At this year’s Hurley US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, 10 of the world’s best surfers including four World Champions Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning, C.J. Hobgood and Andy Irons plus six others surfers – voted on by you – will attend the event and participate in all the All-Star related activities.
Carlsbadistan’sTaylor Knox is on the list of nominees and we need your help making sure he makes the list. Click here and vote for Taylor.
Where are we going to be on this Memorial Day weekend? Well, on Saturday May 23, 2009 from 9 AM to 1 PM? We’ll be down at Ponto trying out some of Al Merrick’s latest Channel Island’s creations, that is if you all don’t check them out before us.
Okay, we actually like this one. The endless feathering on this wave is hypnotic. . . at least when those on-shores are blasting up Elm CVD. Nice work, Bryan.
Carlsbadistan surfer Ricky Whitlock, 22, takes Surfline.com readers on a little tour of all of his favorite Carlsbadistan spots in and audio/visual treat titled: Around Town with Ricky Whitlock.
What are his favorites? Beach City Smoothies, The Grand Deli, Calavera Hills Community Park, Lola’s “is my number one out of everywhere,” Mikko Sushi, Dini’s “most of the time I’m there it’s a drunken blur,” Norte, Pizza Port “we’ve been running amuck at Pizza Port since we learned to walk,” and The Whitlock Compound.
Click the link to hear it in Ricky’s own words with epic Carlsbad photos from Billy Watts. (Thanks to our favorite News Tipper for alerting us to something we really should have already seen.)
Carlsbadistan surfer Cori Schumacher, 31, won the longboard division in the Tidal 9 Women’s Pipeline Pro this week on the North Shore of Oahu, according to a story in the Honolulu Advertiser. It was her first time surfing Pipe on a longboard.
“It’s what I expected — it’s difficult, but still a lot of fun,” said Schumacher, 31. “But what this contest is doing is showing other girls that it can be done. You’re going to start seeing a lot more women out there, and the performance level is going to skyrocket.” . . .”The spirit of the event was the most important thing,” she said. “And it benefitted the Girl Scouts of Hawai’i, so you can’t go wrong with that.”
Congrats, Cori. Nice work. We’re stoked, but not all that surprised.
San Diego Union-Tribune surfing writer Brad Melekian visits Carlsbadistan’s southern most beach in his latest column and considers the rapid changes that are coming to one of his favorite surf breaks.
As things you can park your car on go, I’d always found this particular patch of sand on the south side of the Ponto Jetties in Carlsbad to be fairly remarkable. . . Of course, it was not remarkable. It was a patch of sand. But it existed – until two weeks ago – as a place where you could park your vehicle, step out barefoot with sand between your toes, climb a small dune and check the surf.
Melekian laments (along with many of us) the changes the Ponto Vision Plan will bring and what he’ll soon see when looking back at the beach from the water. It’s not going to be pretty. Click the link to read the rest.
Joey Buran began surfing 1973 and went on to become one of the best surfers ever to come from Carlsbadistan. Now, 36 year’s later Joey is joining Quiksilver co-founder Jeff Hakman, Endlesss Summer director Bruce Brown, and surfer Pat O’Connell as inductees into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame on Friday, July 24, 2009 in front of Huntington Surf & Sport in Huntington Beach, California.
Buran began life landlocked in the mid-west (Cleveland), but moved to Carlsbad in 1972. He started surfing in 1973 at the age of 12 and by 1975 was already ranked as the top amateur surfer in California. After turning pro in 1978 Buran defeated Rabbit Bartholomew in his inaugural man-on-man event, won his first pro title in Oceanside and reached the final round of the Pipeline Masters in Hawaii defeating, among others, two-time reigning champion Rory Russell. He received the nickname “California Kid” from ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
Since then Buran has worked mostly as a pastor with Calvary Chapel and in 2007 became the head coach of the US National Surf Team. Congrats, Joey. You’ve done Carlsbad proud.
Carlsbadistan pro surfer Ricky Whitlock is featured in the new issue of Surfing Magazine in a story titled, Players: Confessions from five of surfing’s most notorious bachelors. But it doesn’t look like everyone in the surf world thinks it’s cool. Especially the blog Postsurf.com. Here’s what we mean:
But my favorite story came from young Ricky Whitlock, a Carlsbad D-list pro surfer who you’ve probably never heard of. . . . Ricky recounts one of his greatest exploits for Surfing: “I got this call at 11pm on a weekday night. It was a bunch of girls on the phone and they’re like ‘We’re drinking and hanging out and we want you to come over.’ I thought it was a setup, but since they weren’t far from where I was, I went anyway.” . . . Ricky goes on to describe how three girls answer the door, throw him on the couch, and start kissing him. But instead of going along with it, Ricky tells them “I need to at least have a drink to slow my heart down.” . . . Likely translation: “I’m being suffocated by three homely hippos with mustaches and unibrows. I need to be absolutely shit-faced to follow through with this.”
With 20 to 25 mile per hours winds blowing sand down the beach, the conditions were perfect for kite surfing. This afternoon four guys were out ripping the waves and launching thirty feet into the air. The wind was blowing so hard that anything laid down on the sand would be buried in 10 minutes.
If you have a Carlsbad news story, press release, event, rumor, or scandal that we'd be interested in (and there are a lot of them), please click the link to send them to The Editors.
Or just search the site to see if we've mentioned it before, right here.
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