Pittwater Life April 2019 Issue

PL’s APRIL SURF CALENDAR
April 3-13: WSL CT double header, Snapper Rocks, Qld
The world championship opening round for both men and women.
There’s a lot of story threads here just waiting to be picked
up: Kelly Slater’s last tour year, the brilliant Brazilian push, some
great rookies coming into play, and a new team in charge of the
whole thing’s appearance on broadcast. It’s all slightly intensified
by this year’s late start; the WSL has pushed it back to fit with
a late start to the Bells event at Easter. As always though, the
whole show will depend on surf, and while solid surf is expected
immediately pre-event, it’s a bit hard to call further in. Watch at
worldsurfleague.com or on Fox Sports.
April 17-27: WSL CT double header, Bells Beach, VIC
Number two, right on the heels of number one. This is the latest
Easter in many years and while that usually signals fantastic surf,
the slow turning of seasons may mean a few dead days on the Surf
Coast. Let’s just wait and see.
NICK’S APRIL SURF FORECAST
I think I am supposed to have a crystal ball for this job. Instead I have
the fabulous services of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, which not only detects everything happening in the
lower atmosphere and ocean surfaces of the globe, but feeds it all
into gigantic mega super computers and lets AI software do the
rest. Even with all that, it still only sees a week or so ahead with any
certainty, but that’s enough for a long-term surf watcher to pick up
on trends, and right now, the trend is kind of backwards. Autumn
is upon us, but it isn’t really, not yet. April will very likely feel more
like February: unseasonally warm and humid, some instability
(thunderstorms etc), possibly a black nor-easter at some point, and
a wobbly array of surf focused awkwardly across the Australian east
coast. Expect sluggish easterly swells, maybe a dramatic southerly
or two, weak sea-breezes, and generally a feeling of being out-ofseason.
There’s a real bomb of a month out there somewhere but
April probably isn’t it.
Nick Carroll
Surfing Life
a treat. Gunther is an
underground design legend,
the equivalent of a great
session musician. He pulled
down a pre-shape of a model
he calls the Lazy Wilfred, a fullnosed
squashtail with a clean,
plain-ish vee bottom. Did he
know a Lazy Wilfred? “I do
actually. He used to work for
me,” Gunther said dryly.
He played with the Lazy
Wilfred for a while, pointing out
fin positions and explaining
the value of a vee in a wider
board – “helps tip it from rail
to rail”. He then started in
on a 5’11” Timmy Patterson
design. Timmy is a Californian
designer who has a trans-Pacific
exchange deal with Gunther,
and who designs board for
the Brazilian superstar Italo
Ferreira. I asked Gunther if this
was an Italo Special and he just
grinned. “There’s a lot of tail
curve here,” he said. “I guess he
needs that, for the ends of his
turns.”
People began paying
The Local Voice Since 1991
attention. I wondered if
they knew what they were
seeing. Italo Ferreira is the
most brilliantly electric and
creative surfer in the world
right now, a serious world title
threat in 2019, and here was
a board Italo might just as
well be about to ride. Was that
something you could convey
to people as they strolled by
on the Manly promenade on
a sunny Friday, all bikinis and
sunglasses and composedly
relaxed appearance?
But like I said, Gunther is
good. As he worked, he talked
the small crowd through the
purpose of concave, and
through the need for a rail to
achieve transition from soft to
razor-hard smoothly, so as to
preserve speed and not blunt
the waterflow.
Waterflow? It’s like any other
kind of flow, really. “You put
something into a board, you’ve
gotta take something out,”
he said, and for a moment, it
sounded like Zen wisdom.
APRIL 2019 43