I’m gonna be honest with you people. It’s half past midnight here in France. I was on the beach from 8am til 7ish. I feel like my eyes are going to fall off, a decidedly uneven tan is forming and I’m having trouble forming coherent sentences. Not because I am drunk- it’s just been a long, sun-baking, booby-admiring, aerial-wafting, upset-happening, Dane-worshipping, crowd-pleasing day… and it’s hard to put a whole day of the Quik Pro France into words when you’re yawning and you’ve got to be back at the comp in six and a bit hours.
The decision to run in the not good surf was postponed by sending out the King of the Groms comp to test the water for a few hours. Finally come 11 the WT kicked in and the first heat was closely observed as to whether enough decent waves were coming through. If you were Bede it was fine, if you were Mushie it was flat. Then Dane went in on a copy of a Machado twin-fin and everyone forgot about whining about the surf as he did things to those little waves that bordered on the obscene. Watch the ‘On Demand’ vid of the heat. The third turn on his first wave can only be described as visceral. His second wave’s flawless roundhouse with a little tail tweak on the rebound into an air was poetry and they didn’t even show you his air-reverse on the clip… That’s the kind of shit that puts photographers and event peeps in a good mood in the a.m. -even when two coffee machines have no coffee, two have vanished into thin air and another is supplied only with foofy fruit teas.
So there’s the main news- Dane/Parko. What of that Kelly fellow and the other title hunters? Well I don’t know much about the maths but of the ten guys sniffing Parko’s ring on the ratings eight of them are still in the event. So that’s a 9th minimum for them all and the gap is gonna narrow. Kelly got another fright from local kid Joan Duru (who beat him in Rd1 last year) who opened up with a 9.17 and Slats only eased the massive baying crowd by pulling it back at the end of the heat. But the real Kelly news is the crowd. It’s always been scary but this year it’s gone beyond reason. During Parko’s heat a large crowd was forming on the beach north of the comp site- Kelly had gone for a quick warm up surf- he got out to come back for his heat they all followed and to a man stood at the waters edge. All lined up in one big photographers nightmare. If he ever want to start a revolution or something France is the place for it as he has a large mobile army of fans who come for his heats and his heats alone. I’m still slightly traumatised by it all.
Anyway. Its 1a.m. I’m going to bed. I reckon they’ll finish tomorrow. Not because the surfs great but purely because like today it’s a weekend and bums on the beach means… errr, I don’t know what it means, I thought the era of crappy small beachbreak surf and big crowds was the 80s?
