Surf Reporter John Charlton admits he is the guy responsible for leaving a “15-cm long” gash that nearly “scalped” 12-year-old Matt Nicol after running him over while surfing at Noosa’s First Point on Sunday but he says he didn’t do it on purpose, according to a story in Australia’s The Daily.
In the Daily yesterday, Peter Nicol, who did not see the incident and was acting on reports from beachogers, alleged the adult surfer who had hit Matt appeared to deliberately change direction and run over the boy. . . Mr Charlton said nothing could be further from the truth.. . “It was purely an accident,” he said. . . .“I was going in on my last wave and was trying to hold my line to avoid him and he ducked right under me. . . “There was backwash and it pinned my rail down. If I had tried to bail out, I could have hit 10 people.
According to Mr. Nicol witnesses told him that Charlton had been involved in “several run ins before hitting Matt.”
Australian surf writers Tim Baker, Nick Carroll, and Sean Doherty will be speaking on a panel at the Sydney Writer’s Festival being held May 18-24, 2009. The event titled High Surf takes place May 23, 2009. Here’s what their website says about the discussion:
From Puberty Blues to Tim Winton’s Breath, surfing and surf culture continues to hold a valuable place in the Australian cultural landscape. Indeed, as the surfing community has become a broad church, surfing seems to have become the image, metaphor and recreational choice for our times. Surfing writers Tim Baker, Nick Carroll and Sean Doherty paddle you deep into the turbulent waters of the world of surfing and surf writing, with John Meredith.
Although we enjoy the creative output from the group of surfing brothers known simply as “The Malloys” we still can’t help but write silly captions in our heads whenever we see posed, wistful group photos like this one on the Nixon site promoting their work in a new documentary film on surfing in Ireland titled Waveriders. But we don’t want to play this game alone.
We’ll kick it off with ours:
Three tools escape from their shed.
Post your captions in the comments and the person with the best caption will win something.
Santa Cruz surfer Sam Skelton, 24, and his friend Ryan Mackey apparently had a little nose to nose with a Great White shark last week while surfing at Platform’s, according to his first person story in the San Jose Mercury News.
While waiting for a set, a dark, large object in the water catches my peripherals. There, within eight feet of me, placed still in the water, the ocean’s most infamous predatory fish — a great white shark. . . The clarity of the water allows me to see its gills, the speckled skin going from dark to light, and its sheer size, which looks about 10-12 feet long. Fear penetrates my bones, heightened from all the shark-week programs and cheesy TV dramatizations that hype the great white as vicious and bloodthirsty. . . . In a frenzy of four-letter words mixed with “shark,” “holy,” and “big,” I paddle parallel to the beach, directly away from the predator, passing Ryan, who does not know yet what all my commotion is about.
The two eventually paddle in yelling shark the entire way, but no one else seems to care. To get the full feeling of giddy relief read the rest of the story. . .
The municipality argues that surfers are a hazard to swimmers, but defenders of the sport claim they actually save lives, and that Friday’s tragedy illustrates their point. . . “There would have been surfers to pull out the person who drowned as we often do, but we were just too afraid to turn up, not knowing what to expect from the police and municipality,” said Danny Van Doreen, of Surf Dubai.
Surfers have been ticketed not just for surfing, but also for having surfboards on the beach or in their cars. The surfers say the beaches that have been closed to surfers are the only beaches which “benefit from swells generated by winds blowing down the Gulf,” and they have no place else to go.
And we have to admit, watching Brian Conley step off a moving ski onto a board (no straps) while holding a camera in his right hand, and then get barreled on a Boco Grande monster is just plain crazy. Check it out.
The Surfing Heritage Foundation is apparently running into a little opposition in Dana Point, California as organizers push for the proposed $30 million project to be built in what the OC Register describes as a “sprawling, passive park along Pacific Coast Highway and Niguel Road.”
It is the proposed park location that has locals a little upset. At the Surfing Heritage Museum Town Hall Meeting on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 many were not interested in seeing their open space replaced by a 30,000 square foot building no matter how cool its contents.
“For you surfers who didn’t want a freeway ruining your park in San Clemente, we don’t want a building ruining our park in Dana Point. We will support your surf museum, and you need to support open space,” McCabe said. . . Though the current plan met with much opposition at the meeting, some people supported the planned location. San Clemente resident Tom Morey, creator of the iconic Boogie Board, said Dana Point residents should trust their elected leaders, who should do all they can to put the museum in Dana Point.
The location had previously been approved by the City Council as the home of a new library in 2002, but plans to build it fell apart after the proposed $18 million project was denied a state grant. When the Surfing Heritage Foundation approached the city in 2007 with the idea of building a museum they inherited the conceptual plans for the formerly approved 33,300 square foot library. “Instead of books being there it’s going to be surfboards,” said foundation executive director Tom Pezman.”
We love the idea of the museum, and Dana Point is undoubtedly a perfect place for it, it’s just a tad ironic to see surfers fighting on the side of ripping out a park to put in a building.
Shocker: It was announced today that Andy Irons is joining Billabong’sKustom Footwear program. A “delighted” Kustom GM Harry Truscott has released this seemingly un-ironic statement:
‘Kustom and Andy Irons are a natural fit,’ says Harry Truscott, General Manager at Kustom Footwear. “Andy will be a huge addition to our team.”
Huge addition? Absolutely. Natural fit? Okay, if by “natural” Truscott means that AI is pretty much strapped to the Billabong wagon right now (not a bad wagon to be strapped to, but strapped is strapped) then his quote makes perfect sense.
Surf Reporter John Charlton admits he is the guy responsible for leaving a “15-cm long” gash that nearly “scalped” 12-year-old Matt Nicol after running him over while surfing at Noosa’s First Point on Sunday but he says he didn’t do it on purpose, according to a story in Australia’s The Daily.
