I am not an enormous fan of covering a surf contest. I do indeed love to surf and I do indeed love to watch surfing, but wandering around the sand trying to interview people with other things on their mind while the waves are (hopefully, for the sake of the contest) firing is not exactly… fun. It’s not not fun, and there are plenty of other things I can think of that are a hell of a lot worse, but you get the idea.
What I do like, however, are the few days before the contest. When the pros are showing up to get their feet in the wax. When the mood is anticipatory. And this year, anyway, the days leading up to most of the WSL contests have been far better than the contest itself.
I was in Portugal a few days before the Supertubos event, and it happened to be what a few surfers called “the day of the decade” Unsurfable for me, but it was incredible to watch the world’s best tackling it without the pressure from the judges’ discriminating gazes.
Lakey Peterson is one of the world’s best. She’s in J-Bay, along with the rest of the CT, waiting for the starting horn at the Corona Open. And, like many of the days leading up to the other events, the waves have been fully pumping. The forecast doesn’t look quite as good in the coming days, but with any luck, it’ll be somewhere close to what it’s been for the last week or so.
