30 July – Somewhere, Indonesia: The opening ceremony yesterday certainly pleased the swell gods tremendously, as the dawn revealed what most have called the best day of the year at the secondary “Somewhere” lefthand reefbreak of the Rip Curl Pro Search, where the worlds best surfers got shacked, shot out, and shut down on solid 5-6 foot Indo barrels all day long today.
Joel Parkinson, Andy Irons, Bruce Irons, Mick Fanning and of course Kelly Slater displayed some amazing surfing today. Kelly’s double barrel, first on his backhand and then switchfooting it to ride forehand and a sick tripling up wave, exiting to even carve a nice turn at the end…well, what can you say? A 10 and 9.17 was it?
Indonesian wildcard Rip Curl Cup winner Komang Sujaya was in the same heat, and probably would have rather been watching from the front rather than the back. But he had fun and hey, just to be out in the water with Kelly would be something any of us would be stoked about.
And speaking of wildcards, Made “Garut” Widiarta did a pretty good job in the water today, not able to do much about the insanely deep tubes Bruce Irons was pulling in and out of all heat long, but did himself proud getting second over Taj Burrow. That’s a good story to tell the boys about over a beer tonite eh?
The surfers had been told the night before to be ready for a 7 am start, but after checking the conditions Contest Director Damian Hardeman elected to move to the site that where the waves were the absolute sickest, and that was the secondary location. Not that the primary location was that bad, it was going off also, but since location 2 rarely breaks and even more rarely like it was shaping up to do today, it was in the true spirit of competing in “the worlds best waves” that the decision was made to start at 10 am at location 2.
A full16 heats were run, with the final one just as the sun was nearly set over Indian Ocean at just after 6 pm.
With a live webcast, people all over the world were enjoying the action, well, most of the time anyways. The internet infrastructure being what it is here in Indonesia there were some down times, and things didn’t’ always go according to plan, but for most of us watching live I think I can safely say it doesn’t get much better than this…ever! Even if you missed a few minutes here and there. The goods were certainly produced today.
Tomorrow standby call is for 7 am at the primary location. It would be miracle of the waves were still good tomorrow at location two, especially in light of the fact that the forecast is calling for slightly smaller waves, but who knows? What happened today was a bit of a miracle in itself, wasn’t it!
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