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HURLEY PRO TRESTLES: DAY TWO
Upset City as Kerrzy + Otton go crazy while Jordy, Bobby + Wardo bow out in fine Lowers
Not much happens in the Loser's Round. (Hence the name.) Especially on a mainly overcast, sorta dreary Monday. And today, after another nine-plus-hour, 19-heat slog in conditions that ranged from nearly-blistering Lowers walls to 20-minute-lull plagued heats -- both of which happened back-to-back -- we're not going to lie to you: nothing earth-shaking went down.
Of course that's not to say nothing happened.
Hell, there were a dozen or so exciting, get-off-the-chair, holy-cripes moments. Even the back-end of the ASP top 45 surf better than we ever will, and even average Lowers is most likely better than most of our local spots.
The morning started off better than yesterday: light south wind, and a pulsing medium-sized SW swell that was actually feeling the cobblestone reef, unlike yesterday's scattered, bending-out-to-sea WNW swell. Shoulder-high peaks would pop up and bend into the bay, allowing for all manner of modern surf trickery and flow.
CJ Hobgood was the first to take advantage; he nabbed 15+ points before most of us had choked down our coffee. (One good thing about the Loser's Round for guys like your correspondent and the other few dozen industry types who spent all day down here? Hardly any breakfast or lunch line. Yes, we know, it's the little things.)
Not much in the way of actual drama though, till Taylor Knox (one of the best Trestles' surfers on the planet) almost lost to Drew Courtney (who's probably only surfed here a dozen times). It was actually nerve-racking watching Taylor walk up the beach after the heat, head down, waiting for the scores to drop; he needed a 5.0 and ended up with a 5.1, which had the whole beach cheering. "It makes it more exciting," Taylor smiled afterwards. "It's good to take things down to the wire like that."
Fast forward to the next heat, Jordy Smith vs. Tiago Pires. One might think that Jordy, who's sort of becoming an honorary Lowers' local, would dispense with the Portuguese journeyman with ease. Tiago had other plans. He started busy and kept busy the whole freaking time, smoothly decimating any left that came his way. Surfline's Power Rankings co-author and USA Team coach Ian Cairns watched Pires' relentless backside attack from the scaffolding. "You gotta have passion to win these things," he pointed out. "Tiago has passion." Indeed. Great surfing alone may not always be enough to win heats.
Which takes us neatly into our next Moment, six heats later. Funnyman Dayyan Neve vs. Air Guy Josh Kerr. Despite never really doing well out here, Lowers is Kerrzy's kind of wave. And in Heat 15, he showed exactly why, launching airs where most surfers had been playing it safe, and linking 'em in to smooth bottom-turn-to-fins-free-top-turn combos. Neve, for his part, answered back with a series of well-executed carves, but was unable to catch the flying Queenslander, who netted the day's highest heat score.
We caught up with him after the heat-win, and he joked, "Stoked to do this. Helluva lot better than packing up and going home." Kerr's year looks like two 33rds, two 17ths and a 9th, so ending up in R4 means at least a year's best for the regularfoot.
"I'd been here the last couple of hours and in the heat before I saw that there were a few nice rights shaping up," Kerr said. "There seemed to be a few in our heat. Dayyan got a couple as well. That one wave wasn't the biggest wave, but it looked like it was going to connect down the line and that's exactly what it did. I raced down the line and popped a little air, came around, up and down, and it stayed wally for me and I gave it a little bang off of the end."
But that's not all, folks: Kerr got his chance to win again a few heats later, as he went up against nimble + quick goofyfoot Adrian 'Ace' Buchan. Their heat was dramatic, but in a mid-nineteenth century play kind of way. In other words, slow as hell at the beginning, followed by a flurry of activity at the end. Kerr beat Ace in the last minute with a 7.0 -- and a 1.23 he'd gotten at the beginning of the heat, for a whopping 8.23 over 7.76, the second lowest heat score of the day.
"I guess they're both exciting because both heats came down to the wire, just in different ways," Kerr said. "I had a good day, though. I had a good heat earlier and got to sit around and get cold in the second one, but I still came through with the win."
Other standouts today were pretty much all Aussies: Jay Thompson (who took his R2 heat but lost in R3), Bede Durbidge (who took down rampaging Saffa Davey Weare in R3) and Kai Otton. Otton was especially on fire, perhaps using a little bit of his J-Bay mojo out here at Lowers, beating Parko yesterday and taking down Jay Thompson in R3 today.
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September 14, 2009
