Check the lines sweeping up the coast.

sunrise corduroy. Winter forever.

More lines.

Not that much size.

The post Ships Log. Jun19, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

Looks a little underwhelming in the photos.

Perfectly clean.

The post Ships Log. Jun18, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

It’s not quite this this morning. But not too far off.

Perfect winters morning with cool westerly and long lines of swell sweeping up from the S. Byron buoy hasn’t really kicked too much from when it first started registering the swell and is holding pretty steady at around 2m HSig with periods in the 10-11 second band. That’s translating to an inconsistent 2-3ft on the points with bigger, unrulier surf at S facing beaches. Definitely some surf to be had but keep expectations tempered. It’s not pumping, just a nice winters day for surfing.  Sorry no photo, batteries died on the hill. The photo is from a couple weeks ago.

The post Ships Log. Jun17, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

You can see the new S swell overlaying the dying E swell.

Tasty little peak.

Winter light.

The post Ships Log. Jun15, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

Clean and long lined.

Room to move.

winter noka oi.

The post Ships Log. Jun15, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

Clean, peaky combination swell with all day offshores.

How clear is that winter light for a change. No cloud bank on the horizon. Combination swell clearly visible.

Could a wave look any prettier than this back-lit little peeler?

Got trigger finger this morning because it was so dolled up.

Thar she blows. Call early and call loud when ye see the white whale.

This set is more from the ENE/NE. Hint.

The post Ships Log. Jun15, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

Slater victories make me happy, in the same way listening to Mozart does, or absorbing the colour and light of a Van Gogh painting or watching birds on the wing, witnessing a rosy sky at dawn, a flash of lightning in the summer sky. Human beings seem prey to all kinds of nihilism,  technology is tyrannical, our gadgets become not tools, but masters. They own us. We become them. Our interactions, our meaning is now mediated through cyber-space and blinking screens. Human experience is becoming narrower, more machine-like. Seen in this light, a Slater victory is revolutionary. The “thing itself”, which is the interaction of human and force of nature can’t be imitated by technology. Simulacrums of this experience will arise as wavepools become prevalent, thus we become more beholden to technology, thus we move inexorably towards a post-human future. We are all agents in this. Whoa, we are tripping out bubba.

There was none of this idle thought last night. I was miles away from the nearest Pro Surfer, hunkered down at a run-down bar nestled in mosquito swarming bush next to a river in a dishevelled market town. The kind of town where Fiji’s workers, the ones who’s rights have been stripped by Cranky Frank’s decrees, live when they aren’t waiting on white people for 3 bucks an hour. It’s hard to believe that somewhere on the other side of those impossibly perfect images beamed around the world there is a shadow land where these majestic people are getting royally screwed over. But there is, and I was right in the heart of it.

(http://destinationfiji.org/about/)

Frank’s aim is to open up Fiji like Bali. That’s why he needed to dismantle the land rights provisions of native Fijians. Open slather is the goal and it’s likely to be the result. For good or ill. Pro surfing and it’s fans won’t give a fuck if Fijians becomes not much more than indentured servants for the capricious desires of well heeled tourists. It’s a strange world we live in shipmates. For every winner there seems ten losers. Maybe this is merely the natural order of things.

Shooting some stick with Rick, well oiled up under dim lighting. The atmosphere was masculine. Fijian men were drinking, we were drinking. A florid faced white man, a veteran of the tropics, on a table with what could easily have been a prostitute, certainly much younger. Some south pacific reggae music on the jukebox.

The game finished and I handed the cue to a large Fijian man. He looked down at me, leaned over and in my ear said “Why you call me a cunt?”.

I thought he was joking.

“I ah, I didn’t say that”

“You call me a cunt, why?”

“Sorry mate, I didn’t say that”.

I scurried away with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The guy was huge.

I told Rick and he laughed it off.

I snuck a glance over at the man. He was glaring at me. Shit.

Over the next couple of hours a strange dance ensued. He was slowly stalking me around the pool tables. He would walk around and I would try and keep as much distance between us as possible, yet he continued to ever so surely keep tracking towards me.

Rick thought it was hilarious. Watching this behemoth stalk the little whitey around the pub.

“The jail is close by here”, he said, “he’s probably fresh out from rape and murder”.

“Christ” I said “can’t we get the fuck out of here, this is killing me. This guy wants to tear me limb from limb”.

“Alright, one more drink”.

I drank the beer in a building state of fear. My nemesis had seemed to become more single minded in his pursuit and wore a deepening expression of murderous intent. There could be no doubt he was pursuing me and me alone around the Pub.

“C’mon for fucks sake. I’ve got kids mate”.

We left the bar and strode across the dirt carpark, hemmed in by tangled cottonwood and rubbish. We got in Ricks beaten up toyota. He started to roll one up.

“Can’t you do that when you get home” I said.

Suddenly there was a loud bang on the roof.

“Lock the doors!” Rick shouted.

My predator was lurching around the car, banging on the roof and shaking the car.

Before long he had friends.

Rick started the car and hit the gas, spinning gravel in the carpark. The back window exploded in a loud smash as a large rock hit the car.

“Holy fuck!……”

Rick burst out laughing.

“Welcome to Fiji…you think it’s all kava and happy times hhhhahahahahahah”. I guarantee you it was a bit different to how the Pros spent the night.

Back across the Coral Sea. The surf industry remains floundering and nothing has changed. Slater has picked up GoPro, not a damn thing has changed either way for a single recreational surfer on the Planet. The juggernaut rolls on, despite the cries of protest or triumph from desiccated soviets of the spirit hurling anguish at computer screens. Such is life. We are all playthings of historical forces, pieces of a fate which belongs to the whole, one is in the whole. To condemn one piece of fate is to condemn the whole. But nothing exists apart from the whole!

Inner perspective from Ernst Mach, the father of relativity.

Onto Bali. There will be surf but tradewinds will be problematic for Keramas. A Bukit  back-up location would have made good sense. One tip for the Einstein who wrote the copy for the Oakley website. Bali is not in the South Pacific. Never has been. Not since Gondwanaland anyhow.

I won’t be going to Bali; last minute negotiations with the Indonesian authorities have broken down despite some powerful advocacy from high ranking Balinese tourist figures who are fond of holidaying in the Northern NSW hinterland. I don’t mind. A bit of rest. Bit of a spell in the Lennox paddock and see how we go for Tahiti. We’ll still lay down some track for Bali. Check back in and  see what happens. Thanks for reading. It’s been emotional.

The post The Outsider: Fiji Epilogue. The Fog of Sport. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

Hows that for a winter-time line-up.

There is some height in some of that windswell.

The post Ships Log. Jun13, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

We live in the Age of Slater. That must be accepted as self-evident truth. The crustiest die hard living in the remotest corner of the Earth knows of his achievements; the bitterest foes of Pro Surfing get bed sores from sitting on sweaty faux leather chairs while his heats are on. Such is life. He is as inexorable as the tide.

We gave fair warning that given equal opportunity today he would have learned from waves attempted and not made yesterday. Those mistakes were nothing but mental challenges solved deep in the sub-conscious mind of the champ while he lay sleeping through another balmy tropical night. Which he duly did on the way to laying down the most dominant display in Pro Surfing history. Let others rejoice in the numbers; they were close to perfect, even if the judges finally lost what was left of their minds as they succumbed to the force majeur of a full blown kelly-gasm. His last ten was no ten, but in the end that point was moot.

The only opponent who had the skills, attitude and composure to come close to him, John John Florence was systematically dismantled by scoreboard pressure placed immediately on the young Hawaiian and the force of psychological pressure as the champ put his bald dome continually up in Florence’s grill. Florence was never in the heat. The anti-climax was deliberately engineered and the downstream consequences at Pipeline as Slater carries a favourable winning record against Florence could be profound. It was a victory that will resonate.

Heats apart from Slaters, with the exception of Florence’s dominating display against Smith, looked paltry and second rate. No disrespect to Fanning but he wasn’t the surfer capable of besting Slater in the Final. Only a rampaging Florence had that ability and he was already gone.

Fanning skipped to an early lead on a wave Slater was just a notch too deep for. It could have been the mistake to derail momentum but Slater parried into the second wave, an outrageous Teahupoo style drain pipe which he stood no hands in and copped serious punishment. That was emblematic of Slaters mastery. It wasn’t the waves he made that most spiked blood level visceral reactions but the ones he didn’t; the ones he attempted. The ones no-one else over two majestic days at Cloudbreak could get next to, let alone attempt themselves. In doing so he had to absorb continuing bomb blasts of serious punishment on the most dangerous section of the reef. It was equal parts mindfulness and pure courage to continue to charge the squarest and throatiest waves when the consequences had been so demonstrably revealed.

He may have feet of clay, he may have appalling judgment when it comes to wavepools and engaging in business dealings with disreputable sharks. He may have a moral blindspot the size of Texas when it comes to Monsanto and the links it has with his own major sponsor in which he owns substantial stock holdings….but that is tangential to the scintillating performance he put on today and symptomatic of the post social media world we live in. If he chooses to construct his own digital narrative then he must accept the slings and arrows which follow. A more profound consideration perhaps is why we would expect sports stars or artists to be role models in the first place. Isn’t their role in society to enlarge the boundaries of the human condition not act as moral bulwarks for the existing order? In that sense we celebrate what Slater was able to achieve today in the realm of surfing. A magnificent tension of skill and opportunity: and with so tense a bow, able to aim arrows at the most distant targets. We may have not yet seen the most distant of these targets. Today was distant enough for most lifetimes. We’ll never see the likes of him again. Lucky indeed are those alive to witness the feats of R.K Slater.

Lets come back tomorrow and post mortem this thing properly sports fans. For now, I’m off to a dive bar in the market town of S to down a few Fiji Bitters with Rick. Bula. Vinaka.

The post The Outsider. When Good Times Turn Good. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.

Grey skies, small sloppy surf.

Small, sloppy surf pt.2

The post Ships Log. Jun12, 2013. appeared first on The FreeRide Voice.