Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries:
Remember those days when you had to be able to decipher a weather map to score decent waves? Understanding the dark art of reading isobar maps meant you could often pinpoint the best sessions with very few others dialed into the waves. Well, those days are over and I have to say it's a shame for surfing.
Modern forecasting sites seem intent on not only revealing the wind shifts and swell profiles in great detail, but actually promoting the best surf events on social media as well. The navel-gazing corporates behind this behaviour seem determined to suck any form of mystery right out of surfing and surf discovery.
This weekend's east north east swell was a great example. It was compounded by the swell angle not suiting most of the north coast point breaks. That meant The Spit was the go to for nearly every surfer in Otago. And, yes, it looked amazing and was great for photography. But I have never seen it so crowded. And I've never seen so many surfers prepared to burn others to get a wave. It was chaos. I saw three or four people dropping in on some of the set waves. Just madness. Guys locked in barrels and shoulder hoppers bringing down the walls on them.
Some of the peaks looked more like a mirror image of Snapper Rocks on the Gold Coast. Even swimming I had to have one eye on the guys gunning it for the shoulder of the waves for fear of being run over.
In between, some amazing rides went down, but it was unanimously agreed to be way harder to surf than it looked. Even some of our very best surfers came in frustrated.
It was good to see some of the groms charging out there including Keo and his mate, local ripper Fletcher Melville. They're both 13 and charging hard chasing barrels as was Max Wooffindin, who is only 10! Good to see a bunch of the young girls paddling into some of the bigger sets too with Rosa Barson and Sari Ayson making the most of the swell.
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS We had a couple of issues with one of our online payment providers last week and some customers never received a confirmation of their order and others encountered a very buggy checkout process. This was something to do with our PayPal configuration and so we are in the process of moving to another provider. Apologies if this affected you. We'll have this sorted this week. In the meantime you can drop into see us at the gallery where we have eftpos. Yay, love technology ... when it works.
Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries: