Mavericks surf contest canceled

On the Mavericks surf website this notice has just been posted:

2007 CONTEST WINDOW CLOSES
The waiting period for The 2007 Mavericks Surf Contest® presented by Ask.com® is officially over. Bad news for surfers and surf fans alike, but Mavericks is an unpredictable place, and Mother Nature calls the shots. It takes near perfect conditions – swell, winds, tides, and weather -- to create contest-worthy surf at Mavericks. This year, that perfect day never came.

This is certainly a major disappointment for many. Mavericks is a world-renowned big wave breaking place located one-half mile off the coast of Half Moon Bay, California and 20 miles south of San Francisco. As their website describes that Mavericks has been in the foreground of modern big-wave surfing since the early 1990s,

. . . attracting the most elite riders to test its limits each time it breaks. These riders are presented with waves that have crested at over 50 feet, remarkably strong currents, dangerously jagged rocks and shallow reefs, and frigid water temperatures. In summary, Mavericks is like no other place on the planet.

The contest takes place every winter during the period from new year to the end of March. Ther're usually large waves out there. But somehow this year the "world class swell" just refused to show up. So now the wait for '08 begins.



For us non-surfers or a desk surfer like me, however, we can always take comfort in this real life experience of an inspired surfer by Cathy Hamilton published in the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World this morning:

. . . I skip into the ocean, cold waves lapping at my legs. I wade out, deeper and deeper, until the water is chest-high. Off in the distance, a swell is building and heading toward me. It looks big.

I’m stoked!

“Surf’s up!” I cry and hoist myself onto the board, hugging it and bracing for the ride of my life.

The wave starts to curl downward. It’s a FREAKING TSUNAMI! I start to kick my legs and paddle furiously to get out in front of it.

Before I can cry “Banzai!” the wave crashes down, pitching me forward in a gnarly whirl of blinding, salty foam. The board flies out from under me and, after a two-second head-over-heels tumble, I land facedown on the beach. My hair completely covers my face. My swimsuit is twisted into a wad, and I’m swallowing sand.

Something tells me I didn’t exactly rip it.

This rather humorous description of an esxciting but not so humorous experience is a master piece. I, for one who has never dreamed to be a surfer and is not waiting for the Mavericks '08, can certainly fully empathize what she went through! May be if I were much younger, I might have a part of me to think why not try it some time. But it is more than a humorous adventure, it can be much worse than swallowing sand. Anyway my nerve is definitely not made to do something like that!