HAWAII, FLORIDA

Pe'ahi yesterday

North Shore a few days ago

The Bay yesterday

!

Florida???...

YESTERDAY IN HALF MOON BAY

CROWN JEWEL EVENT

Big Wave World Tour

The Official Yellow Light has been issued for theXpreshon Big Wave World Tour's Crown Jewel Event, the Body Glove Mavericks Invitational Presented byGoPro. An official "Green Light" will be made in the next 24 hours. Competitors, sponsors, staff are all starting to arrive. Good warm-up swell in the water at Mavericks right now.

YESTERDAY EVENING/SANTA CRUZ

The following break has met, or is expected to meet, your Surf Alert® requirements:

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LOCATION: C Street

Conditions:
Date: Friday Jan 24: 07:00 AM
Surf: 12 - 14ft

Trigger:
Surf Height:  Greater Than 8 ft.
Lookahead:  96 hrs 

Best of the best.

GREG LONG / INCOMING

Good time for the Eddie, Maverick and Nelscott contests?

Big-Wave Surfer Greg Long

After nearly drowning, a big-wave surfer comes back to win his sport’s biggest title.

"As I was dangling from the basket of the Coast Guard helicopter, being lifted from the middle of the ocean in huge seas after basically drowning, I said to myself, 'There’s no way. I’m done. Thank you for this second chance at life. I don’t need big-wave surfing anymore,' " remembers 30-year-old Greg Long. That day, he vowed he would never surf big waves again.

On December 21, 2012, Long had just dropped into a massive 25-foot wave at Cortes Bank, 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, when fellow surfer Garrett McNamara unknowingly dropped in on top of him, cutting him off and causing him to fall. The inflatable bladder, essentially an airbag in the back of his wetsuit, failed to deploy when he pulled the cord that activates the CO2 cartridge. He managed to hold his breath long enough to crawl up his leash to the tail of his surfboard, but the board was still submerged in aerated water, which prevented him from catching a breath before he blacked out. Three consecutive waves pinned him underwater.

Despite his initial reaction to the accident, not only did Long go back to riding big waves, he went on to earn the title of Big Wave World Champion less than a year later when he won the 2012-'13 Big Wave World Tour, a yearlong competition in which the world's top 12 big-wave surfers get as little as 72 hours notice to buy a ticket to sanctioned big-wave competition sites around the world. They surf waves a minimum of 30 feet high. Long put a lot of thought into his decision to return to big-wave surfing, but ultimately, he came back to the reason he started in the first place.

"It's always been my passion to explore this, and where I really feel alive," Long says. "I wanted to find my physical and mental potential as a human being—that was the avenue by which I was exploring it. So I decided I was going to go back."

"We grew up in the water," Long says of himself and his older brother, Rusty, also a pro surfer, and sister, Heather. They were raised in San Clemente, California, by a beach-enthusiast mother and a lifeguard father who started taking his kids out on the front of his surfboard before they knew how to swim. Long started surfing at ten years old. He fell in love with the excitement and challenge of big-wave surfing. By 15, he knew he wanted to ride the biggest waves in the world. He’s spent the second 15 years meticulously training his body and mind to do just that.

Long tracked swells obsessively. He swam, ran, or biked every day for cardio fitness. He did breath-holding drills in pools. Under certain conditions, he can hold his breath for up to five minutes. He practiced yoga for strength and flexibility, and to better understand and control his thoughts and fears.

"Everything revolved around me being physically prepared, mentally prepared, tracking the swells, traveling, going from one place to the next and continuing to push myself. If you ask any of my friends or family, it was 24/7. It literally consumed my life," Long says.

Long's all-consuming and thoughtful preparation earned him gold medals at the 2003 Red Bull Big Wave Africa, at Mavericks in 2008, at the 2009 Eddie Aikau event, the 2013 Big Wave World Tour, and more category wins at the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards than any other surfer. It also saved his life that day at Cortes Bay—from the physical abilities and mental composure he had developed, to the rescue team he had assembled. The same thoughtfulness now guides the way he is processing the aftermath of the accident.

"I got right back into it thinking, Okay, I’m going to pick up where I left off," Long says. "And to the outside viewers, it may seem like that’s exactly what happened. At the same time, I will openly admit, I’m not the same person with the same mindset that I was prior to that accident. Some days, I’m motivated and inspired to pick it up with that same intensity. Others, I’ll stop, and think, Hang on a second, did you miss the big picture of the world trying to tell you something through that accident?"

"I’m at a place where I just respect the process," he says. "I’ll find my way to where I’m meant to be in the big-wave surfing world."

GREG LONG is up for NATGO'S "ADVENTURER OF THE YEAR". Go to National Geographic and Vote.

For us poor slobs sitting here in Central Florida.

BIG SWELL COMING TO CALIFORNIA

Who told you that ?

venice Beach

Napa Valley area. photo: Bud Hedrick

happy now??

tow in, Big Sur river.

So..I'm just say'in....it's going to be big.

The following break has met, or is expected to meet, your Surf Alert® requirements:

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LOCATION: Lincoln City

Conditions:
Date: Sunday Jan 12: 04:00 AM
Surf: 34 - 41ft
Primary Period: 14.9 sec

Trigger:
Primary Period:  Between 12 secs and 20 secs
Surf Height:  Greater Than 8 ft.
Lookahead:  72 hrs 

HOLY CRAP!

aT RAnDoM

TRES BEACH

Paradise Beach yesterday late afternoon

David West's Hawaiian lap steel guitar

A new vest with redundant system

Leon's juice bus located a couple houses down from Casa Zen, Tres Beach

Rico's new t

HOmE@wORk Patty and her two assistants.

.

Sophie and Nick's Christmas visit

Storm Hercules in France Jan. 2014, Jamie Mitchell:
DID YOU GET SUCKED UP AND OVER?
Well, I skipped down and got sucked over and pretty pounded and then by the time I came up, the next one behind it was even bigger. The view from where I was...I've never seen anything like it. It was, I don't even want to say how big the whitewater was, but it looked like the whitewater was connecting with the clouds and there was just all one big freakin' white bit of water from the sky down to the ocean coming at me. I already had my Patagonia vest self-inflated, so I couldn't even really duck under the wave. So I just sat there, got a couple of good breaths, and just had to take it. I looked in the channel and saw skis that wanted to come and get me. I looked left and right and then looked ahead of me and went, 'There is no one in the world that can help you now, my man. You're on your own.' It was pretty daunting.

EUROPE

As of Tuesday morning, it appears the surfers who gambled on France reaped the best rewards, as conditions were clean at Belharra Reef. “But it’s still too early to tell,” says Sharp, who has ignited the quest for the first 100-foot wave to be ridden. “This is the most intense storm I can remember seeing in my 20 years of tracking these things. There was an area bigger than Spain on the Atlantic Ocean with sustained winds of 50 knots. That’s just massive.”

But Sharp, and the surfers who chase waves, know that every single element has to come together for the magic to happen. “In some places it’s pretty clear the swell peaked overnight,” Sharp explains. “In other places the local weather just tore things up, and it was too stormy. But one thing this storm proves is the 100-foot wave is easily possible. All it has to do is match up with the right reef, under the right conditions, during daylight hoursMONDAY and TUESDAY

GO FOR IT

FRANCE

cornwall

PORTUGAL

Portugal. November 2013

FRANCE

Lainch