Rampant Saffa Surfers

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Excellent surf at the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast saw the start of the men’s division at first light. Durban’s Travis Logie, who had been suffering from a mild dose of food poisoning from some ‘dodgy sushi’ was up in the second heat of the day. Four-foot waves poured down the Superbank at Snapper Rocks, somewhat flat but highly contestable, and Travis was up against Adriano De Souza (Brazil) and Dusty Payne from Hawaii. Both Adriano and Dusty are natural footed surfers, surfing with their left feet forward and thus facing the right-hand waves of Snapper, while Travis was the lone goofy-footer in the water.

It was a close heat, with waves pouring through, and up until the last few minutes Travis was coming last, needing a combination of scores to even it up

It was a close heat, with waves pouring through, and up until the last few minutes Travis was coming last, needing a combination of scores to even it up. “I saw this wave coming through and it was a good one, going wide. I saw the other two guys were too deep, and the wave just gifted itself to me.” Travis scored an 8.93, and less than two minutes later picked up another excellent ride to score a heat highest score of 9.27, winning the heat comfortably.

“I’m tired,” said Travis after the heat. “There’s a wash down the beach, and I’ve got a bit of a tummy bug, but so stoked for the win and for those two waves.”

Travis is an evergreen member of the elite World Championship Tour of surfing, and when asked what his goals are for the year, he replied that, “This year I want to win a big event, I want to win an event on the World Tour.”

Travis was struggling in the heat. “I was totally combo’ed with about 6 minutes to go,” said Travis, “Then I had a few minutes of glory and ended up comboing everyone else.”

“I haven’t surfed a heat in two months, I’ve been over in Cali and haven’t surfed much, I’ve been training but it’s been a bit cold to surf and the waves haven’t been very good, but I got here with a week to go and surfed as much as I could,” said Logie of his training regime. “I actually woke up today a bit sick from that dodgy sushi I mentioned earlier and didn’t have an early morning free surf, so I just paddled out in my heat and got the job done.   

Former world champion Martin Potter said from the commentator booth that Travis one of the most exciting surfers in the water so far at this event. “He went from last place to first place in less than two minutes,” said Potter. “If he could do that sort of thing all the way through the event he could win it.” Travis scored a 9.27 and an 8.93 for a heat total of 18.20, the highest heat score of the day, so maybe this is where Travis gets that win he so deserves.

Jordy Smith followed suit in the last heat of the day. Up against the valiant rookie Glenn Micro Hall and former world champion CJ Hobgood, Jordy was trailing through the opening half of the heat, looking for a good, walled-up wave. In the background, Micro was chipping away, getting decent points on the scoreboard. Such a wave came to Jordy.

“You really need to look for the ‘growers’ out there,” said Jordy of the conditions. “They’re quite hard to find out there. At Jeffreys, for example, you can see the waves that are going to push all the way down to Impossibles, but out here some of the little one-footers end up being the growers and they end up like three to four-foot down at the bottom with all the scoring potential."

Jordy found two of them for scores of 9.63 and 8.30 respectively, to take the heat and the second highest heat score of the day.

With some much surfing and aerial excitement, there is little talk of the recent Quiksilver executive and team rider shuffles and cutbacks, less talk of the poor Billabong earnings of last quarter, and no mention of the fact that Rip Curl is for sale.

Quite the opposite is taking place in fact. The pop-up stores at the contest site are so busy that it’s hard to squeeze in there, even just to hide from the rain, (did I tell you it’s been raining? Pissing cats and dogs is a good term here) and Kirra Surf, a huge multi-brand store down the drag at Kirra, seems to also be doing a roaring trade, including in their board department.

Having said that, this is probably quite a busy retail period what with the contest on and all, but on the surface, it seems that it’s (brisk) business as usual.