroll]

jeez this is all pretty forgettable isn't it.

[tootr]

Has any commentator said "chandelier barrel" yet?

[crabmeat thompson]

i tuned in for about 6 minutes today. cloudbreak looked like rio.


went back outside into the wind.

[Nick Carroll]

http://www.coastalwatch.com/surfing/216 ... r-rankings

Sean made me feel like I missed something

[godsavetheking]

^ it's a good write up. Honestly though, it's got to the point where I'm so bored of pro surfing that my only involvement with the comps is articles like that one and the ones that steve does for Beachgrit. Have barely watched a heat all year. It says something about the meagre fare on offer that someone like me - raised on a diet of avowedly pro-tour '80s seppo mags, willing to stand for hours on the beach watching shit heats in shit waves in the '90s, feeling like a kid at Christmas that events were being broadcast live and free in the '00s - is so utterly uninterested in any of it these days. If they can't make it appeal when they were pushing against an open door, what hope do they have of drawing in the non-surfing audience?

[steve shearer]

"raised on a diet of avowedly pro-tour '80s seppo mags,"

It's interesting to me that despite that and even a big push in the Kelly era, especially when Nick was editor of Surfing, that Pro surfing just never really took in the USA.
I'm amazed at the number of people `i meet from Florida, for instance, who have never heard of Kelly Slater. Just zero recognition.

I think there's a book in that.

[Nick Carroll]

well it's not that mysterious, most Americans have no contact whatsoever with the ocean, never mind surfing, so it was never gonna penetrate the US sporting consciousness in any lasting way. hell it was probably better known to US TV audiences in the late 1960s and 1970s through the ABC and NBC coverage of Fred Hemmings's events in Hawaii than it ever was in the 1990s or thereafter.

[steve shearer]

yeah, I don't mean middle America. I mean California and the East Coast: it's been a continual series of false starts and sputtering fade outs.
And they had Curren, and then Kelly and it still couldn't take hold.

It never really took hold of the US surfing culture the way it did in Australia.

[Nick Carroll]

Like it has taken for long periods within the surf culture in the US. In Kelly's first incarnation during the 1990s, membership of the ASP skyrocketed to numbers never seen before or since. Most of those numbers were added from the USA. There were significantly more members of the organisation then than there are today.

But yeah, mainland US has had an up and down relationship with professional surfing despite providing a heap of cash for it via the surf industry in the past. In fact for most of the past 50 years or so the two mainland surfing coasts have been very distant cousins, almost different countries in many ways. EC has been a fair bit more pro pro surfing than WC for a lot of that time.

[Nick Carroll]

If they can't make it appeal when they were pushing against an open door, what hope do they have of drawing in the non-surfing audience?

Well pretty much none right now I reckon.

[steve shearer]

California Worlds 7th largest economy with 39 million people and surfing as its main leitmotif can sustain 1 CT and that has changed hands on several ocassions........the whole of the USA can sustain one CT.
While pissant Australia with 25 million can easily hold and sustain 3 for extended periods.


But pro surfing. Maybe you've outgrown it Godsave.
The aussie leg was sick, best start to a tour year ever.

Brazil was lame and this Cloudy comp has been very patchy.

I got a feeling J-Bay will go ballistic if they get swell. John Florence is chafing at a very short leash. As is Jordy.

[The Mighty Sunbird]

For me it's all about the waves. I watched as much of margs as I could. A little less bells and snapper. Five minutes of rio, ditto today. I hope teahupoo and Hawaii get swell, don't care much for France or trestles

Oh, I used to watch to see Kelly surf, now I watch to see JJF surf. Mick and Parko bore the shit out of me and I find the majority of the others indistinguishable. I'm a committed surfer, so people who don't surf surely will never watch at all

[godsavetheking]

But pro surfing. Maybe you've outgrown it Godsave.

Perhaps. I certainly don't really care who wins any more, which I suppose is a fatal disconnect.